tag:theconversation.com,2011:/ca/topics/freud-13384/articles
Freud – The Conversation
2023-08-22T05:49:38Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/211830
2023-08-22T05:49:38Z
2023-08-22T05:49:38Z
Why do we make violent art – and what does it say about the artist?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543887/original/file-20230822-29-rk91ae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=7%2C310%2C2544%2C1571&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">El Tres de Mayo by Francisco de Goya</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The sensationalised media coverage of the recent suspected mushroom poisonings in regional Victoria expanded last week, to include children’s scribblings on a wall. </p>
<p>The pictures, which comprised stick figures, rudimentary drawings and text that referenced death and dying, were removed last year from the former home of the woman who cooked the lunch. Drawn by her primary-school-aged children, and photographed long ago by the tradesman who cleaned the wall, they included tombstones, swords and the words “I am dead” and “You don’t long to live”. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/death-wall-inside-mushroom-chefs-house/news-story/a879b2505a32b22dc16214201659dab4">news story</a> revealing the pictures quoted another tradesperson who saw the wall, saying the drawings were not what you’d “typically expect” from children of that age. “You’d think they’d be drawing flowers and unicorns, not gravestones and death.”</p>
<p>It was implied that these “eerie”, “scary” depictions of violence indicate something troubling. But art history doesn’t bear this out, whether we’re talking about children’s capacity for gruesome drawings, or indeed the tradition of modern artworks by fully fledged artists whose work deliberately explores troubling themes.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/violence-is-here-to-stay-we-need-to-understand-it-31411">Violence is here to stay – we need to understand it</a>
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<h2>Ethical concerns and the human condition</h2>
<p>In fact, the history of modern art suggests depictions of violence are often tied to deep ethical concerns and explorations of the human condition. The idea that violent art must be the expression of a violent individual is simply not true.</p>
<p>In the wake of Freudian theories about the monster lurking inside “civilised man”, early 20th-century modernist explorations of violence were often a means of accessing unconscious human desires and fears. </p>
<p>Much <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-surrealism-52487">surrealist</a> and expressionist art sought to reveal deeper truths, beyond what was sanctioned in bourgeois society. </p>
<p>Man Ray’s 1921 <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/man-ray-cadeau-t07883">Gift</a> (or, <em>Cadeau</em>), a sculpture of a domestic iron studded with tacks, acknowledges the violent drives that unconsciously propel much human behaviour. And Andre Masson’s delicate <a href="https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/collection/artwork/massacre">line-renderings of massacres</a> (1930-34) confront the viewer with the violence of war.</p>
<p>Such work was often motivated by the desire to outrage polite society and compel it to confront its hypocrisy, particularly in the wake of the horrors unleashed by the ruling classes during the first world war.</p>
<p>A modernist impulse to shock and an attraction to the darker side of the human psyche are still common in art and popular culture. It’s partly about asserting freedom from social norms. But it’s also about highlighting the breadth of human experience – and the social and personal harm that can result when that complexity is denied. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/y/young-british-artists-ybas">Young British Artists</a>, who began to exhibit together after a 1988 exhibition organised by Damien Hirst (perhaps their most notorious member), made a very successful brand of it. </p>
<p>Their work included <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/feb/21/marcus-harvey-margaret-thatcher">Marcus Harvey’s Myra</a> (1995), a portrait of a child serial killer, rendered in children’s handprints. Harvey’s work intends to shock us out of our assumptions about who serial killers are and their motivations, but also to force us to see that our society has produced people capable of such heinous acts.</p>
<p>Another strain of modern art represents violence as a means of holding perpetrators to account. Proto-realist painters such as <a href="https://www.parkwestgallery.com/francisco-goya-disasters-of-war/">Francisco Goya</a> depicted the atrocities of war in early 19th-century Spain in graphic detail as protest. </p>
<p>His contemporary Honoré Daumier was jailed for <a href="https://www.wikiart.org/en/honore-daumier/gargantua-1831">Gargantua</a> (1831), a caricature of King Louis Phillipe. It was one of a series of engravings illustrating the brutality of the French administration’s class warfare. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543883/original/file-20230822-18-xeifp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543883/original/file-20230822-18-xeifp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543883/original/file-20230822-18-xeifp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543883/original/file-20230822-18-xeifp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543883/original/file-20230822-18-xeifp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543883/original/file-20230822-18-xeifp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543883/original/file-20230822-18-xeifp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543883/original/file-20230822-18-xeifp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Honoré Daumier’s caricature of King Louis Phillipe, Gargantua, had him jailed.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<h2>Documentary and protest</h2>
<p>The legacy of such artists lives on in documentary photography and film. There, the violence of political and historical events is made widely visible, with the aim of influencing public opinion and forcing governments to act. </p>
<p>Nick Ut’s photograph of “napalm girl” (1972), since identified as nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc, photographed naked while fleeing a napalm attack, is an iconic example. It <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-11/nick-ut-kim-phuc-napalm-girl-photo-50-years-later/101139364">arguably helped end</a> the war whose horrors it captured.</p>
<p>And recent exposés about the horrors of factory farming – such as <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12185108/">Hogwood</a> (2020), a documentary focused on a UK pig farm that features undercover footage – compel us to confront the normalised violence embedded on our dinner plates. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/50-years-after-napalm-girl-myths-distort-the-reality-behind-a-horrific-photo-of-the-vietnam-war-and-exaggerate-its-impact-183291">50 years after ‘Napalm Girl,’ myths distort the reality behind a horrific photo of the Vietnam War and exaggerate its impact</a>
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<h2>Violence using the artist’s body</h2>
<p>Violence enacted on the artist’s own body has been a powerful means to explore the limits of the human condition, but also to make literal the violence of social and political repression. </p>
<p>In her early performance work, <a href="https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/yoko-ono-cut-piece-1964/">Cut Piece</a> (1964), Yoko Ono sits impassively onstage, a pair of scissors before her, awaiting the audience’s response to the invitation to cut off a little snippet of her clothing to take with them. </p>
<p>The audience’s latent gendered violence is gradually manifested, without a word being said by the artist: men take to her clothes with escalating bravado, until Ono is left in tatters.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EWczMBtPa04?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece revealed the audience’s gendered violence.</span></figcaption>
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<p>In her <a href="https://www.lissongallery.com/about/confession">Rhythm</a> series of performances (1973-74), <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-mystical-stillness-of-marina-abramovic-in-sydney-43640">Marina Abramovic</a> variously stabbed a knife between her splayed fingers, lay at the centre of a burning five-point star, and offered her prone body as an object for the audience to interact with, using a selection of objects that included a gun, a scalpel and a saw. </p>
<p>By subjecting herself to violence, Abramovic tests her physical and psychological limits – and by extension, our own. And she demonstrates the violent tendencies that are normalised and affirmed in patriarchal systems when, during Rhythm 0, her body is repeatedly assaulted by members of the public.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/v0Qysmjakso?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Select footage from Marina Abramovic’s Rhythm performances.</span></figcaption>
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<p>In 2002, Australian artist Mike Parr sewed his lips shut and nailed his arm to a wall in his endurance performance <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/flinch-art-20020612-gduail.html">Close the Concentration Camps</a>. It was an act of solidarity and empathy with those in detention centres – and a protest against Australia’s inhumane refugee policy. </p>
<p>Acts of violent destruction can be central to the very artworks themselves, as acts of political commentary. </p>
<p>Ai Weiwei’s <a href="https://theartling.com/en/artzine/artling-exclusive-ai-weiweis-dropping-han-dynasty-urn/">Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn</a> (1995) dramatically focused on how little we value the past. And Michael Landy destroyed all his personal possessions in <a href="https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20160713-michael-landy-the-man-who-destroyed-all-his-belongings">Break Down</a> (2001), in an anti-consumerist gesture. </p>
<p>The history of modern art shows compelling grounds for creating images of violence, including to reflect the complexities of human behaviour and to hold perpetrators accountable. </p>
<p>It tells us there is no clear causation between creating violent images and committing violent acts.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/211830/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jacqueline Millner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
It’s often implied that violent art means something sinister about its creator – most recently, in news stories about ‘scary’ kids’ drawings of death. But the history of modern art suggests otherwise.
Jacqueline Millner, Professor in Visual Arts, La Trobe University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/210135
2023-07-21T09:21:20Z
2023-07-21T09:21:20Z
Virginia Woolf’s copy of her first novel was found in a University of Sydney library. What do her newly digitised notes reveal?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538690/original/file-20230721-19-grm0uz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=32%2C8%2C5431%2C3628&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Virginia Woolf's own, marked up, copy of her first novel: newly digitised.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">The University of Sydney/Stefanie Zingsheim</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>One of just two copies of Virginia Woolf’s first novel, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-voyage-out-9780141919850">The Voyage Out</a> (1915), annotated with her handwriting and preparations to revise it for a US edition, was recently rediscovered in the <a href="https://www.library.sydney.edu.au/collections/rare-books/">Fisher Library Rare Books Collection</a> at the University of Sydney. </p>
<p>Purchased in the late 1970s, it had been misfiled with the science books in the Rare Books collection. Simon Cooper, a metadata services officer, found it in 2021 and immediately understood the value of his discovery.</p>
<p>The Sydney copy, which is the only one available for the public to view, has now been digitised. It’s <a href="https://digital.library.sydney.edu.au/nodes/view/13658">available online</a> – allowing scholars and readers to study and consider Woolf’s editorial interventions. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538694/original/file-20230721-29-biub4l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538694/original/file-20230721-29-biub4l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538694/original/file-20230721-29-biub4l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538694/original/file-20230721-29-biub4l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538694/original/file-20230721-29-biub4l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538694/original/file-20230721-29-biub4l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538694/original/file-20230721-29-biub4l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538694/original/file-20230721-29-biub4l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Virginia Woolf’s annotated copy of The Voyage Out is one of two in the world, and the only one publicly available.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The University of Sydney/Stefanie Zingsheim</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
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<p>The Voyage Out follows Rachel Vinrace and a mismatched collection of characters embarking on her father’s ship to South America. Woolf’s story grapples with self-discovery and satirises Edwardian life.</p>
<p>It almost finished her writing career. She struggled through years of drafts, eventually abandoning the first version in 1912: it was titled Melymbrosia, named after the food of the Greek gods. Woolf’s ideas on colonialism, women’s suffrage and gender relations were considered too dangerous for a first-time novelist.</p>
<p>Over the next three years, she composed the (retitled) novel we have today, published by her half-brother <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Duckworth">Gerald Duckworth</a> in London in 1915. At this pivotal moment, she began her diary and suffered a significant mental breakdown, losing the rest of the year to illness.</p>
<p>In preparation for the novel’s first US edition, published by George H. Doran in New York in 1920, Woolf carried out a series of revisions to her text. Two copies of the first UK edition of the novel contain the evidence of this process, with Woolf’s handwritten annotations and typed page fragments pasted into each book.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-a-room-of-ones-own-virginia-woolfs-feminist-call-to-arms-145398">Guide to the classics: A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf's feminist call to arms</a>
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<h2>Why revise?</h2>
<p>What motivated Woolf to revise her text? She made revisions in the aftermath of her breakdown, and after her literary career was revived with her second novel, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/night-and-day-9780140185683">Night and Day</a>, published in 1919.</p>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Virginia Woolf(Picture: George Charles Beresford)/Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>Scholars have suggested she wished to place some distance between her own psychological stresses and the anguish of her primary character, Rachel Vinrace. Both Woolf and her chief protagonist had domineering father figures, had lost their mothers at a relatively young age, and were denied a formal education – instead being schooled at home. Laying out her character’s mental life so starkly caused Woolf some discomfort. A new edition may have provided an opportunity to reconsider.</p>
<p>This is a plausible theory. But does the evidence in Woolf’s corrections bear it out? There are two main places in the text where the majority of changes are indicated: both are pivotal moments in the narrative.</p>
<p>The first set of changes occurs in Chapter XVI, where the conversation between Vinrace and Terence Hewet – the pair occupying the romantic plotline of the novel – is altered to reduce access to Rachel’s inner thoughts. Entire paragraphs are replaced by typed text pasted directly onto the page, where the narrator studies Rachel without the guarantee of understanding her.</p>
<p>This has the effect of diluting some uncomfortable autobiographical elements in the text, but also marks a significant shift in the way narration accesses the minds of characters. </p>
<p>The narrator is bounded by the limits of character itself: the depths of Rachel’s subjectivity are unknown even to her. This bears the mark of modern psychology and <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-dangerous-method-in-defence-of-freuds-psychoanalysis-5989">Freud’s theory</a> of the unconscious, in the years before and during the composition of the novel.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/sophie-cunninghams-pandemic-novel-admits-literature-cant-save-us-but-treasures-it-for-trying-187724">Sophie Cunningham's pandemic novel admits literature can't save us – but treasures it for trying</a>
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<h2>A modernist revolution</h2>
<p>This innovation signals a profound shift in modernist fiction, which began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is characterised by a self-conscious break with traditional ways of writing. </p>
<p>The unknowability of Woolf’s characters begins with the dark regions of the mind. No longer in the realm of realism, where thoughts and actions are knowable (and often transmitted by an omniscient narrator), instead the narrator provides a portrait of the complex modern person, who responds to the world in ways not fully accountable by reason.</p>
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<p>The other significant set of revisions in the Sydney text arise in Chapter XXV, in which Rachel and Terence attempt to navigate the future of their nascent relationship – which also marks Rachel’s descent into fever and her decline, ending in death. </p>
<p>Long passages are marked for deletion (although none were actually deleted in the first US edition). They are largely concerned with Rachel’s fevered consciousness and Terence’s attitudes towards romantic love and its effects on an artistic life.</p>
<p>Woolf again may have wished to put distance between the narrator and the intimate thoughts of her characters, invoking instead a space of ambiguity, where words and gestures are to be interpreted by readers rather than analysed in full light by a knowing narrative consciousness.</p>
<p>Woolf’s first novel straddles the conventions of realism inherited from the 19th century and the new, experimental fiction of the 20th. The Sydney text tells an important part of this story. </p>
<p>It shines a light on Woolf’s developing technique and its evolution into the free indirect style for which she became famous in later novels such as <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/mrs-dalloway-9780143136132">Mrs Dalloway</a>, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/to-the-lighthouse-vintage-classics-woolf-series-9781784870836">To the Lighthouse</a> and <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-waves-vintage-classics-woolf-series-9781784870843">The Waves</a>.</p>
<p>Woolf was at the centre of the revolution in the novel form during the time of modernism. The evidence is there in her annotated copy of The Voyage Out.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/210135/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mark Byron has been the recipient of one Discovery Grant and two fellowships from the Australian Research Council, most recently a Future Fellowship from 2017 to 2020.</span></em></p>
A Sydney librarian recently discovered a misfiled lost gem in the stacks: Virginia Woolf’s own copy of her first novel, with handwritten notes for revision. An expert explores what they tell us.
