scholarly journals Hearing Voices: A Corporeal Expression of Trauma in Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 801-820

The study aims at giving the clinical symptom “Hearing Voices” a literary conceptualization through an analytical reading of Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle (1976). Shedding light on the synergy between the body, the voice, and trauma, the study specifically examines how the protagonist’s childhood trauma returns through the cracks of her consciousness in a form of hallucinations and hearing ghost voices in adulthood. The study also aims to explore how Atwood problematizes the notion of hearing voices to project her protagonist’s inner world. The ensuing discussion utilizes Sigmund Freud’s theorization on trauma’s embodiment through corporeality, as well as Cathy Caruth’s emphasis on the manifestation of trauma through both the voice and the body. Also relevant is Laura Di Prete’s focus on the interplay between embodied voices and speaking bodies. Keywords: Childhood memories; Corporeality of trauma; Hearing voices; Margaret Atwood,;Lady Oracle.

Author(s):  
Evi Zohar

Continuing the workshop I've given in the WPC Paris (2017), this article elaborates my discussion of the way I interlace Focusing with Differentiation Based Couples Therapy (Megged, 2017) under the systemic view, in order to facilitate processes of change and healing in working with intimate couples. This article presents the theory and rationale of integrating Differentiation (Bowen, 1978; Schnarch, 2009; Megged, 2017) and Focusing (Gendlin, 1981) approaches, and its therapeutic potential in couple's therapy. It is written from the point of view of a practicing professional in order to illustrate the experiential nature and dynamics of the suggested therapeutic path. Differentiation is a key to mutuality. It offers a solution to the central struggle of any long term intimate relationship: balancing two basic life forces - the drive for individuality and the drive for togetherness (Schnarch, 2009). Focusing is a body-oriented process of self-awareness and emotional healing, in which one learns to pay attention to the body and the ‘Felt Sense’, in order to unfold the implicit, keep it in motion at the precise pace it needs for carrying the next step forward (Gendlin, 1996). Combining Focusing and Differentiation perspectives can cultivate the kind of relationship where a conflict can be constructively and successfully held in the inner world of each partner, while taking into consideration the others' well-being. This creates the possibility for two people to build a mutual emotional field, open to changes, permeable and resilient.


Author(s):  
Marissa Silverman

This chapter asks an important, yet seemingly illusive, question: In what ways does the internet provide (or not) activist—or, for present purposes “artivist”—opportunities and engagements for musicing, music sharing, and music teaching and learning? According to Asante (2008), an “artivist (artist + activist) uses her artistic talents to fight and struggle against injustice and oppression—by any medium necessary. The artivist merges commitment to freedom and justice with the pen, the lens, the brush, the voice, the body, and the imagination. The artivist knows that to make an observation is to have an obligation” (p. 6). Given this view, can (and should) social media be a means to achieve artivism through online musicing and music sharing, and, therefore, music teaching and learning? Taking a feminist perspective, this chapter interrogates the nature of cyber musical artivism as a potential means to a necessary end: positive transformation. In what ways can social media be a conduit (or hindrance) for cyber musical artivism? What might musicing and music sharing gain (or lose) from engaging with online artivist practices? In addition to a philosophical investigation, this chapter will examine select case studies of online artivist music making and music sharing communities with the above concerns in mind, specifically as they relate to music education.


2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Megan Corbin

Abstract: There exists a constant within the trajectory of Diamela Eltit’s contributions to New Chilean Fiction: the turn to the body’s revelatory capacity as a corporal archive of human existence. Simultaneously exploring and rejecting the confines of the traditional testimonial reliance on language, Eltit moves the reader to a re-consideration of the truth-telling function of the biological materiality of the body, placing imperfect corporalities on display as a means of speaking, even where the voice itself may falter.  This essay locates Eltit’s move to the corporal within the trajectory of feminist criticism, the traumatic realities of the Chilean dictatorship and post-dictatorship periods, and the search for the recuperation of those bodily knowledges represented by the disappeared.  Next, it turns to Eltit’s Impuesto a la carne as her most recent re-visioning of the importance of corporal textualities, whether or not the subject-matter of the body’s denunciation is connected to the dictatorship.  Lastly, this essay reconsiders the rejective power of the traditional archive, analyzing the effect set models have on those who seek to tell their stories outside of the traditional testimonial model. I argue that the case of Diamela Eltit is an example of the way writers and producers of cultural texts which actively inscribe alternative memories of the past are resisting the authoritative power of the archive and subversively inscribing narrative memory onto bodily materialities, re-orienting the view of the corporal from an evidentiary showing to an active process of re-telling the past. Eltit’s novels, inscribed with her corporal textual model, give voice to survivors, articulating an alternate historical model for the archive, embracing the biological and making it speak against the rigid abuses of authoritarianism.


