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Tact in Psychoanalysis: Marion Milner

David Russell

in Tact: Aesthetic Liberalism and the Essay Form in Nineteenth-Century Britain

This chapter focuses on the writings of Marion Milner. Like Eliot in her essays, Milner laments the inadequacy of cultural resource available to support a creative life; but unlike Eliot in her ... More

This chapter focuses on the writings of Marion Milner. Like Eliot in her essays, Milner laments the inadequacy of cultural resource available to support a creative life; but unlike Eliot in her essays, Milner is on the lookout for new uses for vulnerability. If the resources of the strong only serve to suppress the capacities and perceptions of those who are marginalized, then what use can they be to the weak? Though the chapter considers her diary books in some detail, its focus is on how their concerns with a freedom to see and feel for oneself, and the uses of vulnerability, shape her analytic work. In particular, how this work calls for a clinical sensibility with striking affinities to the tact of the nineteenth-century essayists described in this book.Less

“I Cried Twice”: Sincerity and Life in a Post-Communist World

Ellen Rutten

in Sincerity After Communism: A Cultural History

This chapter examines the controversy surrounding Vladimir Sorokin's “sincere turn” in order to elucidate post-Communist thinking about artistic self-expression and commodification. Having gained ... More

This chapter examines the controversy surrounding Vladimir Sorokin's “sincere turn” in order to elucidate post-Communist thinking about artistic self-expression and commodification. Having gained fame as a nonconformist writer in the late Soviet era, Sorokin had acquired the status of a postmodernist Russian classic by the turn of the twenty-first century. At this point he astounded his public with a prose trilogy that revolved wholly around the need for human sincerity and for “speaking with the heart.” From an outright dismissal of socioethical commitment, Sorokin now moved to classic literary self-fashioning models to which openness and truth telling are imperative. The chapter proposes a nonessentialist approach— one that is inspired by recent theorizations of sincerity by Rosenbaum and like-minded scholars, who advocate a reading of the concept that accepts the tension between sincerity's moral charge and an artist's inevitable involvement in market mechanisms. It considers how sincerity rhetoric works in Sorokin's public self-fashioning and reception and describes thinking on post-Soviet creative life.Less

Introduction

in The Age of Immunology: Conceiving A Future in an Alienating World

This chapter provides an introduction to the science of immunology and focuses on racism in the sciences. Immunological ideas provide the primary conceptual framework in which human relations take ... More

This chapter provides an introduction to the science of immunology and focuses on racism in the sciences. Immunological ideas provide the primary conceptual framework in which human relations take place in the contemporary world. Therefore, it openly accepts that a certain metaphor of science also now dominates the social interactions in which human relations are rhetorically negotiated and described. The chapter discusses a fundamental bias regarding creative life. Today's world relies heavily on innovation rather than on invention. The Age of Immunology relies heavily on innovation for survival. The psychological transformation and human change are creative ventures that occur when one encounters difference and finds some space in which the net result of an encounter with a genuine “other” is greater than the sum of the parts of the encounter.Less

Coming to Writing

Elizabeth Harlan

in George Sand

This chapter illustrates how, even though George Sand's childhood was dominated by a cruel and divisive contest between her mother and grandmother, she nostalgically recounts in her autobiography ... More

This chapter illustrates how, even though George Sand's childhood was dominated by a cruel and divisive contest between her mother and grandmother, she nostalgically recounts in her autobiography that life's “beginnings are so sweet and childhood such a happy time.” This showed that, as a child, Sand's dilemma was her inability to reconcile these differences so as to make harmony out of dissonance. Although Sand casts her inclination toward idealization against the political backdrop of the “terrors of the century,” what she describes as her need to combat the “emptiness and horror of human existence” could be said just as well about her personal and creative life.Less