Mark Byron, Professor, University of Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/191843
2022-10-30T19:02:26Z
2022-10-30T19:02:26Z
Are you haunted by ghosts of the past and phantoms of your future? Welcome to the spooky realm of hauntology
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491153/original/file-20221023-12577-4tyc12.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C18%2C6310%2C5969&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Alasdair Macintyre, Ghost Kid on Stairs 2, 2019.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/185141588@N06/52446584517">aecap/flickr</a>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Do you believe in ghosts? Every year, Halloween serves up the usual images of spooks, skeletons and witches – but these ideas aren’t just the domain of fiction or trick-or-treating. There is also a philosophical concept that embraces ghosts. </p>
<p>It is called “hauntology”, and it might just make you a believer.</p>
<p>The word hauntology was invented by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida for his 1993 lecture <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specters_of_Marx">Spectres of Marx</a>. </p>
<p>Derrida was a whimsical guy, and the words “hauntology” and “ontology” both sound identical when spoken in French. </p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology">Ontology</a> is the philosophical study of existence and being, dating back as far as ancient Greece. In Derrida’s mind, ontology was shadowed by hauntology, a state of non-being. </p>
<p>Hauntology is that eerie zone where time collapses and our past memories and associations haunt our minds, like a ghost. </p>
<h2>Haunted by past and future</h2>
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<span class="caption">Pedro Américo’s Visão de Hamlet (Hamlet’s Vision), painted 1893.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>In his lecture, Derrida invoked Shakespeare’s Hamlet, both through the phantom of Hamlet’s father and particularly the phrase “time is out of joint”. </p>
<p>Not only does hauntology look back to your past experiences, it looks forward. You are haunted by the future – or, at least, haunted by futures that did not eventuate.</p>
<p>Are you in the job you planned to have ten years ago? Do you live in the house you dreamed of when you were younger? Do these unfulfilled dreams weigh on your mind? Dare I ask, do these unmet expectations haunt you? </p>
<p>English theorist Mark Fisher called this concept “cancelled futures” and associated it with cultural stagnation. In a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ">2014 lecture</a> he bemoaned little forward progress in music and films: an endless repetition and recycling of old ideas, just in high definition.</p>
<p>Fisher was an important catalyst in the transformation of ghosts. Along with music journalist Simon Reynolds, Fisher appropriated Derrida’s hauntology by analysing pop culture, music and movies through a hauntological lens: considering how contemporary culture is haunted by our pasts and impossible futures.</p>
<p>This area of “spectral studies” developed in the new millennium mainly through blogs. The traditional idea of ghosts evolved from a supernatural phenomenon (fictional or otherwise) into a philosophical concept, discussed vigorously in the digital realm. </p>
<p>Those studying spectral studies turned to sources as diverse as Freud’s observations of the “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny">uncanny</a>” and <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/DAVSAT-2">Sartre’s suggestion</a> that, although invisible, the dead survive and are all around us.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/from-black-death-to-covid-19-pandemics-have-always-pushed-people-to-honor-death-and-celebrate-life-170517">From Black Death to COVID-19, pandemics have always pushed people to honor death and celebrate life</a>
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</p>
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<h2>Haunted popular cultures</h2>
<p>Many creatives have embraced the motif and connotations of the ghost. Richard Littler’s blog <a href="https://scarfolk.blogspot.com/">Scarfolk</a> (2013-) imagines a fictional English village stuck forever looping on 1979. The retro electronica musicians of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Box_Records">Ghost Box Records label</a> (2004-), seem to capture the <a href="https://soundcloud.com/ghost-box">soundtrack</a> of a parallel world outside of time. </p>
<p>Hauntology also describes a post-traumatic-like disquiet of those born in the 1960s and ‘70s. Dubbed by Bob Fisher as “<a href="https://hauntedgeneration.co.uk/2019/04/22/thehauntedgeneration/">the haunted generation</a>”, Fisher says kids of this era grew up in an age of “cosy wrongness”, consuming lots of media – especially television. </p>
<p>Not all of it was suitable for children. </p>
<p>Think of films like <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078480/">Watership Down</a> (1978) with its blood-soaked fields and scary rabbits, or those fuzzy Jon Pertwee/Tom Baker-era episodes of Doctor Who. </p>
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<p>Are you of an age where the memory of those grainy black and white ghost photographs you saw as a child in Usborne’s <a href="https://usborne.com/au/the-world-of-the-unknown-ghosts-9781474976688">World of the Unknown: Ghosts</a> (1977) still freak you out? Does the recollection of the shrill screams in Disney’s read-along book and record of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJcpZeISmFk">The Haunted Mansion</a> (1970) still send shivers down your spine?</p>
<p>Much hauntological writing discusses popular culture artefacts such as these, and the way they haunt our minds through recurring memories that return again and again.</p>
<h2>Walking with ghosts</h2>
<p>Films like Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), especially its setting at the vast and secluded Overlook hotel, strongly reflect key features of hauntology. The emotional disintegration of Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) mirrors the very hauntological collapsing of time within the walls of the hotel. </p>
<p>People and events from decades past appear and influence his behaviour. Then, of course, there are the ghosts of those two little girls in their blue dresses.</p>
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<p>This depiction of ghosts we knew returning to us dressed in the attire they wore in life reflects a long tradition. Hamlet’s father returns dressed in battle armour. The ghosts of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol are decked out in their burial suits.</p>
<p>It was not until the 20th century that ghosts began to appear in their ubiquitous white sheets, most notably in the works of MR James. In James’ <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27Oh,_Whistle,_and_I%27ll_Come_to_You,_My_Lad%27">Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad</a> (1904), a holidaying academic inadvertently conjures up a terrifying entity swathed in linen bedsheets.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491232/original/file-20221024-17-y8vdtg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A sheetly-like ghost." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491232/original/file-20221024-17-y8vdtg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491232/original/file-20221024-17-y8vdtg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491232/original/file-20221024-17-y8vdtg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491232/original/file-20221024-17-y8vdtg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491232/original/file-20221024-17-y8vdtg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491232/original/file-20221024-17-y8vdtg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491232/original/file-20221024-17-y8vdtg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Illustration by James McBryde for MR James’s story, Oh, Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>So in a sense, hauntology has brought us full circle, returning to these ideas of ghosts we knew from our lives returning once more to haunt us.</p>
<p>Now you know it, hauntology is a name you can give to those slightly eerie memories from your childhood, or that nagging feeling that you took a wrong turn in life somewhere along the road. </p>
<p>Whether ghosts be the Scooby Doo-style spooks chasing us around old castles, or the psychological phantoms gatecrashing our own minds, hauntology is all around.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/looking-for-love-on-a-dating-app-you-might-be-falling-for-a-ghost-128626">Looking for love on a dating app? You might be falling for a ghost</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/191843/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alasdair Macintyre lectures in the School of Arts and Humanities at the Australian Catholic University.</span></em></p>
Ghosts aren’t just the domain of fiction or trick-or-treating. Hauntology is a philosophical concept that embraces ghosts.
Alasdair Macintyre, Associate lecturer visual arts, artist, PhD, Australian Catholic University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/192507
2022-10-27T19:05:53Z
2022-10-27T19:05:53Z
Friday essay: in praise of the ‘horror master’ Stephen King
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491545/original/file-20221025-246-gpmy5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=39%2C3%2C1989%2C1358&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">idmb</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Growing up in the 1980s, the name Stephen King was synonymous with macabre, terrifying, apparently taboo (though ubiquitous) book covers. They seemed to appear everywhere: bookstores, to be sure; but also newsagents, supermarkets, cinemas, airports and libraries. They always seemed to be spinning in some library carousel, looking tattered, like they’d been borrowed 100,000 times.</p>
<p>Like a kid from a King novel, I was obsessed with the forbidden. I would spend hours staring at these book covers, thinking about the horrors that might lie within. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491563/original/file-20221025-26-d0g3w2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491563/original/file-20221025-26-d0g3w2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491563/original/file-20221025-26-d0g3w2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=886&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491563/original/file-20221025-26-d0g3w2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=886&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491563/original/file-20221025-26-d0g3w2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=886&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491563/original/file-20221025-26-d0g3w2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1114&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491563/original/file-20221025-26-d0g3w2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1114&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491563/original/file-20221025-26-d0g3w2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1114&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>A giant, bloody salivating dog. A freakish pair of eyes looking out of a drain. A silhouette of a figure with an axe eclipsing someone in a wheelchair. Hell, they looked more like movie posters than book covers. I’d go to bed and imagine one of these figures coming alive and creeping towards the house from the backyard. </p>
<p>Very occasionally, this was actually scary – but mostly it was just fun. </p>
<h2>Why we love horror</h2>
<p>Why do we gravitate towards subject matter that, if it existed in the real world, would be at best supremely unpleasant? There are many theories regarding why people love horror film and literature. </p>
<p>Perhaps it’s cathartic. Maybe it reflects Freud’s “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_drive">death drive</a>,” or what Edgar Allan Poe described, in a titular short story, as the “imp of the perverse,” (suggesting we all have self-destructive tendencies). Or maybe it simply reflects our fascination with extreme experiences, a desire to be overwhelmed by the sublime, which <a href="https://natureofwriting.com/courses/literary-theory-1/lessons/edmund-burke/topic/the-sublime/">Edmund Burke</a> defined as a mixture of fear and excitement, terror and awe. Perhaps horror thus manifests a desire to re-enchant the world with magic in a controlled and safe context, physically activating the body and its response mechanisms in an environment that only simulates real peril. </p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-nietzsche-nihilism-and-reasons-to-be-cheerful-130378">Friedrich Nietzsche</a> wrote about the collective pleasure of inflicting pain on others through punishment. Does our fascination for horror channel this? Or, as <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julia-Kristeva">Julia Kristeva</a>’s theory suggests, does art help us manage our abject horror at the breakdown between self and other – most pointedly captured in our confrontations with corpses?</p>
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<span class="caption">Agnus-Dei The Scapegoat (James Tissot)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Brooklyn Museum/picryl</span></span>
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<p>Literary theorist <a href="https://iep.utm.edu/girard/">René Girard</a>’s ideas are equally compelling. Perhaps we’re attracted to images of violence because of its anthropological function in the earliest periods of community formation. A victim – the scapegoat – would be chosen to bear the violence that would otherwise be destructively directed towards other members of the community. This idea is beautifully rendered in Drew Godard’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1259521/">The Cabin in the Woods</a>, a horror film about the origins of horror films in ritual and sacrifice. </p>
<p>In a broader cultural sense, our modern interest in horror, the supernatural and the weird has grown in direct proportion to industrialisation, and the parallel shrinking of the world’s magic and mysteries (captured in the term “globalisation”). </p>
<p>In a post-sacred era of intense scientific rationalism and technological development, the aesthetics of the weird, supernatural and horrific – in all their wondrous irrationality – allow us to occupy an alternate, imaginary space removed from the horror of things as they really are: mass industrial wars of attrition, precarious states of living, pandemic disease and global warming. </p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-scary-tales-for-scary-times-181597">Friday essay: scary tales for scary times</a>
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<h2>My first King</h2>
<p>When I finally had the autonomy (and my own money) to pick the books I wanted to read, it was with mixed feelings of shame and excitement that I went to buy my first Stephen King novel. </p>
<p>I still remember the suburban bookstore and the sardonic frown of its middle-aged clerk as she looked down at my ten-year-old self when I placed <a href="https://stephenking.com/works/novel/pet-sematary.html">Pet Sematary</a> on the counter and got 12 bucks out of my wallet. I remember blushing when she intimated (or was it actually a question?) I must have been buying this for an older relative. </p>
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<p>The novel follows what happens to a doctor and his family when they discover, in the woods, a children’s pet cemetery that reanimates whatever is buried there. It lived up to the promise of its cover, offering splashes of superlative gore, a handful of genuinely terrifying moments (the sequences involving Rachel’s sick sister Zelda still get to me) and a plethora of new words. Not swear words, mind you – any self-respecting kid knows all of these by seven or eight – but terms like “cuckold”, about which I had to consult my mum. </p>
<p>For the next two years, I spent most of my reading time dedicated to King. I quickly got through the pantheon – massive tomes like <a href="https://stephenking.com/works/novel/stand.html">The Stand</a>, <a href="https://stephenking.com/works/novel/needful-things.html">Needful Things</a> and <a href="https://stephenking.com/works/novel/it.html">It</a>; more moderately sized ones like <a href="https://stephenking.com/works/novel/carrie.html">Carrie</a>, <a href="https://stephenking.com/works/novel/shining.html">The Shining</a> and <a href="https://stephenking.com/works/novel/salems-lot.html">Salem’s Lot</a>; and short, explosive ones like <a href="https://stephenking.com/works/novel/running-man.html">The Running Man</a>, published under King’s pseudonym, Richard Bachman. And then I started with the new releases (there was at least one every year – like 1994’s <a href="https://stephenking.com/works/novel/insomnia.html">Insomnia</a>), generally available from Kmart in hardback. </p>
<p>I found in King an interlocutor who spoke with gusto and enthusiasm about all kinds of things – old age, domestic abuse, natural and supernatural horrors of the mind and closet. But, more than anything else, he seemed not only to write stories that often featured young characters, but to accurately dramatise what it actually felt like to be a kid. </p>
<p>Short stories like <a href="https://stephenking.com/works/novella/sun-dog.html">The Sun Dog</a>, novels like <a href="https://stephenking.com/works/novel/cycle-of-the-werewolf.html">Cycle of the Werewolf</a> and the monumental It – not to mention more obvious outings like The Body, the basis of the massively successful nostalgia film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092005/">Stand By Me</a> – captured the peculiar melancholic excitement, both intense and slightly wistful, of being near the beginning of life in that delirious halcyon era just before puberty sets in.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/492010/original/file-20221027-8248-t25z9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/492010/original/file-20221027-8248-t25z9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/492010/original/file-20221027-8248-t25z9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492010/original/file-20221027-8248-t25z9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492010/original/file-20221027-8248-t25z9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492010/original/file-20221027-8248-t25z9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492010/original/file-20221027-8248-t25z9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492010/original/file-20221027-8248-t25z9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Stephen King speaking about his writing in 2017.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mark Lennihan/AP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Then I grew up – and stopped reading King. Through writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jane Austen, I was introduced to prose worlds that seemed to be richer: both more concentrated and more expansive, certainly more nuanced. King gradually disappeared from my field of vision. </p>
<p>I forgot about the “gypsy” curse on Billy Halleck (the basis of <a href="https://stephenking.com/works/novel/thinner.html">Thinner</a>) and about Arnie and Dennis from <a href="https://stephenking.com/works/novel/christine.html">Christine</a>, as they struggle to overcome the eponymous evil car. Like one of the children of <a href="https://theconversation.com/it-remake-will-haunt-those-nostalgic-for-the-unbridled-terrors-of-childhood-83532">It</a> – who forget their childhoods, until they reunite as adults to confront them – I forgot about my horror master, erasing my childhood experiences from memory. When I was 15, as a gag, I tried reading <a href="https://stephenking.com/works/novel/firestarter.html">Firestarter</a> and found it garish, gross, infantile. A few years earlier, King’s novel about a pyrokinetic child being hunted by a government who want to weaponise her would have seemed thrilling, maybe even insightful. </p>
<p>But the King was dead.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/suppd-full-with-horrors-400-years-of-shakespearean-supernaturalism-57129">'Supp'd full with horrors': 400 years of Shakespearean supernaturalism</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Literary snobs and good writers</h2>
