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Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis theory
Merits and demerits of freuds theory
Freud's psychoanalytic theory - discuss
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The White Hotel Donald Michael Thomas began his writing career as a poet, and his early work was notable for the way it ranged across the heights of the fantasy worlds of science fiction and of sensuality. Thomas was a superb writer, meticulous researcher, and a genius in deceiving the reader. He skillfully wrote The White Hotel, combining prose, poem, and science fiction, to make it a believable, conceivable, and a touching piece of literature. In his novel, Thomas makes realistic and believable references to Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalytic theories. Furthermore, he was able to capture the real Freud so well that many Freudian scholars believed this “case study” of Frau Anna G. to be a lost work of Sigmund Freud. This leads us to conclude that Thomas did not only possess a great imagination for fiction, but was also well studied in his accounts of Freud and the Holocaust. Composed of a prologue and six sections, The White Hotel utilizes a variety of literary forms. The main characters of this novel are the celebrated psychoanalyst and theorist Sigmund Freud and Lisa Erdman, a twenty-nine-year-old, half-Jewish Viennese opera singer who comes to Freud for treatment of hysteria in 1919. This novel is by far one of the greatest works of English literature, exploring such concepts as, premonition, inhumanity, sexuality, and briefly, the concept of life after death. It is fashioned with many images of love, death, life, and desire, taking the audience on a horrifying and historical depiction of the Holocaust. Thomas’ novel is written using the third and first person narrator, which seems to have more knowledge than the reader or the character. I have to admit that I was distracted and even caught off guard by Thomas’ disorganization of chronological events. For example, the novel begins with presumably the middle of the story, after which the novel continues with the beginning and then ends the novel with a metaphorical new beginning for Lisa Erdman. Furthermore, many parallels and symbols can be seen in each section, which brilliantly connects them into a cohesive story filled with meaning and dire premonitions of an inevitable future. Throughout this course, we have discussed various novels, from a psychoanalytic point of view, and we have been able to deconstruct many of the characters according to Freud’s psychoanalytic theories. Ironically, in The White Hotel, it is those theories that allow the reader to be misguided, and not realize the important symbolism of Lisa’s symptoms.
The tragedies of the holocaust forever altered history. One of the most detailed accounts of the horrific events from the Nazi regime comes from Elie Wiesel’s Night. He describes his traumatic experiences in German concentration camps, mainly Buchenwald, and engages his readers from a victim’s point of view. He bravely shares the grotesque visions that are permanently ingrained in his mind. His autobiography gives readers vivid, unforgettable, and shocking images of the past. It is beneficial that Wiesel published this, if he had not the world might not have known the extent of the Nazis reign. He exposes the cruelty of man, and the misuse of power. Through a lifetime of tragedy, Elie Wiesel struggled internally to resurrect his religious beliefs as well as his hatred for the human race. He shares these emotions to the world through Night.
Authors sometimes refer to their past experiences to help cope with the exposure to these traumatic events. In his novel Night, Elie Wiesel recalls the devastating and horrendous events of the Holocaust, one of the world’s highest points for man’s inhumanity towards man, brutality, and cruel treatment, specifically towards the Jewish Religion. His account takes place from 1944-1945 in Germany while beginning at the height of the Holocaust and ending with the last years of World War II. The reader will discover through this novel that cruelty is exemplified all throughout Wiesel's, along with the other nine million Jews’, experiences in the inhumane concentration camps that are sometimes referred to as “death factories.”
Many different responses have occurred to readers after their perusal of this novel. Those that doubt the stories of the holocaust’s reality see Night as lies and propaganda designed to further the myth of the holocaust. Yet, for those people believing in the reality, the feelings proffered by the book are quite different. Many feel outrage at the extent of human maliciousness towards other humans. Others experience pity for the loss of family, friends, and self that is felt by the Holocaust victims.
It is not surprising for an author’s background and surroundings to profoundly affect his writing. Having come from a Methodist lineage and living at a time when the church was still an influential facet in people’s daily lives, Stephen Crane was deeply instilled with religious dogmas. However, fear of retribution soon turned to cynicism and criticism of his idealistic parents’ God, "the wrathful Jehovah of the Old Testament" (Stallman 16), as he was confronted with the harsh realities of war as a journalistic correspondent. Making extensive use of religious metaphors and allusions in The Blue Hotel (1898), Crane thus explores the interlaced themes of the sin and virtue.
