Fantasy and Dream work in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari The silent expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari exposes psychological guilt and insanity through the main character's fantasies and delusions. This character, Francis, brings the viewer into a nightmarish world through his story-telling. He recounts the story of the mad Dr. Caligari and the somnambulist Cesare who is under his control. The doctor's arrival in Francis' hometown results in a string of murders, the death of his best friend Alan and the kidnapping of his beloved fiancée Jane. Francis tells this story as if it were true, but in the end he is revealed as a patient in a mental hospital. The film does not confirm whether Francis' story is reality, but Freudian theory suggests that this story is a wish fulfillment. Francis' neurotic mind created and mistook this fantasy for reality in order to displace the guilt over his friend's death by means of dream work and displacing his guilt onto the somnambulist Cesare. Neurosis is characterized by a retreat into ones imagination and alienation from reality. According to Freudian theory, this is also typified by believing a fantasy to be the truth. "Neurotics turn away from reality because they find it unbearable; the most extreme type of this turning away from reality is shown by certain cases of hallucinatory psychosis which seek to deny the particular event that occasioned the outbreak of their insanity" (Freud, 301). In this passage, Freud describes the psychological techniques that a neurotic mind uses in order to cope with a traumatic event. Instead of coming to terms with their trauma, the mind will alter the events and shape them around a delusion in order to produce a more pleasing conc... ... middle of paper ... ...ing fantasy. In addition, Dr. Caligari and Cesare are not real people; they are fragments of Francis' psyche and serve the purpose of objects onto which the blame is displaced. The filmÕs ambiguous ending leaves the validity of Francis' story unknown because his illness is not explicitly confirmed. However, Freudian theory clarifies this uncertainty by showing that Francis has fantasized the entire story to satisfy his guilty mind. Bibliography The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Dir. Robert Wiene. Perf. Werner Krauss, Friedrich Feher, and Condrad Veidt. Decla-Bioscop AD, 1920. Freud, Sigmund. The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: W.W. & Norton. ---. Writings on Art and Literature. Ed. Niel Harz. Janowitz, Hans, and Mayer, Carl. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. (1920). http://www.cs.nyu.edu/kandathi/scr/caligari.txt
Limon uses character development to show a large array of traits and behaviors that give her characters the complexity of a real human being. In the novel, Father Benito is a dynamic character that, due to the events in the plot, makes a basic internal change in character. In one part of the novel, Father Benito is shocked “to hear his voice utter the words his mind had refused to acknowledge, and he felt objection wrapping itself around him, pressing down on him. He wanted to run away from this women who [has] a way of prying out thoughts and feelings of which even he was not aware” (p.43). After talking a bit with Huitzitzilin, Father Benito has changed from a stern religious priest to a more...
The book begins with the accusations of ancient writers such as Seneca, Pliny the Elder, Josephus, and Suetonius who all claim that Caligula suffered from insanity. It is apparent that the authors do not believe this allegation and throughout the book, they attempt to prove their theory. They instead portray him as more of an evil genius with ulterior motives for his actions. They note that Suetonius suggests that Caligula committed incest with his sisters but use the fact that Seneca and Philo of Alexandria do not, as a way to discredit the notion.
This story focuses on the extra-marital affair a housewife named Calixta has while her husband and son are away due to a storm. Although we learn that Calixta has an affair we also know that she doesn’t completely defy the Cult of Domesticity. From the story we get the idea that she remained pure until she married her husband and as Chopin tells us in page 689 “She had not seen him very often since her marriage, and never alone,” this line suggest that even if she saw her past lover around she would not speak to him because neither of them were ever alone and they both didn’t want to disrespect their marriages. In addition Calixta seems to be a very good housewife and mother. She appears to be always tending her home. In page 689 we learn that “[sitting} at a side window sewing furiously on a sewing machine. [Calixta] was greatly occupied and did not notice the approaching storm.” She is so focused on her chores that she didn’t even notice a storm. For Calixta sewing and doing chores around the house is what is normal. She has assumed a role as a married woman and mother and she is fulfilling it. Before the affair you can say that by societies expectations she was a true woman, she kept her virginity until marriage, she makes sure her house chores are done, and she takes care of her family. Even after the affair she acts as if nothing has
It was eleven years later that Breuer and his assistant, Sigmund Freud, wrote a book on hysteria. In it they explained their theory: Every hysteria is the result of a traumatic experience, one that cannot be integrated into the person's understanding of the world. The emotions appropriate to the trauma are not expressed in any direct fashion, but do not simply evaporate: They express themselves in behaviors that in a weak, vague way offer a response to the trauma.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, also known as PTSD, was recognized as a disorder with specific symptoms and was added to the Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980. However, prior to this acknowledgement, father of psychology, Sigmund Freud, had already developed a theory on it. Freud’s Seduction theory states: “both forgotten childhood trauma and a variety of adult stresses could cause neurosis”, such as we have seen in Euripides’s Medea; in which Medea acted irrationally after having gone through traumatic events. Whether it was Freud in the 1890s or Euripides in 430 BC the idea that PTSD is present in one’s daily live has always been a suggestion.