<p>Perhaps the only thing worse than the literary snob who looks down on everyone who doesn’t read Joyce’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-wonder-of-joyces-ulysses-79417">Ulysses</a> on loop is the literary snob of the populist variety, the one who scowls at everyone who doesn’t read the kind of fiction that ord’nary folks like. </p>
<p>When outspoken literary critic and professor Harold Bloom <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-sep-19-oe-bloom19-story.html">described</a> the 2003 awarding of the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to Stephen King as “another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life,” it was easy to dislike Bloom as an example of the former. Listening to King discuss his writing, it is almost as easy to dismiss him as the latter. </p>
<p>What makes a good writer? According to King, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So is King, as Bloom writes, “an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis”? King does, after all, describe his own work as “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonald’s”. And there are numerous passages throughout his work – probably most pronouncedly in the words of writer Bill Denbrough in <a href="https://stephenking.com/works/novel/it.html">It</a> – in which King expresses a serious disdain for academic knowledge and scholarship. </p>
<p>As Bloom would probably argue, consistency in style and tone, and complexity of form, are key elements underpinning any kind of aesthetic mastery. And it’s undeniable that King has produced a not-inconsiderable volume of poorly written and inconsistent work. Sometimes his novels warrant criticisms of pretentiousness, hackneyed style and tediously repetitive prose. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/492008/original/file-20221027-23824-tg4woh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/492008/original/file-20221027-23824-tg4woh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/492008/original/file-20221027-23824-tg4woh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492008/original/file-20221027-23824-tg4woh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492008/original/file-20221027-23824-tg4woh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492008/original/file-20221027-23824-tg4woh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492008/original/file-20221027-23824-tg4woh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492008/original/file-20221027-23824-tg4woh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Stephen King arrives at the US federal court in August before testifying for the Department of Justice as it bids to block the proposed merger of two of the world’s biggest publishers, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Patrick Semansky/AP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>King may or may not be a great, or even good, writer. His more self-consciously serious stuff sometimes seems intolerable to me: kitsch is only fun if the attitude is fun. And some of his work (<a href="https://stephenking.com/works/novella/rita-hayworth-and-shawshank-redemption.html">Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption</a> and <a href="https://stephenking.com/works/novel/dolores-claiborne.html">Dolores Claiborne</a>, for example) feels heavy-handed to the point of being virtually unreadable. Never mind – these works are frequently adapted into incredibly popular and incredibly dull films. </p>
<p>In any case, the debate continues to play out, with critics intermittently arguing for and against King’s writing. Dwight Allen, for example, <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/my-stephen-king-problem-a-snobs-notes/">wrote in the Los Angeles Review of Books</a> that King creates one-dimensional characters in dull prose. In the same publication, Sarah Langan <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/killing-our-monsters-on-stephen-kings-magic/">responded</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>All of [King’s] novels, even the stinkers, have resonance. […] his fiction isn’t just reflective of the current culture, it casts judgement. […] No one except King challenges [Americans] so relentlessly, to be brave. To kill our monsters. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>King is, undeniably, a juggernaut of commercial literary production – an industry unto himself, a literary and cinematic brand – who has written a handful of genuine horror genre masterpieces throughout his career. </p>
<p>Perhaps it’s in part this combination of prolific volume and intermittent brilliance that keeps me, like an addict, coming back for more. </p>
<p>Ultimately, though, I would suggest I like reading King for the same reason so many others do, a reason that accounts for his enduring popularity when better horror stylists (King’s contemporaries <a href="http://www.clivebarker.info/">Clive Barker</a> and <a href="http://peterstraub.net/">Peter Straub</a>, for example) have fallen by the wayside. And that’s his unprecedented capacity to tap into nostalgia.</p>
<h2>Returning to King-world</h2>
<p>Nearly 20 years after I gave up on Stephen King, in one of those random nostalgic moments that seem to populate his fictional world, my brother gave me <a href="https://stephenking.com/works/novel/revival.html">Revival</a> for Christmas.</p>
<p>King’s Frankensteinian novel, published in 2014, is about the aftermath of an encounter between a young boy and a Methodist minister fascinated by electricity. After years of mainly reading what is sometimes pretentiously called “literary” fiction, and mostly avoiding anything written after the 19th or very early 20th centuries, I returned to King-world.</p>
<p>And I was dazzled by what I found there, realising what I must have known as a kid: King is a superb storyteller. Much of his work is characterised by an infectiously energetic prose style, governed by a flair for simple but satisfying plotting and a supremely inventive imagination. </p>
<p>And – yep – I was stunned by his capacity to precisely render in prose, perhaps more acutely than any other contemporary writer, the confusing, often hokey and melodramatic, but always exciting images, emotions, and sensibilities of youth. </p>
<p>I realised there’s something brilliant, and totally inimitable, about King. Despite his work’s sometimes kitsch silliness (a hazard of the horror genre), despite the not uncommon misfires – and despite the absurdly voluminous output - King is able to authentically generate an atmosphere of nostalgia that taps into something at the very core of the pleasure of reading. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/frankenstein-how-mary-shelleys-sci-fi-classic-offers-lessons-for-us-today-about-the-dangers-of-playing-god-175520">Frankenstein: how Mary Shelley's sci-fi classic offers lessons for us today about the dangers of playing God</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>It: a masterpiece of nostalgia</h2>
<p>His novel <a href="https://stephenking.com/works/novel/it.html">It</a> is a case in point: a masterclass in narrative development through a <a href="https://theconversation.com/nostalgia-for-childhoods-of-the-past-overlooks-childrens-experiences-today-183805">nostalgic</a> structure. </p>
<p>It – for anyone who hasn’t read it, or seen one of the three film adaptations – cuts between the adult lives and childhoods of a group of misfits, the “<a href="https://stephenking.fandom.com/wiki/Losers_Club">Losers Club</a>”, who collectively band together to fight the evil of their town, Derry. That evil takes the form of a shape-shifting clown, Pennywise. </p>
<p>The Losers Club battled and banished Pennywise as kids, but now “it” has come back. The club members return from around the world to live up to their childhood promise: that if “it” ever returns, they, too, will return to fight “it”. The narrative cuts between characters, en route to Derry, as they recall forgotten passages from their childhood “it’s” return has forced them to remember. </p>
<p>So, the novel is structured around a nostalgic trope: adults literally remembering and reconstructing their childhood in the present. At the same time, the town Derry is developed by King according to a quintessentially nostalgic image of the American small town, recalling peak 1950s Americana. Think <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077631/">Grease</a>: soda fountains, switchblades and quiffs. But behind closed doors, fathers abuse daughters, mothers keep their children sick, and a monster that assumes the form of whatever demon most terrifies you stalks the streets, killing and eating children. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491576/original/file-20221025-20-olrwm5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491576/original/file-20221025-20-olrwm5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491576/original/file-20221025-20-olrwm5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491576/original/file-20221025-20-olrwm5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491576/original/file-20221025-20-olrwm5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491576/original/file-20221025-20-olrwm5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491576/original/file-20221025-20-olrwm5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491576/original/file-20221025-20-olrwm5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The kids of It, in a scene from the 2017 film.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Warner Bros/IMDB</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The narrative architecture is starkly simple, sustaining a profound sense of dread in the reader. The characters remember a dreadful past, in a present-future they wish had never materialised. Perhaps nostalgia always contains shades of the dreadful, given its suggestion that one’s future is foreclosed, that all we have are memories of a better time: memories that only exist as memories.</p>
<p>In some of King’s work – Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, for example – nostalgia acts mainly as window dressing, functioning primarily as an aesthetic. But in It, <a href="https://theconversation.com/nostalgia-can-be-good-for-you-heres-how-to-reap-the-benefits-102603">nostalgia</a> is neither incidental nor benign: it’s a way of exploring the impossibility of having to <a href="https://theconversation.com/memories-of-trauma-are-unique-because-of-how-brains-and-bodies-respond-to-threat-103725">remember trauma</a>. </p>
<p>Memory appears inevitably nostalgic, because it involves, for the characters, narrative reconstruction of childhood in the present. In the Derry library, for town librarian Mike Hanlon – the only Loser to remain in Derry as an adult (and the only one who didn’t battle It in the sewers as a child) - for example. Or for Ben Hanscom, an internationally successful architect, once the fat kid of the group, who flies back to Derry, drunk and asleep in first-class. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491583/original/file-20221025-201-dpd3mj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491583/original/file-20221025-201-dpd3mj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491583/original/file-20221025-201-dpd3mj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=983&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491583/original/file-20221025-201-dpd3mj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=983&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491583/original/file-20221025-201-dpd3mj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=983&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491583/original/file-20221025-201-dpd3mj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1235&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491583/original/file-20221025-201-dpd3mj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1235&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491583/original/file-20221025-201-dpd3mj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1235&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In this way, the novel functions as a kind of treatise on narrative itself. A grab bag of clichés from the horror playbook become legitimately terrifying for the children in the novel - they’re kids after all, and the cultural worlds of kids are often constructed around clichés – from mass-produced popular figures like the Wolf Man, to figures associated with the characters’ nightmarish personal traumas. </p>
<p>It’s a “coming of age” story with a vengeance - a metatext on the horrors of youth, of fitting in, metamorphosing into adulthood, and breaking free of one’s parents - and it inherently explores the ways we use horror stories (like fairytales) to come to terms with this. </p>
<p>As Adrian Daub, revisiting the novel on its 30-year anniversary, <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/where-it-was-rereading-stephen-kings-it-on-its-30th-anniversary/">wrote</a> in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2016:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Anamnesis — remembering — is the central structuring device of It’s parallel plots: characters have to find out what they once did, and confront what on some level they already know. […] Perhaps all the kids who devoured It in the ’80s sensed that King had made their pre-adolescent mode of experiencing the world — that unique combination of vivid clarity and forgetfulness — its formal principle. […] All the friends, events, images, and feelings that we ever-so-gently cover in sand as we stumble into adulthood can startle us when we come face to face with them again, and these are the true source of It’s terror. What else have we hidden back there, we wonder uneasily?“</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In It’s truly weird (over)length, in It’s oscillating moments of genius and stupidity, in It’s ambition – as King’s horror book about horror, the horror book to end all horror books – it is an American masterpiece. It captures everything incisive, deluded, cruel and sentimental about the popular American literary imagination.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-do-we-find-it-so-hard-to-move-on-from-the-80s-59445">Why do we find it so hard to move on from the 80s?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Reading as escape and connection</h2>
<p>So why is nostalgia such a powerful affect in It, and in King’s work in general? </p>
<p>I think it taps into something at the heart of the process of reading novels. We sit with a novel and retreat from the world: an intensely solipsistic act. A novel sweeps us up into a fantasy image of things (no matter how distant or close to reality) and makes us feel, in our solitude, excitement about what’s to come – but also a faint melancholy in remembering we will soon have to leave this world. </p>
<p>It’s no surprise many people cry at the end of novels: we’ve made such a personal investment, then that world simply disappears, and all we’re left with are our memories of it. In our desire to return to this pleasurable state, we may feel compelled to borrow – or buy – another book. </p>
<p>But while reading a novel feels like a private act (as opposed to going to a movie or concert), there’s also always a sense we are connected to (and connecting with) some kind of cultural and historical continuum. </p>
<p>We read Dickens in our solitude, yet imagine we’re in Victorian England, connected across 150-odd years. Time and space seem collapsed into a vibrant, active present. Dickens speaks to us, but more significantly, the zeitgeist addresses us in a moving presence – perhaps we can cheat death, after all?</p>
<p>The structure of It (and much of King’s other work) reproduces what attracts many of us to reading fiction in the first place – an escape into a present that is at the same time a kind of memory-fantasy, governed by lingering nostalgia. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491587/original/file-20221025-225-ne5qnx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491587/original/file-20221025-225-ne5qnx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491587/original/file-20221025-225-ne5qnx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=324&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491587/original/file-20221025-225-ne5qnx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=324&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491587/original/file-20221025-225-ne5qnx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=324&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491587/original/file-20221025-225-ne5qnx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491587/original/file-20221025-225-ne5qnx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/491587/original/file-20221025-225-ne5qnx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">King’s work provides escape into a kind of memory-fantasy. (Pictured: Billy Crystal reads Misery in When Harry Met Sally.)</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For Marxist philosopher <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Bloch">Ernst Bloch</a>, literature offers a utopian space in which we can transcend and transform the past and future, captured in the figure of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heimat"><em>heimat</em></a> (meaning homeland – and appropriated in opposition to the term’s German nationalist use). Literature allows us to return to a mythic-nostalgic image of "home” – which we know has never actually existed. This nostalgic space opens the possibility of a better collective present and future.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-psychology-behind-why-clowns-creep-us-out-65936">The psychology behind why clowns creep us out</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Long live the King!</h2>
<p>There are definitely better, more controlled stylists than King in popular horror fiction. But their work is somehow more forgettable. King’s perpetual presence - as ringmaster, as media conglomerate, as relentless worker – is always in performance in his work. </p>
<p>You may find his style annoying, or his narratives hokey, but you will always recognise them as Stephen King. He has a flavour, and it ties his work together, good and bad. Much of it emanates from the man himself and his sheer love of writing and reading – dare I say it, of “literature”. </p>
<p>This is evident in his publishing history, but also in the forewords and reviews, and endorsements, he writes for writers he loves. The revival of interest in noir master <a href="https://theconversation.com/jim-thompson-is-the-perfect-novelist-for-our-crazed-times-143240">Jim Thompson</a>, for example, who had vanished into obscurity, seems to be at least in part down to King’s forewords to several of his books. And one wonders how much the <a href="http://www.hardcasecrime.com/">Hard Case Crime</a> imprint, which publishes hard-boiled crime novels in the flavour of those of the 1950s and 60s, relies on the success of King’s original crime novels written for them. How many forgotten masterpieces of noir literature have been brought back into print because King publishes with Hard Case? How many books have moved because a line from King is featured on the cover? </p>
<p>No other living horror writer has enjoyed King’s longevity. There’s no one whose monsters have lingered quite as long in the popular imagination, and in the imaginations of countless readers like me. </p>
<p>The literature we read as children and adolescents has a profound effect on our cultural and personal formation, shaping our becoming as adults. King’s worlds, where children struggle to shape their futures, draw upon our own, personal nostalgia. But they also tap into a kind of nostalgia that lies at the heart of novelistic pleasure itself.</p>
<p>Horror films and novels situate us in precarious situations - we identify with victims, sense their isolation as monsters attack, and feel their glory when and if the monsters are defeated. </p>
<p>We creep through the worlds of horror, watchful, alert, before returning to the safety of our bedrooms, but we’re always a little sad when we come back: that world may have been dominated by <a href="https://mrnsmith.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/the-birds-by-daphne-du-maurier.pdf">killer birds</a>, or by hellish <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17245.Dracula">blood-sucking fiends</a>, but it was an exciting, atmospheric - and beautifully solitary – place.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/192507/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ari Mattes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
No other living horror writer has enjoyed Stephen King’s literary longevity. His monsters have lingered in the popular imagination, and that of our author.