Symbolism is the element that plays the starring role in this production, coyly divulging the clues necessary to illuminate the reality of her psychosis. The physical triggers of said psychosis belong solely to the room she and her husband slept in; now a playroom, it had obviously gone through many other transformations as had this woman, who despised it (nursery, gym, playroom). More importantly, it is the wallpaper that has caught and held her mind's eye.
At the beginning of 19th century, the form of anti-Semitism becomes more serious. Germanys seems to isolate and eliminate Jews. When the Nazi Party, led by Adolf Hitler, comes to power in Germany in 1933, it wants to set up the Perfect Nazi state. The Nazi wants to stamp out any opposition to their rule, so they set up a system of camps, for instance, concentration camps, death camps for holding people that they see as “undesirable”. Lots of those “undesirable” people are Jews. From 1933 to 1945, about six million Jews are murdered and it is called the Holocaust. The Holocaust is the greatest single case of mass murder in history and is difficult to ignore. After World War II, survivors of the Holocaust tell their stories directly or write down what happens in the Holocaust. One of the plenty writings is Night by Elie Wiesel who is Holocaust survivor and awarded the Noble Peace Price in 1986. This work is based on his experience with his father, Chlomo, in the Nazi Concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald between 1944 and 1945. Another effective book is Fugitive Pieces by Canadian poet Anne Michaels which is awarded Orange Prize and the Books in Canada First Novel Award. As a young boy during the Holocaust in Poland, Jakob Beer is seven-year old and his parents are murdered by Nazi soldiers and his sister, Bella, is abducted. Jakob flees and is rescued by a Greek geologist Athos Roussos. Athos hides Jakob successfully in Greek, then at the end of war, to Toronto. Both characters Elie and Jakob’ experiences reflect a truth which is no matter how harsh the situation is, one tends to overcome all obstacles to obtain a life of fulfillment. The courage can be gained from love, faith and intension of survival...
Freud, Sigmund. 1953-74. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. 24 vols, trans. James Stachey. London: Hogarth.
Freud, S. (1957b). Some character types met with in psychoanalytic work. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 14, pp. 309–333). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1916)
In these first three chapters, Lisa’s identity is entirely obscured, first as the ambiguous and mysterious author of a nonsensical duo of erotic texts, and second as a subject under Freud’s microscope, given alternate traits to obscure her true self. There is great significance in the concealment of her career as an opera singer, as, metaphorically, her voice has been taken away, similar to the fact that in Don Giovanni, The Gastein Journal, and Frau Anna G., Lisa never narrates her own story. At this point in her life Lisa is almost without agency. She has fallen victim to these episodes of psychosomatic hysteria and grown dependent upon her aging aunt to support her as her illness has both ravaged her body and addled her mental faculties,
At first glance, Night, by Eliezer Wiesel does not seem to be an example of deep or emotionally complex literature. It is a tiny book, one hundred pages at the most with a lot of dialogue and short choppy sentences. But in this memoir, Wiesel strings along the events that took him through the Holocaust until they form one of the most riveting, shocking, and grimly realistic tales ever told of history’s most famous horror story. In Night, Wiesel reveals the intense impact that concentration camps had on his life, not through grisly details but in correlation with his lost faith in God and the human conscience.
When this story is viewed through Sigmund Freud’s “psychoanalytic lens” the novel reveals itself as much more than just another gory war novel. According to Sigmund Freud psychology there are three parts of the mind that control a person’s actions which are the id, ego, and superego. Psychoanalysis states that there are three parts of the human mind, both conscious and subconscious, that control a person’s actions. The Id, ego, and
Barry, Peter. "Psychoanalytic criticism." Beginning Theory: an Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. 3rd ed. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009. 92-115. Print.
The aim of this essay is to clarify the basic principles of Freud’s theories and to raise the main issues.
The ideas used to interpret this play are not classically Freudian, but rather a more contemporary understanding of psychodynamics as influenced by modern existential theory. The ideas of Ernest Becker, one of the more influential figures in the new psychoanalysis, are used throughout this psychological examination.
By considering such arguments, psychoanalysis can be said to have no ultra fundamental meaning when assessing an author’s work. For former advocate of this analysis, Frederic...