2009 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleanor Sorrell ◽  
Mark Hayward ◽  
Sara Meddings

Background:Previous research suggests that the distress experienced by clinical voice hearers is associated with the perceived relationship between voice and hearer, independent of beliefs about voices and depression.Aims:This study aimed to replicate these findings and generate further hypotheses by comparing the voice hearing experiences of clinical and non-clinical hearers.Method:A cross-sectional, quantitative design was employed and used between-subjects and correlational methods. Thirty-two clinical voice hearers and 18 non-clinical voice hearers were assessed using the PSYRATS, the Voice and You questionnaire, the Beliefs About Voices Questionnaire – Revised, and the Beck Depression Inventory-II.Results:For clinical voice hearers, distress was significantly associated with perceptions of the voice as dominating and intrusive, and hearers distancing themselves from the voice. However, these associations were not independent of beliefs about voices’ omnipotence or malevolence. Non-clinical voice hearers were significantly less distressed than clinical voice hearers and voices were perceived as less dominant, intrusive, malevolent and omnipotent. Non-clinical hearers were found to relate from a position of less distance to voices perceived as benevolent.Conclusions:Findings from previous research were only partially replicated. Clinically, the development of less maladaptive relationships between voice and voice hearer may reduce distress.


Author(s):  
Vita Heinrich-Clauer

This article focuses on bioenergetic principles and the link between emotions and the voice, discussing various approaches to vocal expression in the psychotherapeutic process. There is an examination of the idiosyncrasies of bioenergetic work with the voice in contrast to therapeutic approaches that work solely with the body. There is an important distinction for practical bioenergetic work between liberating vocal discharge on the one hand and the build-up of tone, boundaries and self-efficacy on the other hand (cf. Shapiro, 2006, 2008, 2009).


Author(s):  
Guillaume Collett

While, for many, Deleuze’s philosophy is synonymous with his concept of the ‘body without organs’, and even though he first explicitly develops this concept in The Logic of Sense, a large part of the present book argues that it is rather the organ-ised body – here figuring specifically as incarnated structure, building explicitly on Leclaire – on which his onto-logic of sense hinges. Nonetheless, this body only emerges later on in the ‘dynamic genesis’, the psychoanalytic portion of The Logic of Sense which provides a psycho-sexual account of language acquisition and of the emergence of sense, and first we must turn to the dis-organ-ised body of Klein and Artaud. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze develops his conception of the body without organs based on a reading of the work of Antonin Artaud.


2020 ◽  
pp. 147-164

Over a decade before the French-American sculptor Louise Bourgeois underwent psychoanalysis in New York (1952–1985), her work mined territories of psyche, body, home, and exile. Bourgeois’s papers from 1940 onward reveal that she shared Freud’s description of neurotics, hysterics, and artists as suffering from reminiscences. Scottish psychoanalyst W. R. D. Fairbairn identified the last of these in 1943 as “war neuroses,” just six years before Bourgeois debuted her first mature sculptures. These abstract “personages” served as melancholy surrogates for lost objects, the friends and family Bourgeois left in 1938 in Occupied France. In the 1960s, she further reduced the body to ambivalent amalgams of part-objects made from plaster and latex, suggesting swollen nodes, skin, and sex organs. Of particular interest are two papers published by Fairbairn in 1938 that extend the inner world of the individual to the field of object relations via the transposition of the symbolically “restored object.” Fairbairn conceived the radical notion of restitution, the mental process of repairing damage in the artist’s inner object world. These principles resonate with Bourgeois’s métier and a postwar sculptural aesthetic that probed the phenomenal experience of anxiety, exile, and psychoanalysis on the Self and others.


2021 ◽  
pp. 98-126
Author(s):  
Tereza Havelková

Chapter 3 approaches liveness as an effect of immediacy. It analyzes how hypermedial opera constructs an opposition between live performance and that which is “mediatized,” that is, generated or reproduced by media technology. Relying, among others, on film sound theory, the chapter shows how the effect of liveness becomes a function of a particular relationship between sound and its source, and especially voice and body. Where some scholars have played up the discrepancy between the voice heard and the body seen in opera, this chapter is attentive to how an apparent unity of voice and body is maintained within the context of hypermediacy. With the help of Louis Andriessen and Peter Greenaway’s opera Writing to Vermeer, the chapter suggests that an alignment of liveness with femininity and body-voice unity subverts some of the critical claims that have been made with respect to both live performance and the embodied singing voice.


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