Ari Mattes, Lecturer in Communications and Media, University of Notre Dame Australia
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/184548
2022-07-28T20:05:05Z
2022-07-28T20:05:05Z
Friday essay: ambition, our least liked virtue?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475982/original/file-20220726-19-x60slv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=313%2C4%2C2406%2C1841&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and space tourism company Blue Origin, jogs onto Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket landing pad in Texas in July 2021 before launching into space.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tony Gutierrez/AP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Talent and ambition. Having the first without the second is a tragedy. The latter without the former leads to comedy. Ambition is the catalyst that allows us to achieve many great things, yet it remains a curiously unexamined emotion in modern life.</p>
<p>A new book, <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/ambition-9781501383830/">Ambition: An Essay on the Burning Desire to Rise, by Eckart Goebel</a>, offers an historical and philosophical examination of this emotion and how the West has viewed it over the centuries. </p>
<p>Goebel traces how authors from Homer through to Tocqueville, Nietzsche, Kafka, and Freud have tackled the topic of ambition and its consequences. These authors explored the potentials and pitfalls that accompany the desire to achieve. Too often they found themselves in a terrible bind. Alive to the dangers that ambition posed, they were unable to imagine a world without it. </p>
<p>Is ambition a virtue or a vice? Success clearly requires some form of self-belief and motivation, but it is all too easy for self-belief to turn to selfishness and for motivation to transform into a one-eyed fanaticism indifferent to the suffering of others.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475981/original/file-20220726-16-ih29lw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475981/original/file-20220726-16-ih29lw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475981/original/file-20220726-16-ih29lw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=802&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475981/original/file-20220726-16-ih29lw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=802&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475981/original/file-20220726-16-ih29lw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=802&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475981/original/file-20220726-16-ih29lw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1008&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475981/original/file-20220726-16-ih29lw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1008&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475981/original/file-20220726-16-ih29lw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1008&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Aristotle: saw ambition as a virtue.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>The debate about the value of ambition has raged since classical antiquity. Aristotle classified it as a virtue, but then adds so many qualifications you begin to wonder whether he wasn’t starting to regret this decision.</p>
<p>The Greek poet <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesiod">Hesiod</a> had a bet each way, arguing there are in fact two forms of ambition, which he regards as a form of strife or envy: a productive one and a destructive one.</p>
<p>The productive one is the motivating factor that inspires the farmer or potter to try and best their rivals, so fuelling progress. The destructive form of ambition leads to spite, cruelty, and conflict.</p>
<h2>What are the origins of ambition?</h2>
<p>Where did this desire to always be first come from? Goebel <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=2RxgEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA20&lpg=PA20&dq=goebel+ambition+%22carrion%22&source=bl&ots=Re13MW4YsN&sig=ACfU3U3ZHqUN-xqzAuMMc2o_S2Ccnq9OWg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjC77zO74P5AhVI-DgGHaY0AHsQ6AF6BAgXEAM#v=onepage&q=goebel%20ambition%20%22carrion%22&f=false">cites evolutionary biologists</a> who attribute the origins of this craving to the competitive advantages given to speedy members of a species. In the natural world, it is good to be fast on your feet. You are always either chasing something or being chased. The winner was the person who managed to capture the prey or avoided being it.</p>
<p>In many cases, there were no prizes for coming second. The evolutionary biologist Josef H. Reichholf in his book <a href="https://www.fischerverlage.de/buch/josef-h-reichholf-warum-wir-siegen-wollen-9783104002231">Why we Want to Win</a> compared our circumstances to the gibbons that swing through the jungle in search of fruit. </p>
<p>It was a quest in which timing is everything. The gibbon that reaches the crop of ripe fruit first can normally consume it before all the other gibbons arrive. In a similar way, early hominids who existed primarily on eating carrion were advantaged if they managed to reach the carcass before the others could. Through the process of natural selection, the desire to triumph over others was hard-wired into us.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475960/original/file-20220726-10636-8uybip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475960/original/file-20220726-10636-8uybip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475960/original/file-20220726-10636-8uybip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475960/original/file-20220726-10636-8uybip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475960/original/file-20220726-10636-8uybip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475960/original/file-20220726-10636-8uybip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475960/original/file-20220726-10636-8uybip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475960/original/file-20220726-10636-8uybip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The gibbon that reached the fruit first was rewarded.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Like most evolutionary explanations, this account for the origins of ambition appears superficially attractive. There is something pleasing about seeing today’s politicians vying for power as the direct descendants of barely upright apes fighting over a rotting corpse. </p>
<p>Yet given the extraordinary range of ways ambition can manifest itself and the complex effects it has on the human psyche, it feels like there is more at play here than just genetics. As we contemplate humanity’s journey from a mango-munching mammal launching itself from tree to tree to Jeff Bezos launching himself into space, it is hard not to think that it is the intervening steps, rather than the first ones, that matter.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475963/original/file-20220726-26-71bub3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475963/original/file-20220726-26-71bub3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475963/original/file-20220726-26-71bub3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=333&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475963/original/file-20220726-26-71bub3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=333&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475963/original/file-20220726-26-71bub3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=333&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475963/original/file-20220726-26-71bub3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475963/original/file-20220726-26-71bub3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475963/original/file-20220726-26-71bub3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jeff Bezos leaves the capsule after his trip to space in July 2021.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Blue Origin/handout/EPA</span></span>
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</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/branson-vs-bezos-as-the-billionaires-get-ready-to-blast-into-space-whos-got-the-better-plan-163898">Branson vs Bezos: as the billionaires get ready to blast into space, who's got the better plan?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Certainly, Freud thought there was more to locating the cause of ambition. Freud saw ambition as a reaction against the deep sense of powerlessness we experience as we move from the complete narcissism of infancy, in which every demand is met, to the trauma of childhood and adolescence when we realise just how inferior we are to adult members of the community. As we progress through the world, we seek opportunities to reassert ourselves and refute the dread that inferiority is our natural condition.</p>
<p>Sometimes, even the smallest achievements are what we need to help us get through the day. Goebel quotes Freud’s friend and associate, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Jones">Ernest Jones</a>, on how this sense of powerlessness can manifest itself as an ambition in an individual. The analyst recounts the story of the strange compulsion a <a href="https://archive.org/details/InternationaleZeitschriftFuumlraumlrztlichePsychoanalyseBandIiiHeft3/page/156/mode/2up">young man had on entering a public bathroom</a>. </p>
<p>He would rush straight to the first urinal and proudly declare “first before all others”; if it was occupied and he was obliged to take the second urinal, he would remark loudly “second to none”; if he could only obtain the third, he would console himself by saying “in the top three”; and if forced to take the last urinal, he would announce to everyone that he was “last but not least”.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475965/original/file-20220726-23-wj3gsq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475965/original/file-20220726-23-wj3gsq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475965/original/file-20220726-23-wj3gsq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475965/original/file-20220726-23-wj3gsq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475965/original/file-20220726-23-wj3gsq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475965/original/file-20220726-23-wj3gsq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475965/original/file-20220726-23-wj3gsq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475965/original/file-20220726-23-wj3gsq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Even a trip to a public urinal can be an expression of ambition, apparently.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Only by celebrating these triumphs could he feel good about his place in the world. If nothing else, the story is a salutary warning to all parents toilet-training their children. You might want to go a little easy on the praise, lest you warp your child’s priorities and set them up for a lifetime of awkward encounters in public conveniences.</p>
<h2>How productive is ambition?</h2>
<p>An overwhelming desire to get the first stall in the toilet is clearly pathological. Yet, it does raise a question about what a suitable target for ambition should be. An ambition for virtue or to improve everybody’s social conditions is obviously laudable. Yet such ambitions are rarely found outside of the truly saintly. </p>
<p>On the other hand, apart from a few hard-core advocates of the free-market, the ambition to accumulate great wealth has for centuries been viewed as deeply problematic. Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street may have declared that “Greed, in all of its forms … has marked the upward surge of mankind,” yet few have been happy to openly endorse these sentiments.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VVxYOQS6ggk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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<p>A more difficult question is raised by how we should view an ambition for the good opinion and praise of others. Wanting to be well regarded may lie behind some of the greatest acts of philanthropy, but it is also productive of much anxiety and social problems.</p>
<p>The Greek hero Achilles was offered the choice of living a long life of anonymity or an early death at Troy and spectacular fame. He chose fame.</p>
<p>We regard Achilles’ choice as heroic, but at its core his death is no more heroic than that of the surprising number of Instagram influencers <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10057683/Number-people-killed-taking-selfies-triples-lockdowns-lift.html">who have died</a> falling off cliffs or in other dangerous locales trying to take a spectacular selfie in a desperate pursuit of “Likes”.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475977/original/file-20220726-17-fx190u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475977/original/file-20220726-17-fx190u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475977/original/file-20220726-17-fx190u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475977/original/file-20220726-17-fx190u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475977/original/file-20220726-17-fx190u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475977/original/file-20220726-17-fx190u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=598&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475977/original/file-20220726-17-fx190u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=598&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475977/original/file-20220726-17-fx190u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=598&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The Education of Achilles by Auguste-Clément Chrétien, 1861.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>The conditions under which the ambitious thrive is an area of concern. Alexander the Great wept because there were no more worlds to conquer. The operative word here is “conquer”. Consensus and ambition do not make easy bedfellows. Conflict and strife provide the greatest opportunities for the ambitious man.</p>
<p>Nobody doubts Putin’s ambition. Is the war in Ukraine the inescapable result? Certainly, Nietzsche saw violence as the inevitable result of ambition. For him, all competition was a form of sublimated or idealised war. Gymnastics was nothing but the battlefield translated onto parallel bars. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-nietzsche-nihilism-and-reasons-to-be-cheerful-130378">Explainer: Nietzsche, nihilism and reasons to be cheerful</a>
</strong>
</em>
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<p>Ambitious individuals tend to encourage environments of intense competition because they thrive in them. When Alexander the Great was dying, he was asked to name his successor. He said that he would bequeath his empire to “the strongest” and he died leaving his generals to fight it out amongst themselves as to who this would be. </p>
<p>Similarly, Abraham Lincoln constructed a cabinet dubbed the “Team of Rivals” because of the intensity of their struggles with each other and Lincoln.</p>
<p>More recently, the management-style of Donald Trump has been criticised because of his tendency to pit his advisers, and even according to some accounts his own children, against each other. In such circumstances, some rise to the occasion, but others do not. The problem with a “sink or swim” approach is that people drown.</p>
<h2>A ‘manly’ trait</h2>
<p>Ambition has proven to be a deeply gendered concept. Aristotle remarks in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicomachean_Ethics">Nichomachean Ethics</a> that, “We praise the ambitious person as manly.”</p>
<p>Ever since, ambition has been seen as a fundamentally masculine trait and, by correlation, a rejection of ambition as central to femininity. Goebel quotes author Christina Henríquez from her essay in the book <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9781631491214">Double Bind: Women on Ambition</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Ambition is active, not passive; it’s forceful, not meek; it’s stubborn, not yielding. It’s everything that society tells woman not to be. It’s unfeminine, for goodness sake!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The tradition of seeing the ambitious woman as a monster is a long one. Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth has proven to be paradigmatic in this regard. From practically the very first time we see her, she is casting off her womanhood in order to advance herself and her husband. Inflamed by ambition, she renounces her femininity, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty! … Come to my woman’s breasts, and take my milk for gall.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475978/original/file-20220726-19-pesw28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475978/original/file-20220726-19-pesw28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475978/original/file-20220726-19-pesw28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475978/original/file-20220726-19-pesw28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475978/original/file-20220726-19-pesw28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475978/original/file-20220726-19-pesw28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1121&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475978/original/file-20220726-19-pesw28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1121&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475978/original/file-20220726-19-pesw28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1121&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The ambitious Lady Macbeth, played here by Susan Clark.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>It is a great role, but it has had important consequences for perceptions of female leadership and ambition.</p>
<p>The shadow of Lady Macbeth continues to cast its pall even to this day. Female politicians on all sides of politics know too well the dilemmas created by the gendering of ambition. Show none and nobody takes you seriously. However, show a dose of healthy ambition as a woman and you are portrayed as freakish and unfeminine, cold, lacking in empathy, calculating, and ruthless.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/macbeth-by-william-shakespeare-a-timeless-exploration-of-violence-and-treachery-175631">Macbeth by William Shakespeare: a timeless exploration of violence and treachery</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>A few politicians lean into the stereotypes. It was initially a Russian propagandist who dismissed Margaret Thatcher as “The Iron Lady”. Thatcher embraced the title with gusto. Only a week after the Russian Defence Ministry was attributed to using the term, she held forth in a speech in London, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I stand before you tonight … my face softly made up and my fair hair gently waved, the Iron Lady of the Western world, a Cold War warrior, an Amazon philistine … Yes, I am an iron lady.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It was a persona that she used to great advantage. Iron is brutal in its inflexibility and strength. When Thatcher declared that “the lady’s not for turning”, people knew that she meant it.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475979/original/file-20220726-10636-apkiyo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475979/original/file-20220726-10636-apkiyo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475979/original/file-20220726-10636-apkiyo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475979/original/file-20220726-10636-apkiyo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475979/original/file-20220726-10636-apkiyo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475979/original/file-20220726-10636-apkiyo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475979/original/file-20220726-10636-apkiyo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475979/original/file-20220726-10636-apkiyo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Margaret Thatcher, pictured in 1969: embraced her ambition.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>However, for most female leaders, the refusal to regard ambition as a naturally feminine trait has proved a tiresome impediment to getting things done and getting their message across. Hillary Clinton, Penny Wong and Julia Gillard all suffered from allegations of lacking feminine warmth.</p>
<p>In Gillard’s case, her lack of children was seen as symptomatic of her burning lust for power. The Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan accused Gillard of being <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2007/s1912717.htm">“deliberately barren”</a>, echoing criticism Gillard faced from both her opponents and even those on her own side of politics. </p>
<p>As <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/pm-v-obama-who-has-it-harder-20120401-1w6qa.html">she joked</a> in friendly terms with Barack Obama,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I tell him, “you think it’s tough being African-American? Try being me. Try being an atheist, childless, single woman as prime minister”.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Rejecting ambition</h2>
<p>Are we becoming more suspicious of ambition? The last election produced many compelling stories. One of the most discussed was the failure of Kristina Keneally to win the seat of Fowler in western Sydney.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475980/original/file-20220726-14-1mwbpr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475980/original/file-20220726-14-1mwbpr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475980/original/file-20220726-14-1mwbpr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475980/original/file-20220726-14-1mwbpr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475980/original/file-20220726-14-1mwbpr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475980/original/file-20220726-14-1mwbpr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475980/original/file-20220726-14-1mwbpr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475980/original/file-20220726-14-1mwbpr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Kristina Keneally: has been attacked for her ambition.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lukas Coch/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Among the reasons given for her rejection was the feeling amongst voters that her desire to win the seat was merely the product of her ambition rather than a genuine desire to serve others. Her <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/kristina-keneally-s-relentless-ambition-could-cost-labor-dearly-20210916-p58s4y.html">ambition</a> was too naked.</p>
<p>Our current ambivalence towards ambition seems to be reflected in our cinemas as well. So far the most popular and critically successfully movie this year has been Top Gun: Maverick.</p>
<p>It tells the story of Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise), a man who “should be a two-star admiral,” but has never risen above the rank of captain. Not interested in a successful career, Maverick only lives to fly. He is a modern-day Icarus who only feels “the need for speed”. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qSqVVswa420?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Maverick’s desire for speed seems a return to the supposedly evolutionary roots of ambition, and maybe audiences are reacting to the purity and primordial nature of it.</p>
<p>Alternatively, perhaps the greatest ambition that unites us all is the desire to loop and roll in a fighter jet <a href="https://deadline.com/2022/05/top-gun-maverick-darkstar-plane-sr-72-1235034851/">at Mach 3</a> and emerge, like Cruise, with perfect hair.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/184548/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alastair Blanshard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Ambition is a two-edged sword: both creative and destructive. Debate about its value has raged since antiquity and there is a long tradition of casting ambitious women as monsters.
