The Words to Say It by Marie Cardinal is an exceptional narrative of a young woman’s seven year journey through psychoanalysis; a journey through which she embarks on an unconquered path to a successful self-discovery. While on that journey, Cardinal regains control over her health and body, redefines womanhood and femininity, discovers injustices and inequality and gets out of madness. Cardinal’s sensual and artistic writing through colorful metaphors, imagery, poetic language and sensual descriptions characterizes the heroic triumph from madness.
Cardinal’s narration of psychoanalysis treatment is celebrated as one of the best accounts. In the introduction, Bruno Bettelheim praises The Words to Say It: “of all accounts of psychoanalysis, as experienced by the patient, none can compare with this novel, so superior is it in all pertinent respects” (xi). The narrative is unique because it recounts the experiences of the patient without any interpretation by the psychoanalyst. At the beginning of her analysis, the doctor asked Cardinal to try and understand what provokes her, attenuates or accentuate her crises, and that everything is important: noises, colors, odors, gestures, atmospheres, everything”(33). This is the only moment throughout the book that the doctor speaks and takes charge in the session. For the most part, Cardinal is at the helm of discovering the unconscious, rediscovering childhood experiences and finding meaning in traumatic experiences in relation to her madness. While at the peak of her illness, she mentions how she would let the images come, and the ideas; one image led to another and she tried to express them without sorting them through (205). The depiction of her process puts Cardinal in control of th...
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...nt it seems unfair to use other words to analyze this work because, she herself has the words to say it, and every word matters in this narrative. She has the right word for every emotion, movement, and disturbance: this is what makes her narrative unique. It’s been a momentous ride with Cardinal through this journey; it’s been a pleasure to see her flourish with newness. A new Marie Cardinal was born, full of life. She was in a cocoon and her new life resembles a butterfly, she can fly and soar up high (271).
Works Cited
Cardinal, M. (1983). The Words to Say It. (Pat Goodheart, Trans.) Cambridge, MA. (Original work published 1975).
DeSalvo L. (1999). Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives. San Francisco, CA.
Frank, A.W. (1999). The wounded storyteller: body, illness, and ethics. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
“Let Them Talk!” written by Wayne E. Wright is an article that focuses on the idea of promoting English Language Learners (ELL) oral-language skills in the classroom instruction time to improve their literacy and academic achievement. Too often are an ELL’s speaking and listening skills overlooked and not given enough attention to, even though it is one of the most important parts of communication. Wright encourages teachers working with ELL students to allow time for the student to adjust, not to pressure them into their language development, respect their various stages, bring them into whole class and small group discussions, correct simple language errors in speaking that impeded comprehension, and have them interact and communicate in the classroom for meaningful purposes.
Adler-Kassner, Lisa. “Taking Action to Change Stories.” The Activist WPA: Changing Stories about Writing and Writers. Logan, UT: Utah State, 2008.
Sprengnether, M. (2003). Mouth To Mouth: Freud, Irma, And The Dream Of Psychoanalysis. American Imago, 60(3), 259-284. doi:10.1353/aim.2003.0020
The creation of a stressful psychological state of mind is prevalent in the story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, as well as, Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Ophelia’s struggles in William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, and the self-inflicted sickness seen in William Blake’s “Mad Song”. All the characters, in these stories and poems, are subjected to external forces that plant the seed of irrationality into their minds; thus, creating an adverse intellectual reaction, that from an outsider’s point of view, could be misconstrued as being in an altered state due to the introduction of a drug, prescribed or otherwise, furthering the percep...
Psychoanalysis is the method of psychological therapy originated by Sigmund Freud in which free association, dream interpretation, and analysis of resistance and transference are used to explore repressed or unconscious impulses, anxieties, and internal conflicts (“Psychoanalysis”). This transfers to analyzing writing in order to obtain a meaning behind the text. There are two types of people who read stories and articles. The first type attempts to understand the plot or topic while the second type reads to understand the meaning behind the text. Baldick is the second type who analyzes everything. Since his article, “Allure, Authority and Psychoanalysis” discusses the meaning behind everything that happens in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” we can also examine “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” in the same manner.
