Mirroring the Complexities of the Human Psyche and the Depiction of Female Powerlessness in Alice Munro’s “Runaway”

Think India ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 1036-1041
Author(s):  
Steffi Santhana Mary. S ◽  
Dr Anita Albert

Human behaviour is constructed by unconscious drives and impulses. To Freud, thoughts are supposed to be guided by desires and these desires are the fundamental basis of humankind, life, and psyche. Not being expressed directly, they take other shapes in order to be expressible in personal and social situations. They are repressed because they could not be fitted into social norms and laws. Freud believes that many of our actions are motivated by psychological forces unknown to others which he calls ‘the unconscious’. The objective of the present paper is to read Munro's Runaway in the mirror of Sigmund Freud to detect the psychological aspects of the characters.

Think India ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 892-897
Author(s):  
Steffi Santhana Mary. S ◽  
Dr Anita Albert

Human behaviour is constructed by unconscious drives and impulses. To Freud, thoughts are supposed to be guided by desires and these desires are the fundamental basis of humankind, life, and psyche. Not being expressed directly, they take other shapes in order to be expressible in personal and social situations. They are repressed because they could not be fitted into social norms and laws. Freud believes that many of our actions are motivated by psychological forces unknown to others which he calls ‘the unconscious’. The objective of the present paper is to read Munro's Runaway in the mirror of Sigmund Freud to detect the psychological aspects of the characters.


Think India ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 661-671
Author(s):  
Resmy Dominic ◽  
Dr. M. Mary Jayanthi

The amount of criticism which overshadows Freudian concepts has never reduced the relevance it carries in the assessment of human inscape. It successfully explains the reasons behind the complexities of human behaviour. Ian McEwan, who is known for his vivid, picturesque, and striking narrative style, is a prodigy in exploring the human psyche. His prestigious work Atonement remarkably stands out in its portrayal of the interior realms and unpredictable workings of the socially conscious. This paper attempts a detailed study of the behavioural patterns of the characters and the role of the unconscious in controlling them. This study concludes that, though humans are the victims of the unconscious trauma, a positive sublimation can unquestionably save individuals and make them fit for society.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-73
Author(s):  
Eliza Preston

This article explores what the work of Sigmund Freud has to offer those searching for a more spiritual and philosophical exploration of the human experience. At the early stages of my psychotherapy training, I shared with many peers an aversion to Freud’s work, driven by a perception of a mechanistic, clinical approach to the human psyche and of a persistent psychosexual focus. This article traces my own attempt to grapple with his work and to push through this resistance. Bettelheim’s (1991) treatise that Freud was searching for man’s soul provides a more sympathetic lens through which to explore Freud’s writing, one which enabled me to discover a rich depth which had not previously been obscured. This article is an account of my journey to a new appreciation of Freud’s work. It identifies a number of challenges to Bettelheim’s argument, whilst also indicating how his revised translation allowed a new understanding of the relevance of Freud’s work to the modern reader. This account may be of interest to those exploring classical psychotherapeutic literature as well as those guiding them through that process.


Author(s):  
M. Maruthavanan

This study investigated the influence of personality on the class room management of IXth standard students in Madurai district. Psychoanalysts believe man’s behaviour is triggered mostly by powerful hidden forces within the personality. Sigmund Freud, an Australian physician was the originator of this theory in the early nineties He says much of people’s everyday behaviour is motivated by unconscious forces about which they know little. In order to fully understand personality then one need to illuminate and expose what is in the unconscious. Class room management is very important task in the teaching learning process. Without class room management skill teaching skill has made no effect in the class room. In the study the researcher take IX standard students in Madurai district. In this study researcher proved the above statement. He Proved that the classroom management is directly related with the personality.


Author(s):  
Stephan Atzert

This chapter explores the gradual emergence of the notion of the unconscious as it pertains to the tradition that runs from Arthur Schopenhauer via Eduard von Hartmann and Philipp Mainländer to Sabina Spielrein, C. G. Jung, and Sigmund Freud. A particular focus is put on the popularization of the term “unconscious” by von Hartmann and on the history of the death drive, which has Schopenhauer’s essay “Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual” as one of its precursors. In this essay, Schopenhauer develops speculatively the notion of a universal, intelligent, supraindividual unconscious—an unconscious with a purpose related to death. But the death drive also owes its origins to Schopenhauer’s “relative nothingness,” which Mainländer adopts into his philosophy as “absolute nothingness” resulting from the “will to death.” His philosophy emphasizes death as the goal of the world and its inhabitants. This central idea had a distinctive influence on the formation of the idea of the death drive, which features in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle.