Alastair Blanshard, Paul Eliadis Chair of Classics and Ancient History, The University of Queensland
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/166187
2021-08-17T04:43:01Z
2021-08-17T04:43:01Z
Freud, Nietzsche, Paglia, Fanon: our expert guide to the books of The White Lotus
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416434/original/file-20210817-18-1wr9qfn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1584%2C1178&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mario Perez/HBO</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Freud and Nietzsche may not be what you have in mind when thinking of pool-side reads, but they are among the books flipped through in The White Lotus — the tense, new TV drama about the lives of the rich and privileged as they overlap at a Hawaiian resort. </p>
<p>Are Paula and Olivia truly delving into the mind of the anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon, or indeed, into Camille Paglia’s deconstruction of the Western literary canon? Or are they just books for show: an intellectual performance to hide secret glances and gossip?</p>
<p>Either way, frequent book covers speak loudly in the show. So here, then, is what the experts think you should know about these props and the stories they tell.</p>
<p>Maybe you will find one to pick up the next time you fly off for your island holiday. Just try to avoid the White Lotus resort.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1424822796635541506"}"></div></p>
<h2>The Interpretation of Dreams, by Sigmund Freud</h2>
<p>“If I cannot bend the heavens above, I will move Hell.” Sigmund Freud quotes the poet Virgil to describe his aim in this book of explaining the meaning of dreams — by recourse to his theory of the unconscious mind. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416282/original/file-20210816-23-nenqrd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The Interpretation of Dreams" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416282/original/file-20210816-23-nenqrd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416282/original/file-20210816-23-nenqrd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416282/original/file-20210816-23-nenqrd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416282/original/file-20210816-23-nenqrd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416282/original/file-20210816-23-nenqrd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1167&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416282/original/file-20210816-23-nenqrd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1167&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416282/original/file-20210816-23-nenqrd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1167&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Freud always considered Interpretation of Dreams his masterpiece, and ensured it would be published in 1900 to mark its significance. </p>
<p>Dreams had traditionally been viewed as either senseless or vehicles of communication with the divine. Freud instead contended all dreams involve the fulfilment of a wish. </p>
<p>In adults, he wrote, many of the wishes we have are of such an “edgy” nature their fulfilment would wake us up if staged too directly. </p>
<p>So, in order to at once fulfil these unconscious wishes and stay asleep, the “dream work” of the sleeping mind distorts the wish, using mechanisms of displacement (making insignificant things seem important, and the other way around), condensation (bringing together multiple ideas in single images), and transforming words into the seemingly random images. </p>
<p>Packed with striking dream analyses, and containing perhaps the best systematic statement of Freud’s theory of the mind, this book is an influential classic.</p>
<p><strong>—Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor in Philosophy</strong></p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/unravelling-the-mysteries-of-sleep-how-the-brain-sees-dreams-45889">Unravelling the mysteries of sleep: how the brain 'sees' dreams</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon</h2>
<p>Psychiatrist and anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 in the French colony of Martinique. After the second world war, he studied in France. Later, in 1953, he moved to Algeria, joining the Algerian National Liberation Front.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416277/original/file-20210816-19-1bnbznq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The Wretched of the Earth" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416277/original/file-20210816-19-1bnbznq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416277/original/file-20210816-19-1bnbznq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=882&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416277/original/file-20210816-19-1bnbznq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=882&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416277/original/file-20210816-19-1bnbznq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=882&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416277/original/file-20210816-19-1bnbznq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1109&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416277/original/file-20210816-19-1bnbznq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1109&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416277/original/file-20210816-19-1bnbznq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1109&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Wretched of the Earth (originally published as <em>Les damnés de la terre</em> in 1961) was written at the height of the Algerian War of Independence. Based on Fanon’s first-hand experience of working in colonial Algeria, it is a classic text of postcolonial studies, examining the physical and psychological violence colonised people experience. </p>
<p>Fanon’s book is a lucid and damning account of the impact of colonialism: the ways it irrevocably changes people, their societies and their culture. </p>
<p>A passionate call to resist colonisation and oppression, The Wretched of the Earth was seen as dangerous by colonial powers at the time of its publication. It is still an important anti-colonial work today.</p>
<p><strong>—Isabelle Hesse, Lecturer in English</strong></p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-fanon-continues-to-resonate-more-than-half-a-century-after-algerias-independence-43508">Why Fanon continues to resonate more than half a century after Algeria's independence</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Sexual Personae, by Camille Paglia</h2>
<p>Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) is a provocative survey of Western canonical art and culture. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416402/original/file-20210816-19-1jcy5hb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Sexual Personae book cover" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416402/original/file-20210816-19-1jcy5hb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416402/original/file-20210816-19-1jcy5hb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1040&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416402/original/file-20210816-19-1jcy5hb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1040&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416402/original/file-20210816-19-1jcy5hb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1040&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416402/original/file-20210816-19-1jcy5hb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1307&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416402/original/file-20210816-19-1jcy5hb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1307&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416402/original/file-20210816-19-1jcy5hb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1307&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On its publication, Sexual Personae was considered iconoclastic, groundbreaking and subversive for, as Paglia wrote, its focus on “amorality, aggression, sadism, voyeurism and pornography in great art”. </p>
<p>The book was both lauded for its insights into sex, violence and power; and labelled anti-feminist and sinister in its views about gender and sexuality. </p>
<p>Sexual Personae discusses the decadence and enduring influence of paganism in Western culture. Paglia connects sexual freedom to sadomasochism and argues that our self-destructive and lustful <a href="https://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/what-nietzsche-really-meant-the-apollonian-and-dionysian">Dionysian impulses are in tension with our Apollonian instincts</a> for order. </p>
<p>Named after Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), Paglia’s book charts recurrent types in the Western imagination, such as the “beautiful boy”, the “femme fatale” and the “female vampire”. Through these personae, she discusses works such as the Mona Lisa, Wuthering Heights and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Particularly famous is the chapter on Emily Dickinson and Paglia’s analysis of the brutal and sadistic metaphors in Dickinson’s poetry.</p>
<p>Paglia’s Sexual Personae is both electrifying and divisive; still one of the most important texts in 1990s sexual politics.</p>
<p><strong>—Cassandra Atherton, Professor of Writing and Literature</strong></p>
<h2>My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante</h2>
<p>Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (2011), the first volume of her Neapolitan Series, is a feminist coming-of-age story that begins with a mystery. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416451/original/file-20210817-19-ymx8ca.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="My Brilliant Friend cover" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416451/original/file-20210817-19-ymx8ca.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416451/original/file-20210817-19-ymx8ca.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416451/original/file-20210817-19-ymx8ca.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416451/original/file-20210817-19-ymx8ca.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416451/original/file-20210817-19-ymx8ca.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416451/original/file-20210817-19-ymx8ca.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416451/original/file-20210817-19-ymx8ca.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the first few pages, a distinguished writer, Elena (known as Lenù), learns an old friend, Raffaella (or Lila), has disappeared without a trace. Lila’s disappearance prompts Lenù to begin writing the story of her life, focusing particularly on the pair’s complicated friendship. </p>
<p>Focusing on their childhood in 1950s Naples, she writes unsentimentally of poverty, violence, familial conflicts and organised crime. </p>
<p>The novel is densely plotted and written with unsparing accuracy about the characters of Naples, but Lenù’s candid narration makes for an utterly engrossing reading experience. In plain, fast-paced prose she describes a grim childhood full of misogyny and domestic violence, but enlivened by her friendship with Lila. </p>
<p>Ferrante gives us a moving portrait of friendship. Over the course of the novel, both girls begin to see glimpses of how they might move beyond the limitations of the world they have inherited. </p>
<p><strong>—Lucas Thompson, Lecturer in English</strong></p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/elena-ferrante-a-vanishing-author-and-the-question-of-posthuman-identity-118138">Elena Ferrante: a vanishing author and the question of posthuman identity</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann</h2>
<p>For Nietzsche, to write philosophy was to render one’s experience into life-affirming art — even if that art rocked the very foundations of culture itself.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416404/original/file-20210816-15-48gdk2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The Portable Nietzsche cover" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416404/original/file-20210816-15-48gdk2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416404/original/file-20210816-15-48gdk2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416404/original/file-20210816-15-48gdk2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416404/original/file-20210816-15-48gdk2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416404/original/file-20210816-15-48gdk2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416404/original/file-20210816-15-48gdk2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416404/original/file-20210816-15-48gdk2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Walter Kaufmann’s translations in The Portable Nietzsche (1954) showcase much of the power and beauty of one of the finest minds in Western culture. </p>
<p>Here is Nietzsche’s devastating psychological portrait of St Paul; here is the infamous announcement of <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-nietzsche-nihilism-and-reasons-to-be-cheerful-130378">the death of God</a>. They sit together with his complex notion of cheerfulness practised in the face of the terrifying collapse of certainties. </p>
<p>Despite his reputation in some quarters as a malevolent destroyer, Nietzsche’s actual aim of avoiding nihilism is well-captured here. </p>
<p>His cavorting and richly subversive “fifth gospel”, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51893.Thus_Spoke_Zarathustra?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=5kaOopRTy8&rank=1">Thus Spoke Zarathustra</a>, is reproduced in full, as is <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/786605.The_Anti_Christ_Ecce_Homo_Twilight_of_the_Idols_and_Other_Writings?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=VbNVqAzlLD&rank=3">Twilight of the Idols</a>, one of his last works and a fine condensation of his mature project.</p>
<p>Kaufmann’s translations are now dated and his selection of Nietzsche’s works is occasionally eccentric, but The Portable Nietzsche goes an admirable way to presenting Nietzsche’s many aspects: the shy recluse, the loather of anti-Semites, the brilliant transfigurer of pain into texts of depth and beauty, and the lover of life, come what may.</p>
<p><strong>—Jamie Parr, Lecturer in Philosophy</strong></p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-nietzsche-nihilism-and-reasons-to-be-cheerful-130378">Explainer: Nietzsche, nihilism and reasons to be cheerful</a>
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</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell</h2>
<p>Malcolm Galdwell’s Blink (2005) opens with an anecdote about a <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kouros">kouros</a></em>: an ancient Greek statue bought by the Getty Museum in 1985 for just under $10 million. Despite months of due diligence to check the authenticity of the statue, the Getty was duped – the statue had been made in the 1980s.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416454/original/file-20210817-52421-1iu9g6i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Blink cover" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416454/original/file-20210817-52421-1iu9g6i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416454/original/file-20210817-52421-1iu9g6i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416454/original/file-20210817-52421-1iu9g6i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416454/original/file-20210817-52421-1iu9g6i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416454/original/file-20210817-52421-1iu9g6i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416454/original/file-20210817-52421-1iu9g6i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416454/original/file-20210817-52421-1iu9g6i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>The discovery of the fake was attributed to an art historian who, according to Gladwell, knew as soon as he clapped eyes on it that it was not the real deal.</p>
<p>This instant of recognition (a “blink”) is what Gladwell describes as the “power of thinking without thinking”. Gladwell argues going with your gut can often lead to far superior decisions than thinking things over. </p>
<p>Blink is an entertaining collection of anecdotes, from art-historians to “marriage-whisperers” who can tell if a relationship is going to last from watching split-second videos of partners interacting. But, as the saying goes, the plural of anecdote is not data.</p>
<p><strong>—Ben Newell, Professor of Cognitive Psychology</strong></p>
<p>None of these strike your fancy? The characters also pick up Judith Butler, Aimé Césaire and Jacques Lacan — just more light reads on feminism, colonialism and psychoanalysis. </p>
<p><em>White Lotus is now streaming on Binge.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/166187/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
The White Lotus is a tense, new drama about the lives of the rich and privileged, set in a Hawaiian resort. But the protagonists are not lying around reading airport novels.
