Lana Lin
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780823277711
- eISBN:
- 9780823280568
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823277711.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects examines the vulnerabilities of the human body, in particular how cancer disrupts feelings of bodily integrity and agency. Employing psychoanalytic and literary ...
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Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects examines the vulnerabilities of the human body, in particular how cancer disrupts feelings of bodily integrity and agency. Employing psychoanalytic and literary analysis of atypical autopathographies, the book tracks three exemplary figures, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, poet Audre Lorde, and literary and queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Freud’s sixteen-year ordeal with a prosthetic jaw, the result of oral cancer, demonstrates the powers and failures of prosthetic objects in warding off physical and psychic fragmentation. Lorde’s life writing reveals how the loss of a breast to cancer is experienced as yet another attack directed toward her racially and sexually vilified body. Sedgwick’s memoir and breast cancer advice column negotiate her morbidity and mortality by disseminating a public discourse of love and pedagogy. Freud’s Jaw suggests that violences stemming from social, cultural, and biological environments condition the burden of surviving in proximity to one’s mortality. Drawing on psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s concept of “reparation,” wherein constructive forces are harnessed to repair damage to internal psychic objects, Freud’s Jaw proposes that the prospect of imminent destruction paradoxically incites creativity. The afflicted are obliged to devise means to reinstate, at least temporarily, their destabilized physical and psychic unity through creative reparative projects such as love or writing. The book concludes with an analysis of reparative efforts at the rival Freud Museums. The disassembled Freudian archive, like the subjectivities-in-dissolution upon which the book focuses, shows how the labor of integration is tethered to persistent discontinuities.Less
Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects examines the vulnerabilities of the human body, in particular how cancer disrupts feelings of bodily integrity and agency. Employing psychoanalytic and literary analysis of atypical autopathographies, the book tracks three exemplary figures, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, poet Audre Lorde, and literary and queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Freud’s sixteen-year ordeal with a prosthetic jaw, the result of oral cancer, demonstrates the powers and failures of prosthetic objects in warding off physical and psychic fragmentation. Lorde’s life writing reveals how the loss of a breast to cancer is experienced as yet another attack directed toward her racially and sexually vilified body. Sedgwick’s memoir and breast cancer advice column negotiate her morbidity and mortality by disseminating a public discourse of love and pedagogy. Freud’s Jaw suggests that violences stemming from social, cultural, and biological environments condition the burden of surviving in proximity to one’s mortality. Drawing on psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s concept of “reparation,” wherein constructive forces are harnessed to repair damage to internal psychic objects, Freud’s Jaw proposes that the prospect of imminent destruction paradoxically incites creativity. The afflicted are obliged to devise means to reinstate, at least temporarily, their destabilized physical and psychic unity through creative reparative projects such as love or writing. The book concludes with an analysis of reparative efforts at the rival Freud Museums. The disassembled Freudian archive, like the subjectivities-in-dissolution upon which the book focuses, shows how the labor of integration is tethered to persistent discontinuities.
Lana Lin
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780823277711
- eISBN:
- 9780823280568
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823277711.003.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
The Introduction lays out the key terms, organization, and methodology of the book. It details how Freud’s Jaw relies on psychoanalytic object relations theory—in particular theories on part-objects, ...
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The Introduction lays out the key terms, organization, and methodology of the book. It details how Freud’s Jaw relies on psychoanalytic object relations theory—in particular theories on part-objects, attachment and dependency (anaclisis), mourning, melancholia, and fetishism. These psychoanalytic concepts are mobilized to probe the psychic life and death of human and nonhuman objects and to throw light upon how illness initiates processes of objectification. Each chapter focuses on a different type of object, which bears a relation to the psychoanalytic lost object: the prosthetic object, the “first object” (the breast), love objects, and reparative objects. Through its examination of autopathographies, including the author’s own autopathographic observations, the book fleshes out a “subjectivity of survival.” For Sigmund Freud survival entailed maintenance and adjustment of his oral prostheses; for Audre Lorde it was bound up with a politics of self-preservation; for Eve Sedgwick it was explicitly a reparative project. The chapter explains how cancer carries psychoanalytic meaning, confirming that death has always occupied the core of psychoanalysis as a tragic discourse.Less
The Introduction lays out the key terms, organization, and methodology of the book. It details how Freud’s Jaw relies on psychoanalytic object relations theory—in particular theories on part-objects, attachment and dependency (anaclisis), mourning, melancholia, and fetishism. These psychoanalytic concepts are mobilized to probe the psychic life and death of human and nonhuman objects and to throw light upon how illness initiates processes of objectification. Each chapter focuses on a different type of object, which bears a relation to the psychoanalytic lost object: the prosthetic object, the “first object” (the breast), love objects, and reparative objects. Through its examination of autopathographies, including the author’s own autopathographic observations, the book fleshes out a “subjectivity of survival.” For Sigmund Freud survival entailed maintenance and adjustment of his oral prostheses; for Audre Lorde it was bound up with a politics of self-preservation; for Eve Sedgwick it was explicitly a reparative project. The chapter explains how cancer carries psychoanalytic meaning, confirming that death has always occupied the core of psychoanalysis as a tragic discourse.
Valerie Anishchenkova
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780748643400
- eISBN:
- 9781474406321
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748643400.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
The particularities of cultural and ideological discourses in the Arab world, as well as traditional literary conventions, have informed a troubled relationship between Arab autobiographers and their ...
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The particularities of cultural and ideological discourses in the Arab world, as well as traditional literary conventions, have informed a troubled relationship between Arab autobiographers and their autobiographical bodies. But if human body was virtually absent in early works of the genre, physicality has gradually become an important site for the construction of autobiographical identity. This chapter investigates two distinct dimensions in which corporeal selfhood is articulated – sexuality and disability. Muhammad Shukri’s Bare Bread (1973) and Nazik Saba Yarid’s Improvisations on a Missing String (1992) serve as core studies.Less
The particularities of cultural and ideological discourses in the Arab world, as well as traditional literary conventions, have informed a troubled relationship between Arab autobiographers and their autobiographical bodies. But if human body was virtually absent in early works of the genre, physicality has gradually become an important site for the construction of autobiographical identity. This chapter investigates two distinct dimensions in which corporeal selfhood is articulated – sexuality and disability. Muhammad Shukri’s Bare Bread (1973) and Nazik Saba Yarid’s Improvisations on a Missing String (1992) serve as core studies.