In psychoanalysis the therapist takes on the role of the expert, listening and interpreting Ana’s free associations from her unconscious process. The therapist role is to discover what is real and what is not real. The therapist is not to have an agenda and to remain passive and only engage when interpreting something Ana has stated (Murdock,
In the summer of 1915, Anna Freud established personal success as she successfully passed her teacher's examination. (Dyer, 1983) At this time, her career path differed from that of her father, Sigmund. Anna displayed early indications of a desire to work with children, whereas her father’s work was primarily focused on psychoanalysis of adults. She began translating her father's works into German. When the Freud Family vacationed separately, Anna would write to her father asking clarifications of psychoanalytic terms. While Anna displayed the qualities of a more than apt pupil of her father’s life work, her endeavors and efforts would establish her preeminence as a child psychoanalyst, an adept researcher, and a teacher. According to Dyer, (1983) Anna’s readings and translations of her father’s works marked the beginning of her direct involvement with the work of her father.
Love has many definitions and can be interpreted in many different ways. William Maxwell demonstrates this in his story “Love”. Maxwell opens up his story with a positive outlook on “Love” by saying, “Miss Vera Brown, she wrote on the blackboard, letter by letter in flawlessly oval palmer method. Our teacher for fifth grade. The name might as well have been graven in stone” (1). By the end of the story, the students “love” for their teachers no longer has a positive meaning, because of a turn in events that leads to a tragic ending. One could claim that throughout the story, Maxwell uses short descriptive sentences with added details that foreshadow the tragic ending.
In the poem pride, Dahlia Ravikovitch uses many poetic devices. She uses an analogy for the poem as a whole, and a few metaphors inside it, such as, “the rock has an open wound.” Ravikovitch also uses personification multiple times, for example: “Years pass over them as they wait.” and, “the seaweed whips around, the sea bursts forth and rolls back--” Ravikovitch also uses inclusive language such as when she says: “I’m telling you,” and “I told you.” She uses these phrases to make the reader feel apart of the poem, and to draw the reader in. She also uses repetition, for example, repetition of the word years.
“I can trace - of a summer day in Kentucky of a meadow that seemed as big as the ocean to the very little girl walking through the grass, which was higher than her waist.”(17). This was just one of the memories Edna, the protagonist in Kate Chopin’s Novel, recalls of her childhood. It is later revealed that she was “running away from prayers” which escape she believed was “just following a misleading impulse.” This demonstration of impulsiveness embodies the Freudian concept of the Id. This essay will analyze the entire novel through a Freudian interpretation. According to this father of psychoanalysis, the Id is an unconscious part of the psyche that demands immediate pleasure, regardless of the consequences. It is characterized by two impulses:
The aim of this essay is to clarify the basic principles of Freud’s theories and to raise the main issues.
Simone de Beauvoir, the author of the novel The Second Sex, was a writer and a philosopher as well as a political activist and feminist. She was born in 1908 in Paris, France to an upper-middle class family. Although as a child Beauvoir was extremely religious, mostly due to training from her mother as well as from her education, at the age of fourteen she decided that there was no God, and remained an atheist until she died. While attending her postgraduate school she met Jean Paul Sartre who encouraged her to write a book. In 1949 she wrote her most popular book, The Second Sex. This book would become a powerful guide for modern feminism. Before writing this book de Beauvoir did not believe herself to be a feminist. Originally she believed that “women were largely responsible for much of their own situation”. Eventually her views changed and she began to believe that people were in fact products of their upbringing. Simone de Beauvoir died in Paris in 1986 at the age of 78.
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
In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Poe aims to reach into the stratosphere of mythological patricidal figures. Even though the main character of this story isn’t as ill-fated as Oedipus, or as godly as Cronus, his inner conflict is just as epic. The main character’s inner conflict is just as interesting as Poe’s actual life is. In particular, Poe’s relationship with his foster father may shed some light on the reason why the main character’s disposition is so hostile, murderous, and yet, oddly loving towards is father. Psychoanalytical criticism will help shed light on the repression, denial, and intellectualization of the main character and how it corresponds with Poe himself.
Barry, Peter. "Psychoanalytic criticism." Beginning Theory: an Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. 3rd ed. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009. 92-115. Print.