Jane Howard, Arts + Culture Editor
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/152668
2021-01-07T19:55:37Z
2021-01-07T19:55:37Z
The U.S. Capitol raid exposes the myth and pathology of American exceptionalism
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/377600/original/file-20210107-21-9khouo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C5105%2C2995&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">DC National Guard stand outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, after Trump supporters stormed the building in an attempt to overturn the U.S. presidential election.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/John Minchillo)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Looking at Donald Trump’s dangerous behaviour since he lost the presidential election, it’s hard not to recall an observation John Kelly made in 2018.</p>
<p>“He’s an idiot,” <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/404932-kelly-called-trump-unhinged-and-idiot-woodward-book">the former White House chief of staff said</a>. “He’s gone off the rails. We’re in Crazytown.”</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/pro-trump-rioters-storm-u-s-capitol-as-his-election-tantrum-leads-to-violence-149142">Pro-Trump rioters storm U.S. Capitol as his election tantrum leads to violence</a>
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</p>
<hr>
<p>“Crazytown” is not a one-man phenomenon, however: consider Trump’s 74 million votes, Republican conspiracy theories, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/06/ted-cruzs-electoral-vote-speech-will-live-infamy/">Ted Cruz-led Senate shenanigans</a> and the assault on the U.S. Capitol by those who’d come to Washington to disrupt the congressional endorsement of the election results.</p>
<p>The departing president should be seen as the avatar of American attitudes and behavioural predispositions, both widespread and deeply rooted.</p>
<p>In a famous 1933 lecture, “<a href="https://sites.tufts.edu/levineenglish181/2017/09/25/freud-femininity-dissection-of-the-psychical-personality/#:%7E:text=%E2%80%9CDissection%20of%20the%20Psychical%20Personality%E2%80%9D%20defines%20the%20id%2C%20ego,symptoms%20disappear%20or%20are%20lessened.">The Dissection of the Psychical Personality</a>,” Sigmund Freud said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Pathology, by making things larger and coarser, can draw our attention to normal conditions which would otherwise have escaped us. … If we throw a crystal to the floor, it breaks; but not into haphazard pieces. It comes apart along its lines of cleavage into fragments whose boundaries, though they were invisible, were predetermined by the crystal’s structure.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Freud was clearly talking about individuals in this lecture, but it can be applied to political and social affairs in 1933: countries broken by the Great Depression and the rise of Adolf Hitler. As a historian, I am also intrigued by what Freud’s observations tell us about Trump’s homeland.</p>
<h2>Diagnostic tool</h2>
<p>Greek and Latin roots of the word “pathology” signal the study of passions and diseases — and the substantial popularity of Trump’s extreme policies and behaviours offers a valuable diagnostic tool for identifying American pathologies.</p>
<p>To borrow from Freud, think of the United States as a “crystal.” A glittering crystal to many minds — <a href="https://www.econlib.org/archives/2017/12/the_city_on_a_h.html">a “shining city on a hill,” as former president Ronald Reagan often described it, drawing on early Puritan imagery</a> — widely celebrated through three centuries as being exceptional for its commitment to liberty, equality, opportunity, the rule of law, economic and cultural innovation.</p>
<p>But the self-celebration of American exceptionalism has been hard to stomach during the past four years as Trump and phalanxes of enablers (including congressional Republicans) and admirers (<a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/09/11/nih-director-francis-collins-puzzled-maskless-trump-rallies/3471417001/">including mask-shunning Make America Great Again adherents</a>) have chipped away at core values and past glories.</p>
<p>Before Joe Biden’s election, it was all too easy to imagine that the foundations of the famed city on a hill were crumbling — that the crystal was falling and shattering.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A senator looks at toppled furniture in a marble hallway." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/377602/original/file-20210107-15-1cd3xxy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/377602/original/file-20210107-15-1cd3xxy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/377602/original/file-20210107-15-1cd3xxy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/377602/original/file-20210107-15-1cd3xxy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/377602/original/file-20210107-15-1cd3xxy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/377602/original/file-20210107-15-1cd3xxy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/377602/original/file-20210107-15-1cd3xxy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sen. Tim Scott stops to look at damage in the early morning hours of Jan. 7, 2021, after rioters stormed the Capitol.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Without minimizing Trump-era damage, however, Freud’s reference to “lines of cleavage” that were “pre-determined by the crystal’s structure” deserves attention.</p>
<p>Make no mistake: American attributes and achievements are real — opportunity and tolerance for many, for example, offering pathways to education and economic success as well as escapes from wars and persecution. </p>
<p>But “many” has never been “all” — and at every point in American history, the number of people unable to share in the country’s blessings has been tragically large. </p>
<h2>The true majority</h2>
<p>In the earliest days of the republic, in fact, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/magazine/white-terrorism-is-as-old-as-america.html">those who were constrained or had pain and death inflicted upon them were the true majority</a>.</p>
<p>National mythology tends to pay scant attention to the founding decades in which women — fully half of the population — had no rights. Millions of slaves were terrorized and abused beyond imagination. Tens of thousands of Indigenous people were robbed of land, culture, autonomy — and life.</p>
<p>Just like today, ideals were lauded in the 19th century — sincerely in many cases — by political leaders, reformers and intellectuals: Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Ideals had some impact too: witness the end of slavery. But the impact was limited as persistent prejudices and predispositions further deepened the cleavages that went on marring the shining crystal.</p>
<p>Some flaws are particularly glaring and damaging, and persist today.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.history.com/topics/early-20th-century-us/jim-crow-laws">“Jim Crow” laws</a>, rural lynchings <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/chicago-race-riot-of-1919">and urban riots</a> made it clear that systemic racism hardly ended with the Civil War. Indigenous Americans (“squalid savages,” according to former president <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/22/theodore-roosevelt-statue-museum">Theodore Roosevelt</a>, whose face is carved onto Mount Rushmore) have also been continuously subjected to brutal land grabs and cultural devastation. </p>
<p>Former president Richard Nixon’s “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4129605?origin=crossref&seq=1">southern strategy</a>” brought racism politics into the late 20th century, with reinforcement by Reagan and others. Reagan, in fact, once grumbled — to Nixon — about anti-American rhetoric at the United Nations: “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/ronald-reagans-racist-conversation-richard-nixon/595102/">To see those, those monkeys from those African nations – damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes</a>.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="An African leader stands next to Ronald Reagan and their wives." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/377603/original/file-20210107-17-1i9q98g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/377603/original/file-20210107-17-1i9q98g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/377603/original/file-20210107-17-1i9q98g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/377603/original/file-20210107-17-1i9q98g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/377603/original/file-20210107-17-1i9q98g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=537&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/377603/original/file-20210107-17-1i9q98g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=537&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/377603/original/file-20210107-17-1i9q98g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=537&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In this October 1988 photo, Mali President Moussa Traore and his wife join Ronald and Nancy Reagan at a state dinner at the White House.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Scott Applewhite)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/the-long-history-of-racism-against-asian-americans-in-the-u-s">Chinese exclusion actions beginning in 1882</a> and “yellow peril” postulations became part of a broader xenophobic impulse in 20th century America. </p>
<p>This included tightened overall immigration restrictions in the 1920s, resistance to welcoming Jewish emigres in the 1930s, and Japanese internment camps and <a href="https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-zoot-suit-riots-anniversary-20180604-story.html">Zoot Suit riots against Latinos in the 1940s</a>. Anti-Muslim and anti-refugee agitations in the 21st century — <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-51953315">as well as the “China flu” labelling so embraced by Trump</a> — have been tapping into deep wellsprings.</p>
<h2>Treatment of women</h2>
<p>The treatment of women remains another crack in the crystal of American ideals. </p>
<p>Not until 1920 were women across the country able to vote; it wasn’t until the 1930s <a href="https://www.fdrlibrary.org/perkins">that a woman was appointed to a cabinet post (Frances Perkins as secretary of labor</a>). Not yet have women achieved even an approximate proportionate presence in Congress or corporate headquarters; <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/women-congress-record-number-2021/">women still currently hold less than 30 per cent of seats in Congress</a>. </p>
<p>Such deeply rooted prejudices and passions have always dimmed the glowing aura of American values and achievements. They also continue to risk the crystal breakage that Freud’s description of pathology suggests.</p>
<p>Antique chisels and hammers remain at hand — and Trump allies and wannabes are still energetically wielding them. This is not a problem unique to the United States, of course, but its historic character warrants more attention than the departing president’s talent for monopolizing the spotlight, throwing tantrums and inciting violence often allows.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/152668/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ronald W. Pruessen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Donald Trump’s tenure as president reveals how pathologies are part of what Americans see as their “exceptionalism.”
Ronald W. Pruessen, Professor of History, University of Toronto
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/106695
2018-11-11T21:00:34Z
2018-11-11T21:00:34Z
The Tony Clement scandal shows all texting is sexting
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244919/original/file-20181111-116832-t9ytp0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">MP Tony Clement has resigned from the Conservative caucus after admitting to sending "intimate" photos to women he met online.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>What does the <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/clement-letter-1.4897388">sexting scandal involving Tony Clement</a> — the MP who sent “<a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/clement-caucus-1.4898361">intimate” photos of himself to women he met online</a> — tell us, if not that all texting is sexting? Whenever we go online, use our phones, surf the net or click on a link, we are involved with our deepest desires, fears or enjoyment. </p>
<p>Because of this deep involvement with our desires, beneath the shiny surface of apps and the “like” buttons of Instagram and Facebook, there exists what the philosopher Slavoj Žižek calls the “obscene underside,” a murky world where we fall in love with our computers (as in the film <a href="https://www.cmstudies.org/page/CJ_after571_FlisBurn?"><em>Her</em></a>) and allow conglomerates to tell us what books to read and <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/facebook-dating-1.4824745">who to date</a>. </p>
<p>But this paradise, where all our desires are at our fingertips, can go horribly awry. The wrong click or swipe suddenly lands us in all kinds of trouble. Trouble that can seem small — who remembers <a href="https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=rickrolling">rickrolling</a>? — or big, as the news about Clement demonstrates.</p>
<p>A psychoanalytic way of thinking about online culture can help us understand why the former Conservative MP is not the first politician or public figure caught behaving badly with their smartphone, nor will he be the last. We all remember <a href="http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2013/07/anthony-weiner-accused-of-having-more-cybersex.html">Anthony Weiner, the New York state politician who kept sending “dick pics” to women he met online.</a></p>
<h2>Aggressively ‘liking’ online</h2>
<p>So, what do I mean by a psychoanalytic way of thinking about this?</p>
<p>A few hours after Clement resigned from the Conservative caucus, <a href="http://www.tonyclement.ca/letter-to-the-constituents-of-parry-sound-muskoka/">he posted a letter admitting to various acts of infidelity</a>. At first glance, there appear to be two different issues at play. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244713/original/file-20181109-116835-1f8b40b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244713/original/file-20181109-116835-1f8b40b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244713/original/file-20181109-116835-1f8b40b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244713/original/file-20181109-116835-1f8b40b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244713/original/file-20181109-116835-1f8b40b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244713/original/file-20181109-116835-1f8b40b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244713/original/file-20181109-116835-1f8b40b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A picture from Tony Clement’s Instagram feed.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>First, <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/clement-letter-1.4897388">Clement allegedly exchanged or sent explicit pictures (and a video) to women on a number of occasions</a>. This resulted in <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/clement-caucus-1.4898361">at least two</a> potential extortion attempts that came through social media. </p>
<p>Second, when this news broke, some women who knew him through <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-the-wednesday-edition-1.4895585/canadian-women-comment-on-tony-clement-s-aggressive-instagram-behaviour-1.4896383">social media</a> said on Twitter that they were not surprised by these allegations. He was known to them, as Canadian journalist Kim Fox, an editor at <em>the Philadelphia Inquirer</em> discussed on CBC Radio’s <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-the-wednesday-edition-1.4895585/canadian-women-comment-on-tony-clement-s-aggressive-instagram-behaviour-1.4896383?fbclid=IwAR18pIKGr4xsLGtxw6GwOBRUXNkcGjWCOSejdrbLvziQJLEdLJj7c5ACvfM"><em>As It Happens</em></a>. Fox said he was known for “aggressive” liking of women’s posts on Instagram, especially on selfies.</p>
<p>Clement’s behaviour, Fox said, kept Instagram from being a safe space for women.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1060186007788752896"}"></div></p>
<h2>‘Digital fantasy’</h2>
<p>I teach a graduate course called “Digital Fantasy,” where we examine online culture from a psychoanalytic perspective, drawing on the work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Žižek, and also critics like Angela Nagle (author of <a href="http://www.zero-books.net/books/kill-all-normies"><em>Kill All Normies</em></a>) and Jodi Dean (<a href="https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Blog+Theory:+Feedback+and+Capture+in+the+Circuits+of+Drive-p-9780745649696"><em>Blog Theory</em></a>). </p>
<p>Freud tells us that we often do things for reasons we do not understand — the unconscious. Lacan argues that those closest to us — our neighbours — can provoke the greatest anxiety, and the same is true online, isn’t it?</p>
<p>Žižek emphasizes how our search for enjoyment paradoxically results in <em>less</em> enjoyment, and who hasn’t felt that after an hour going down a YouTube rabbit hole? Nagle examines how online culture fosters extreme viewpoints: “millenial snowflakes,” “alt-right dweebs,” and the rise of figures like Donald Trump. Dean points out how that the longer we spend online the more we think <em>I could be doing something more useful</em>, as if we would otherwise be reading a Russian novel. </p>
<p>In general, a psychoanalytic approach teaches us that the problem with online culture isn’t that now we can see, read or learn about anything, but that such plenitude is never enough. </p>
<p>Because I am on Instagram myself, and roughly the same age group as Clement, I checked in with some of my female students to ask: Is this a thing? Aggressive liking? </p>
<p>Well, you can just block someone, one student said. If it’s someone you know, then no problem, added another. It’s kind of how you get someone’s attention, the first pointed out. This is not to say someone may not feel creeped out with a deluge of likes. </p>
<p>Of course <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-ruthless-pursuit-of-online-likes-gives-you-nothing-100862">we post selfies and other pictures on the socials for that attention </a>. And the technology contributes, I would argue, to this obsessive behaviour — especially on Instagram, where to like something, you press a heart. </p>
<p>So if your student or your boss puts a picture up, you have to think about loving them just a little, even if you just think their cat is cute.</p>
<h2>All texting is sexting</h2>
<p>This takes us back to my original thesis: all texting is sexting. </p>
<p>Think of where you keep your phone — on your body, sometimes in your pocket next to your genitals, in your purse with your wallet. You put it next to you when you go to sleep and it’s the first thing you touch when you wake up — perhaps even before you talk to your partner. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244716/original/file-20181109-116850-1usbcr9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244716/original/file-20181109-116850-1usbcr9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=383&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244716/original/file-20181109-116850-1usbcr9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=383&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244716/original/file-20181109-116850-1usbcr9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=383&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244716/original/file-20181109-116850-1usbcr9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=481&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244716/original/file-20181109-116850-1usbcr9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=481&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244716/original/file-20181109-116850-1usbcr9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=481&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Our phones and use of apps are intimate things. Here’s a picture from Tony Clement’s Instagram feed.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The structure, the technology of social media, of the internet, of digital devices — they all lead us to blur the boundaries of public and private. Who has not had that frisson with someone else, when sitting with their partner, at a boring dinner party or watching your child skate, that distraction of texting a friend? </p>
<p>Think, even, of the generic word we have for this technology: digital. What a few years ago might have seemed like an anodyne description, now in the era of swiping right and pinching photos, has come to seem downright carnal. </p>
<h2>‘The obscene underside’</h2>
<p>What Clement’s debacle tells us is that Žižek’s “obscene underside” of the internet is not simply the trolls and other basement-dwelling knuckle-draggers, with their racist rants and misogynistic comments on blogs. </p>
<p>This “obscenity” is not just “dick pics” or “aggressive liking.” Rather, it points to a fundamental ambiguity in communication that has been exacerbated with online and social media. </p>
<p>Do I want my pictures to be looked at, or am I worried about surveillance? I want you to “like” me … but not too much.</p>
<p>I am not saying we need more rules, what used to be called “netiquette” for online behaviour. Don’t like more than three or four pictures, and so forth. </p>
<p>If we don’t need more rules, what do we need?</p>
<p>We should accept that there’s no getting around the messy, sexy, possibilities of miscommunication. We posses the desire to flirt, to engage. But this is not an invitation to harass each other.</p>
<p>Sexting did not begin with the internet. What people who proclaim the superiority of literature over texting forget is that the novel began as an “espistolary” form, as a collection of letters. And if you want to see some really sexy texts, read <em><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49540.Les_Liaisons_dangereuses">Les Liaisons dangereuses</a></em> (<em><a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/301479/dangerous-liaisons-by-pierre-choderlos-de-laclos/9780140449570/">Dangerous Liasons</a></em>), a French novel of letters by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos and a <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/301479/dangerous-liaisons-by-pierre-choderlos-de-laclos/9780140449570/">“damning portrayal of a decadent society.”</a> First published in 1782, it could give Tony Clement a few lessons.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/106695/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Clint Burnham does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Former Conservative MP Tony Clement, dropped from caucus over a public sexting scandal raises questions for all of us about what is too much in our ‘casual’ daily online exchanges.