Sigmund Freud believed that he “occupies a special place in the history of psychoanalysis and marks a turning point, it was with it that analysis took the step from being a psychotherapeutic procedure to being in depth-psychology” (Jones). Psychoanalysis is a theory or therapy to decode the puzzle of neurotic disorders like hysteria. During the therapy sessions, the patients would talk about their dreams. Freud would analyze not only the manifest content (what the dreamer remembers) of the dreams, but the disguise that caused the repressions of the idea. During our dreams, the decision making part of personality’s defenses are lowered allowing some of the repressed material to become more aware in a distorted form. He distinguished between
To draw a parallel of obsessional neurosis with religion, established disconcerting similarities between compulsive acts and religious practices that, in his view, aimed essentially the same thing: remove the guilt by a ritualistic compensatory restoration. Both the religious obsessive as in the main formula would be similar to what happens psych- scroll in a dream - through which the trivial details of the ritual activity become more important, since they are forcibly expelled the truly meaningful content. Regarding this analogy, Freud concludes that we can conceive of obsessional neurosis as a pathological match against religious formation, featuring obsessional neurosis as an individual religiosity and religion as a universal obsessional neurosis.
...Hallert, C., C. Grant, S. Grehn, C. Grannot, S. Hultent, G. Midhagens M. Strom, H. Svensson,
“A kind of boogeyman who does terrible things like letting his girl get hurt and attacked, purposely avoiding even in my mind that terrible word: what had actually happened to her” (Ccormier 99).Francis knew he was bad for letting
1) mental illness of such a severe nature that a person cannot distinguish fantasy from
“Post traumatic stress disorder is a debilitating condition that follows a terrifying event” (Marilyn 8). It occurs when one has witnessed or experienced a traumatic event, such as war, child abuse, or other types of violence. Victims may claim to relive or re-experience events that were traumatic to them. They may even “feel” or “hear” things from the event. Other symptoms may include: “forgetfulness…amnesia, excessive fantasizing…trancelike states…imaginary companion, sleepwalking, and blackouts” (Putman 2). A lot of times, coping mechanisms fail and the following inner dissonance can lead to a multiplicity of upsetting emotional and physical symptoms (Robert Saperstein 2). Some children suffering from PTSD may show traumatic play. This refers to the reenactment of a traumatic experience. Usually, children will change the ending to make it happier. This is an extreme example of using the imagination as a way to escape the terrible memories. Billy has all the symptoms associated with the disorder as he also used his imagination to escape his bad memories.
Once known as hysteria, in Freud’s time, is now hysterical personality disorder or histrionic personality disorder. Histrionic personality is what is left of Freud’s popular diagnosis of hysteria. Today it is a personality disorder classified in cluster B of the personality disorders. Personality disorders, in general, are characterized as enduring patterns of inner experiences and behavior that deviates from the expectations of the individual’s culture in two or more areas which include cognition, affectivity, interpersonal functioning, and impulse control. The enduring pattern is inflexible and pervasive across a broad range of personal and social situations and the patterns lead to clinically significant impairment or distress (American Psychological Association, 2013). Cluster B personality disorders are the dramatic, emotional, and erratic personality disorders (American Psychological Association, 2013). These personality disorders are the ones that are most damaging to social and person...
Interestingly, however, within just a year of publishing this controversial article, Freud appeared to be having doubts about his theory. In a letter to close friend, Wilhelm Fliess, Freud wrote that a “great secret has been slowly dawning on me in the last few months,” (Gleaves & Hernandez, 1999). Reportedly, the great secret was that Freud no longer believed in his theory and was attempting to reorganize his theory on hysteria to better suit the evidence and research he had collected (Gleaves & Hernandez, 1999). In his new theory, which would eventually spawn what the psychological community recognizes as the Oedipus Complex, Freud argued that hysteria was caused by repressed memories of sexual fantasies, not memories of actual sexual abuse or trauma as he once believed (Gleaves & Hernandez, 1999).
Duley, S. M., Cancelli, A. A., Kratochwill, T. R., Bergan, J. R., & Meredith, K. E. (1983).
Neurosis is a functional (Psychogenic) disorder consisting of a symptom or symptoms caused, though usually unknown to the patient, by a mental disorder. The four commonest are Anxiety State, Reactive Depression, Hysteria and Obsessive-Compulsive Neurosis.