Werkwinkel ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-73
Author(s):  
Ruben van Luijk

Abstract The article gives a brief ‘idea history’ of Hesperian melancholy a.k.a. Hesperian depression, the fleeting state of dejection that some humans and animals experience at dusk. The term was apparently coined by the South African poet and naturalist Eugene Marais (1871-1936), who noticed the phenomenon during his field observations of baboons. Marais' observations of primates were in the first place an attempt to shed more light on the evolutionary roots of the human psyche and its afflictions - not in the least his own. A personal focus seems probable in his notes on the use of euphoria-inducing substances among animals and humans, which are an evident reflection of his own morphine addiction; but also in his writings about Hesperian depression. During his lifetime, Marais only published about Hesperian depression twice, once in a very concise article in English, and once in more elaborate form in Afrikaans. The term ‘Hesperian depression’ only became more current when his manuscript on primate behaviour, The Soul of the Ape, was posthumously published in 1963. Since then, the term and its description sometimes appear in (popular) publications of paleobiologists and scholars of the evolution of human behaviour. In psychology and psychiatry, the term was introduced by the eminent American psychoanalyst William G. Niederlander, who presented it in a 1971 article in Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association as an idea of his own. It is evident, however, that he took his cue from Marais, who thus was posthumously plagiarized.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-29
Author(s):  
Oleksandr Markiian Soletskyy

In the paper the parallels between the emblematic “mechanisms” of signification and the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud as well as Carl Gustav Jung have been studied. The Austrian psychiatrist has discovered template schemes that become a visual delineation, the blueprint for developing his scientific vocabulary, methodology, classification of psycho-emotional behavioral types in mythological plots. The Eros and Thanatos images handling, the exploitation of mythical tales about Oedipus and Electra, Prometheus, Narcissus, and many other ones to specify the behavioral complexes denote the presence of “emblematic methodology” in the formation of psychoanalytic conceptions and categories. His interpretations of famous mythological plots are boiled down to emblematic reduction. Carl Gustav Jung frequently selected symbolic notations as his research targets, which were a denotative space for expressing internal mental receptions and historic constellations of cultural axiology. In his writings we see the intention to assemble the concepts of image (iconic) and socio-cultural idea (conventional) into a sole compound that syncretically denote unity of meaning. Such an arrangement of iconic-conventional interdetermination is often significative elbowroom in Jung the decoding of which may allow to discern complex mental reflections. Notwithstanding the fact that he considers a symbol to be the standard unit of cognitive-cultural experience “conservation”, its functional semantics definition is fulfilled in emblematic patterns. This emblematic-cognitive form is not only a method of determining the initial images-ideas of the unconscious, “the mythological figures” of inner conflicts, typical experience of generations, but also the principle of justification and expression of his theory conceptual foundation. To a certain extent, it is an element of the Swiss psychologist’s scientific thinking style and language.  


Author(s):  
Shaima Abdullah Jassim ◽  
Alaa Muzahim Abdulrazaq

There are many theories that emerged in fields other than literature but influenced the literary works greatly. These theories are used by scholars and critics to analyses and study the literary text. Among these theories are Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis and the theory of interpretation of dreams. According to Freud, the human mind is divided into two parts: the conscious and the subconscious. Freud used this theory to treat his patients by making them lie down and talk about their dreams, childhood and other thoughts. It is an attempt to make the unconscious conscious. Additionally, the unconscious can be revealed through the slips of the tongue (paraphrases) and dreams. Moreover, Freud assumes that the human psyche consists of three parts: Id (a store of the human desires and needs); superego (the part of the psyche which represents the high ideals); ego (the part which tries to make a compromise between the id and the superego). He also emphasizes the effect of our childhood upon our lives. The present study is a Freudian reading to Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights with reference to the impact of the author’s life upon the flow of the events and the lives of the characters.


After having briefly but exhaustively recalled the main lines of Freudian psychoanalytic thought, we have discussed a possible psychoanalytic theoretical model for human symbolic function mainly centred on the action of a set of primary psychic mechanisms rejoined around the negative, in its widest sense according to the works of André Green. A chief aspect of this pattern has turned out to be an underlying, irreducible dialecticity that reflects on the one hand, the typical feature of human symbolic function, and, on the other hand, the main outcome of the unavoidable presence of a basic dichotomy formalized the so-called phallic logic, that is, that primordial, ancestral and irreducible logical nucleus inevitably present in the deepest meanders of human psyche as an inborn structure phylogenetically preformed and ontogenetically re-established during the psychic evolution of any human being.


Author(s):  
Marina Warner

‘On the couch: house training the Id’ explains how the intertwining of psychoanalysis and fairy tale is tight, and the stories are still trusted to offer a key to understanding the human psyche—regardless of history or social circumstances. It considers Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment, one of the most influential studies of fairy tales ever written, and the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. The stories have universal meaning, but most decodings remain subjective. The belief that the stories have the power to lead by example and shape character, especially gender, to engineer social citizens, and inculcate values and ideology has been widely held and is still accepted.


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