Clint Burnham, Professor and Chair of Graduate Program, Department of English, Simon Fraser University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/102426
2018-09-04T14:07:10Z
2018-09-04T14:07:10Z
What Fanon still teaches us about mental illness in post-colonial societies
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/234762/original/file-20180904-45143-whtofy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Frantz Fanon challenged traditional views about mental illness.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The contemporary turn towards decolonial thinking is frequently cited in literature from the late 1990s and early 2000s. But this lens through which to understand the world has been around for a much longer time. It has an impressive lineage among Latin American, Caribbean, African and other Southern scholars. But it’s the scholar <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/frantz-fanon">Frantz Fanon</a> who stands head and shoulders above them all. </p>
<p>He is often being incisively referenced as a <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5816/blackscholar.42.3-4.0003?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">key thinker</a> by many current writers. His seminal texts included Black Skin, White Masks (1952), A Dying Colonialism (1959) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Posthumously, Toward the African Revolution (1964) was published. All continue to be read voraciously.</p>
<p>But there’s often a failure to recognise that much of Fanon’s seminal
thinking stemmed from his experiences working with mental illness in North
Africa as a <a href="http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/frantz-fanon-psychiatry-and-politics/">psychiatrist</a>. It’s in these early experiences that we see many of his most revered ideas being incubated, only to become consolidated in his later texts. </p>
<p>Fanon was influenced by writings from Negritude, Marxism, psychoanalysis and the philosophy of <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1964/sartre/biographical/">Jean-Paul Sartre</a>. It is in his critique of colonial psychiatry in the Maghreb that Fanon’s conceptual clarity emerges with a robustness that has remained influential for over five decades. </p>
<p>My first encounter with Fanon’s work was more than two decades ago as
a young trainee psychologist at the University of the Western Cape in South
Africa. I was encouraged by a group of black psychologists to engage with the
emancipatory potential of Fanon’s approach to mental illness. His texts were not considered mainstream at the time. But these mentors had the
foresight to appreciate the importance of his thinking in this field. Then and now. </p>
<h2>Oppression and mental illness</h2>
<p>Fanon recognised mental illness as a real experience that people endure. But he also offered an understanding of it as being influenced by society as well as culture. It opened up the possibilities of linking madness to the intractable contradictions of colonial and post-colonial societies. In doing so, Fanon tackled the quintessential question of the relationship between the individual and social structure – especially when the social structure itself is oppressive. </p>
<p>These oppressive conditions are still encountered today, and so Fanon’s ideas remain relevant. </p>
<p>His experiences with non-Francophone, North African patients and the
barriers to understanding their world views because of an inability to engage
with them in the vernacular, also introduced the importance of language as a
central feature of cultural revitalisation and agency. Not only does language structure the psyche, but we make meaning through language. Being understood through our home language is crucial to mental well-being.</p>
<p>He directed his critique at the crude colonial interpretations of psychosomatic illnesses. These suggested that colonised peoples were primitive because they experienced mental illness through their bodily symptoms. Because of his tutelage under French philosopher <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-017-4744-8_5">Maurice Merleau-Ponty</a> and his critique of the founding father of psychoanalysis, <a href="https://www.sigmundfreud.net/">Sigmund Freud</a>, Fanon didn’t simply consider the body as a site for regressed psychological functioning. Instead, he suggested that the body plays a pivotal role in the expression and structuring of the mind, and helps to constitute us as human beings. </p>
<p>Fanon ultimately viewed institutionalised care as a mode of disciplinary power in the regulation of people. He saw it as a proxy mechanism of control directed at those who displayed an inability to manage the double-bind nature of oppressive colonial contexts.</p>
<h2>Limitations of psychology and psychiatry</h2>
<p>There are many taken-for-granted critiques that undergraduate students in psychology and psychiatry are exposed to today. These include a recognition of cultural bias in psychological assessments and the limitations of pharmaceuticals in treating mental health conditions. They also include the importance of not reducing mental health conditions to a set of psychological origins without considering the impact of the environment or context. </p>
<p>These were in fact foremost in Fanon’s critique. And they continue to propel psychologists and psychiatrists of my generation to circumvent the pitfalls of earlier generations. </p>
<p>Of course, on the matter of violence, Fanon’s experiences with patients
who had been subjected to state repression, brutality and torture revealed the
limitations of psychology and psychiatry in addressing problems in the social structure of society. </p>
<p>It also prompted a consideration of revolutionary violence as a way of “disintoxifying” the colonised minds of the oppressed. But his ideas on violence have probably been most misinterpreted, often conspicuously by those who have characterised him as an apostle of violence.</p>
<p>Fanon’s experience with violence and counter-violence in fact led him to be deeply ambivalent about it. He recognised that the distinction between perpetrator and victim becomes blurred. Also, the residual brutality of violence and counter-violence remains a dominant feature in post-colonial societies. </p>
<p>That is a feature that is perhaps all too common today. It requires a much more fine grained analysis, as we attempt to understand and address the scourge of violence that pervades all spheres of contemporary living.</p>
<p><em>This is an edited version of the foreword to Nigel C. Gibson and Roberto Beneduce’s book <a href="http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/frantz-fanon-psychiatry-and-politics/">Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics</a> (Wits University Press).</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/102426/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Garth Stevens does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Frantz Fanon recognised mental illness as a real experience and offered an understanding of it being influenced by society and culture.
Garth Stevens, Professor of Psychology, University of the Witwatersrand
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/101211
2018-08-09T13:22:28Z
2018-08-09T13:22:28Z
Treating children with depression: how will history judge us?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/230905/original/file-20180807-191025-1fwtrv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/download/confirm/666180598?src=77HxGsmLiirEu8BAa7SYMQ-1-11&size=medium_jpg">callumrc/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>An investigative <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-44821886">report by the BBC</a> recently found that the number of antidepressants prescribed to children in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland has risen 24% over the past three years. </p>
<p>Drugs may not be the most effective way to treat depression (more of which later), but pity the children who were treated for depression before antidepressants were invented.</p>
<p>Bloodletting was the standard treatment for “melancholia” in ancient Greece. This was followed by burning in medieval Europe and locking people up during the so-called “age of enlightenment” in Europe.</p>
<p>Last century, Sigmund Freud improved things a bit when he introduced psychoanalysis as a treatment for depression. The problem was that he thought cocaine was a good way to <a href="http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/poetry/ber-coca">treat his own depression</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/230906/original/file-20180807-191025-jejh5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/230906/original/file-20180807-191025-jejh5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=816&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/230906/original/file-20180807-191025-jejh5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=816&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/230906/original/file-20180807-191025-jejh5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=816&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/230906/original/file-20180807-191025-jejh5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1025&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/230906/original/file-20180807-191025-jejh5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1025&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/230906/original/file-20180807-191025-jejh5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1025&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Freud – a fan of some unusual treatments.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64082854">Max Halberstadt/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Then things got worse again. In the 1950s and 60s depression was sometimes treated by <a href="https://psychcentral.com/blog/the-surprising-history-of-the-lobotomy/">lobotomy</a> (removing part of the brain) and <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/electroconvulsive-therapy-a-history-of-controversy-but-also-of-help/">electroconvulsive therapy</a> (an electric shock so strong it induces a seizure in the patient). The latter technique is still used today for some cases of treatment-resistant <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29256252">depression</a>, where the patient is at imminent risk of harm.</p>
<p>Looking back at these bonkers therapies, you might feel a little shocked yourself. Today things seem more scientific. Now we have psychological therapies, such as cognitive behavioural therapy and antidepressant drugs. These are much better than lobotomies and beatings.</p>
<p>Typical drugs for treating depression are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), such as Prozac, Zoloft and Sertraline. These drugs are quite effective for people who are <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3712503/">severely depressed</a>. But not everyone who gets the drugs has severe depression.</p>
<p>The drugs are prescribed for one in ten adults in most developed nations, and prescription rates for young depressed people are climbing in the <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171030134631.htm">US</a> and <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-44821886">UK</a>. Many people getting the drugs don’t have severe depression, and the drugs <a href="https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-016-1173-2">barely work better than placebo</a> for mild or moderate depression. On a standard depression scale, which rates depression from zero (not depressed) to 52 (most severely depressed), the drugs improve things by an average of about two points, compared with placebo in adults. </p>
<p>So, if you were a bit worried about work and were a bit fidgety, then (compared with placebo) after the drugs you would be worried a bit less and you’d be a bit less fidgety – hardly earth shattering. And the effects are even <a href="https://www.cochrane.org/CD004851/DEPRESSN_newer-antidepressants-for-depression-in-children-and-adolescents">smaller in children and teens</a>.</p>
<p>Worryingly, the drugs are often not being prescribed in an evidence-based way for young people. Whereas guidelines in the UK state that antidepressants should only be prescribed within child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS), many GPs prescribe them. This means that children are unlikely to be getting the supervision needed to avoid unnecessary harm. And the harms can be serious. </p>
<h2>Significant side effects</h2>
<p>Trials show that antidepressant <a href="https://www.cochrane.org/CD004851/DEPRESSN_newer-antidepressants-for-depression-in-children-and-adolescents">drugs increase the risk of suicide</a>, compared with placebo in young people. Other <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5299662/">side effects</a> include nausea, sexual dysfunction and sleepiness.</p>
<p>Given the limited benefits and serious side effects, why have antidepressant prescriptions for young people risen so much? We don’t yet have a good answer to this question. It could be that increased loneliness, caused by young people spending too much time <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4853817/">staring at screens</a>, is causing more depression that needs to be treated. </p>
<p>Another possibility is that funding is being cut to mental health services, which leaves GPs with the difficult task of having to help young depressed people, but not having the option of sending them to mental health services.</p>
<h2>A gentler approach</h2>
<p>Until we find out why antidepressant prescriptions have skyrocketed, why don’t we use safer options? Trials show that <a href="https://www.cochrane.org/CD004366/DEPRESSN_exercise-for-depression">exercise seems to be as good as drugs</a> for most depression. And the side effects of exercise are good things, such as <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5430071/">reduced cardiovascular disease</a> and higher sex drive in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28195945">men</a> and <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29606554">women</a>. </p>
<p>Another safer option is face-to-face socialising. Studies with hundreds of thousands of people show that <a href="https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2458-14-273">contact</a> with friends, family and social groups is associated with less depression. (This doesn’t include contact via social media, which seems to increase the risk of depression.) And a side effect of maintaining close relationship is that you’ll <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316">live an average of five years</a> longer. </p>
<p>So it’s common sense: the right treatment for staring at a screen too much isn’t a pill that increases the risk of suicide, it’s to get some exercise, preferably with friends.</p>
<p>Fifty years from now, are we going to look back at the widespread prescription of antidepressants for mildly depressed young people the same way we look at beatings, lobotomies and cocaine? My guess is “yes”. But I doubt that exercising and <a href="http://www.jeremyhowick.com/latest-updates/love-is-a-drug/">hanging out with friends</a> will ever be viewed in a negative light, so next time you’re feeling low, why not give it a try.</p>
<p><em>The original version of this article stated: “Trials show that exercise seems to be as good or better than drugs for most depression.” This has been changed to: “Trials show that exercise seems to be as good as drugs for most depression.”</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/101211/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jeremy Howick has received funding from the British Medical Association, the National Institute for Health Research, and the Medical Research Council. This project was not externally funded.</span></em></p>
Centuries from now, antidepressants may be seen as a barbaric treatment for treating children with depression.
Jeremy Howick, Director of the Oxford Empathy Programme, University of Oxford
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/61185
2016-06-22T10:02:07Z
2016-06-22T10:02:07Z
Is there a link between being in the closet and being homophobic?
<p>The tragic mass shooting at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando has sparked renewed interest in the causes of homophobia. </p>
<p>While the exact motives of the shooter, Omar Mateen, remain unclear, a portrait has emerged of someone <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/troubled-quiet-macho-angry-the-volatile-life-of-omar-mateen/2016/06/17/15229250-34a6-11e6-8758-d58e76e11b12_story.html">conflicted about his religion and sexuality</a> – a man who was married twice but who <a href="http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-orlando-nightclub-shooting-20160613-snap-story.html">many claimed also frequented gay bars</a>, who became furious when he saw two men kissing but who had reportedly signed up for gay dating apps. </p>
<p>Of course, Mateen’s religion – Islam – traditionally <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/29/opinion/mustafa-akyol-what-does-islam-say-about-being-gay.html">forbids homosexuality</a>. Prior to the shooting, Mateen’s father had also publicly denounced homosexuality, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/shooters-father-god-will-punish-homosexuality_us_575e741de4b0ced23ca87ae1">posting a video on Facebook</a> in which he proclaimed that “God himself will punish those involved in homosexuality.”</p>
<p>Some have wondered (like in <a href="https://www.quora.com/LGBTQI-Issues-Is-it-true-that-many-vocal-homophobes-are-in-fact-self-hating-closeted-homosexuals">this Quora discussion</a>) if those who are homophobic may actually be closeted themselves. Has research actually identified a relationship between repressing same-sex attractions and expressing homophobia? And what factors may influence these feelings?</p>
<h2>Conflicting identities</h2>
<p>Often because of social or religious pressures, some find homosexuality unacceptable. For those who believe homosexuality is wrong – but nonetheless find themselves experiencing same-sex attraction – they can become internally conflicted: They must reconcile these feelings with their strongly held beliefs.</p>
<p>Repressed urges can sometimes be expressed as their opposite; in other words, a person may lash out against what he finds unacceptable in himself. Freud termed this defense <a href="http://faculty.fortlewis.edu/burke_b/personality/readings/freuddefense.pdf">reaction formation</a>, and when one has unwanted feelings of same-sex attraction, they may be expressed as homophobia.</p>
<p>My colleagues and I published a <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0026854">set of studies</a> examining this process in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. We wanted to see if we could identify a relationship between repressed sexual identities and any potential consequences, like homophobia. </p>
<p>Across six studies in the United States and Germany, we recruited participants across the spectrum of sexual orientations. First, we asked participants to self-identify on a continuum from straight to gay, with bisexual at the center. </p>
<p>Next, participants completed a computer task that measured their reaction time while categorizing words and pictures as “gay” or “straight,” including the words “homosexual” and “heterosexual,” and pictures depicting same-sex and opposite-sex couples. </p>
<p>The words and images were presented one at a time, and participants were told to make these categorizations as quickly as possible. But immediately before each of these words or images was presented, a word – “me” or “others” – was flashed on the screen. This was done quickly enough that it could be subliminally processed, but not long enough for it to be consciously recognized. </p>
<p>This method uses what is known as <a href="http://www.apa.org/pubs/highlights/peeps/issue-33.aspx">semantic priming</a>, and it assumes that, after being exposed to “me,” participants will categorize words more quickly that match their sexual orientation (e.g., a straight person, after being primed with “me,” will more quickly choose words or images associated with heterosexuality). If the words don’t match their sexual orientation (such as a straight person viewing homosexual cues), it will take them longer to make the categorization.</p>
<p>These two measures identified a group of people who labeled themselves as heterosexual, but showed quicker reaction times to the “me” and gay pairings. Individuals with these discrepant identities were more likely to describe themselves as homophobic and to endorse anti-gay policies. In addition, in scenarios describing gay individuals committing minor crimes, they were more likely to assign harsher punishments.</p>
<p>In other words, those people in our studies who were conflicted around their sexual identities tended to be more anti-gay themselves.</p>
<p>However, we also sought to understand what could cause this dynamic to develop in the first place. </p>
<h2>Could parents play a role?</h2>
<p>We identified parenting as a possible factor in the development of these conflicting identities. One of the major aspects of parenting we measured was something called “perceived parental autonomy support” among the participants. </p>
<p>When parents support their children’s need for autonomy, they give them the freedom to not only explore their beliefs, needs and emotions, but also to act on them. Parents who do the opposite will pressure their kids to feel or act in narrowly defined ways. </p>
<p>In several of our studies, participants reported how their parents supported them while they were growing up. Those who had a more conflicted sexual identity were more likely to recall having parents who were more controlling. These individuals were also more homophobic. </p>
<p>On the other hand, those participants who had supportive parents were more at ease with their sexual identity and reported being less homophobic.</p>
<h2>Beyond homophobia</h2>
<p>This research highlights an unfortunate reality in many people’s lives: an unsupportive and unwelcoming environment may lead to a rejection of one’s own same-sex attraction or identification. This, then, can cause people to lash out against LGBT individuals.</p>
<p>Of course, it’s important to highlight that this certainly does not explain the source of <em>all</em> homophobic behavior. Furthermore, it’s likely that most of those who are in the closet do not feel the slightest bit of homophobia. Nonetheless, there can be a host of other negative consequences; studies have shown that those who suppress their sexuality suffer <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/ort/71/1/61/">greater distress and suicidality</a>, and <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/xge/143/2/721/">poorer executive functioning and physical stamina</a>. </p>
<p>It’s also entirely possible this process may not apply to the recent tragedy in Orlando. Though a number of people interviewed said that Omar struggled with same-sex attraction, and his father has made his negative views on gay people known, we may never arrive at a truly clear picture of his experience.</p>
<p>However, it should still force us to ask what kind of environments we want to create in our homes, schools and workplaces. Do we want places that will support all people, regardless of their identities? Or do we want to pressure them into lifestyles that simply don’t fit with their sense of who they are?</p>
<p>Improving these environments could go a long way in reducing the suffering felt by many who still struggle to come to grips with an LGBT identity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/61185/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Cody DeHaan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Orlando shooter Omar Mateen’s father has denounced homosexuality, while many say Mateen secretly grappled with his own sexuality. Here’s what the research says on the relationship between parents’ attitudes, being closeted and being homophobic.
Cody DeHaan, Ph.D. Candidate in Psychology, University of Rochester
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/50107
2015-11-19T11:17:24Z
2015-11-19T11:17:24Z
Why do public bathrooms make us so anxious, and why aren’t we doing anything about it?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/101881/original/image-20151113-10438-1pi0mqn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The treacherous toilet. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/rebeccagrace/177928038/in/photolist-gHVNN-HsfaG-2byhY-h59DQM-ax7EJ1-pG2DP-iBRWR-5PRNA-eDVYk-eDVYm-eDVYn-eDVwJ-eDVwL-eDVwF-eDVwE-eDVwH-eDVYo-5uXKzj-5Q3k5K-iNiYx-7tHjX-kC48Bn-9213Li-8Er3GZ-75K5D4-ctxmp7-awmfP-eTkniD-eTwLJC-4gK2gp-CHrwt-b9YmrV-ax7FQS-cXmaVL-BCB2L-4ShhxW-3bU9uo-gywE1G-x9zYK-5PSw6u-5PNfwB-5PSwiA-8Af3Bj-954RBQ-2Gs2z-aybh5W-4tAeLu-7re8yE-8N4XWR-8Fxgfq">Rebecca Boyd/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>“Public” and “toilet” don’t go together, except when they must. And that “must” is the moment we’re not home – when we need to go and can’t hold it in any longer.</p>
<p>Only then do we face the predicament of having to perform a deeply private act in the presence of others.</p>
<p>Yet for one reason or another, American public bathrooms are often designed to make the experience exceedingly uncomfortable. Silence about the issue persists, largely because of cultural taboos that discourage any discussion about alleviating design flaws.</p>
<h2>No room for “rest”</h2>
<p>Our lives are ordinarily carried out through careful – indeed, exquisite – impression management. We adhere to a delicate etiquette of gesture, sound and scent, all so we can display ourselves as dignified, civilized human beings. </p>
<p>Enter: the toilet, which blunders in with sounds, smells and strangers. Hovering above it all is the deepest of pollutants, human waste – often in places where it’s not supposed to be. </p>
<p>From earliest childhood (<a href="https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-25/edition-6/toilet-psychology">thank you, Professor Freud</a>) we participate in the game of excrement as taboo. Any talk is handled through binary code: “Number One,” “Number Two” or the likes of pee and poo. And as children we learn the shrieks of horror that can arise when things go awry.</p>
<p>We bear the burden of all this — and more — when we enter the so-called “restroom.” It’s no wonder we look for an escape. One solution is to just not go at all: we hold it in until we get home or at least to a more opportune setting. </p>
<p>Another strategy is to manipulate intake — eating and drinking — to align elimination with being home. For me, it’s akin to the Japanese art of bonsai: trimming a plant’s roots to shape what comes out the other end. It is a difficult skill to master, for which few of us have had proper instruction. </p>
<h2>Privacy discouraged, by design</h2>
<p><a href="http://www.csun.edu/%7Etph53095/Meanwhile%20Backstage%20Reading.pdf">According to one survey</a>, over 60% of respondents reported that they would delay using a public restroom if they felt like they didn’t have enough privacy. </p>
<p>The design of American public bathrooms can complicate the struggle for a modicum of privacy. In the US, stall enclosures typically have large bottom (and top) openings, along with peek-a-boo gaps at panel seams. The US is a distinctly open society; in virtually every country which has them, toilets have more solid enclosures, with stalls going closer to the ground and ceiling, </p>
<p>The US features probably arose from authorities’ concern, way back when, over what people might do if they had <em>more</em> privacy – specifically, drugs or sex (especially homosexual male sex). </p>
<p>Either way, it’s now expected that when we sit on a public toilet, we expose our feet to the occupant next door. Among other effects, this allows those who know us to make positive and precise identifications based on shoes: another blow to anonymity. Who hasn’t experienced the dread of a boss or colleague plopping down in an adjacent stall?</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/101873/original/image-20151113-10393-1rx4cp7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/101873/original/image-20151113-10393-1rx4cp7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/101873/original/image-20151113-10393-1rx4cp7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/101873/original/image-20151113-10393-1rx4cp7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/101873/original/image-20151113-10393-1rx4cp7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/101873/original/image-20151113-10393-1rx4cp7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/101873/original/image-20151113-10393-1rx4cp7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Anonymity, compromised.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-35828983/stock-photo-girl-in-bathroom-stall.html?src=6oiUFMFik1uG3SXpmjhZHQ-1-7">'Feet' via www.shutterstock.com</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There can be strategies. Some choose restrooms where a colleague or classmate will less likely be present. That might mean going to a different building, floor or division. Others try to time visits for when nobody else will be around (although if everyone selects the same time, there could be comedic bathroom jams instead of circumvention). Of course, openly coordinating among one another to prevent such an outcome would be out of the question: your self-consciousness would be exposed. </p>
<h2>Simple fixes met with silence</h2>
<p>Why haven’t industrial designers and architects stepped in to address some of these issues? </p>
<p>From knowing many of them, I believe they’d be eager to facilitate change: many would gladly make stall walls more substantial, while acoustic specialists would delight in muffling unpleasant sounds with the white noise of running water or music (why not <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=movTSvVQxX0">opera</a>, a la the fountains of Las Vegas’ Bellagio Hotel?) </p>
<p>Sinks and toilets could be combined into a single unit (such models exist in both Japan and Spain) so that the water from the sink enters into the toilet tank, where it is stored for the next flush. This lowers water use and yields hands that are clean before they touch the hardware of the stall exit. (No more opening locks with scrunches of toilet paper!) </p>
<p>Insulin users need a shelf to rest their syringe. Indeed, so do all intravenous drug users. And they need good enough lighting to both see their veins and avoid bloodying things up. </p>
<p>People from Middle Eastern cultures are accustomed to cleansing after defecation with water, often with a spray hose fixed to a wall adjacent to the toilet. (For them, wiping with paper disgusts.) Such preferences should be accommodated; given a chance, it may catch on with the wider public. </p>
<p>Public toilets invite recycling of all waste. And larger facilities, especially, should invite on-site recycling, with user-friendly displays of the process (show the plumbing, digesters and fittings through transparent pipes and walls). Use the toilet to press a wider public agenda.</p>
<p>And that goes for gender too. Gender segregation continues to deliver injustice. Women need more opportunities to go, a fact increasingly being reflected in changing building codes in the US and other countries. Now starting to appear on public policy agendas are the difficulties of people who are transgender or gender-nonconforming. Some people are actually forced to use a bathroom designated for the opposite sex due to their situation: women caring for men (and vice versa), fathers for girls and other variations. </p>
<p>So why not open it up and let all genders share the same zone? It would yield a huge increase in space efficiency, while alleviating the long lines at the women’s rooms, which often occur as stalls remain empty in the men’s room. Integration might also enhance safety: more people would be on hand to act in case of emergency. Hanging a “women” sign over a door only keeps out men with good intentions. (After all, those with bad intentions won’t be impeded by a sign.)</p>
<p>Making change requires making talk. Unfortunately, “the talk” can be rather awkward – awkward for politicians to introduce change or for architects to convince clients to depart from custom. Having sat on many university building committees, I can report that not much time is devoted to the arrangements of restrooms; when it comes to the toilet and its surroundings, silence is business as usual. </p>
<p>Deprivations, some of them unspeakable, fill the void.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/50107/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Harvey Molotch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Public ‘restroom’ is a euphemism of the highest order. We don’t find it restful.
Harvey Molotch, Professor of Sociology and Metropolitan Studies, New York University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/49551
2015-10-26T15:36:35Z
2015-10-26T15:36:35Z
Forensic analysis of skin dust from Freud’s couch leaves much to be desired
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99513/original/image-20151023-27592-7uodxn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Trace fiber from Freud's couch under crossed polars with Quartz wedge compensator (#1), 2015, unique jacquard woven tapestry, 2.9m x 2m.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the middle of a rose garden, on a leafy road in northwest London, nestles the <a href="http://www.freud.org.uk/">Freud Museum</a> – though the petals, in October, are tumbling. The house, at 20 Maresfield Gardens, is the proud bearer of two blue plaques that adorn its frontage like war-medals: one for Sigmund Freud, and one for his daughter, Anna. Both lived at the house until their deaths in 1939 and 1982, respectively.</p>
<p>Inside, Freud’s study has been preserved intact. Everything that he owned in Vienna – prior to fleeing Nazi persecution in 1938 – was carefully imported and reassembled so that he could continue his work unabated: his books, his archaeological artefacts, his leather chair that so curiously and uncannily resembles a human form – and, of course, his famous couch.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99516/original/image-20151023-27612-gcjoqg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99516/original/image-20151023-27612-gcjoqg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99516/original/image-20151023-27612-gcjoqg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99516/original/image-20151023-27612-gcjoqg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99516/original/image-20151023-27612-gcjoqg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99516/original/image-20151023-27612-gcjoqg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99516/original/image-20151023-27612-gcjoqg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99516/original/image-20151023-27612-gcjoqg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Freud’s couch.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Broomberg and Chanarin</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For the next few weeks, however, that couch is covered by a blanket. “Every Piece of Dust on Freud’s Couch” is an installation in Freud’s study by artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. Commissioned by the Freud Museum, it runs until the end of November. </p>
<p>At one end of the room, a carousel slide projector noisily rotates a series of monochrome slides. At the other end, a blanket covers Freud’s couch. The slides – highly magnified images of fibres – are the product of a forensic team’s investigation into the dust from the rug on Freud’s couch. The dust itself, a handout informs us, is largely keratin; in other words, skin. The blanket on the couch – which initially I had taken for something left there by accident – is actually a tapestry: the woven image of a highly-magnified fibre from that couch.</p>
<h2>Freudian dust</h2>
<p>This is not the first piece of art to be generated from Freudian dust. In 1996, Cornelia Parker created a piece called “<a href="http://workflow.arts.ac.uk/view/artefact.php?artefact=861790&view=98786&block=901687">Exhaled Blanket</a>” – a slide projection of dust and fibres also collected from Freud’s couch. The academic in me cries out for a reference.</p>
<p>According to the artists, this “exercise in forensics aspires to the language of science and, like psychoanalysis, it attempts something contradictory; the objective study of subjectivity”. I’m not sure there’s anything contradictory about the aim stated, but it’s true that Freud’s great project was to legitimise psychoanalysis as a “science”. Viewed in this light, the attempt to frame the physical traces of Freud’s sitters within a forensic, scientific context, has validity.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99521/original/image-20151023-27631-16mh6e6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99521/original/image-20151023-27631-16mh6e6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99521/original/image-20151023-27631-16mh6e6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=844&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99521/original/image-20151023-27631-16mh6e6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=844&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99521/original/image-20151023-27631-16mh6e6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=844&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99521/original/image-20151023-27631-16mh6e6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1061&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99521/original/image-20151023-27631-16mh6e6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1061&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99521/original/image-20151023-27631-16mh6e6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1061&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sigmund Freud, 1922.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But so many questions are left unasked.</p>
<p>We are told that the dust “may include traces” of some of Freud’s most famous cases. But of course we don’t know whether the dust thus magnified is actually that of, say, <a href="http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Dora:_An_Analysis_of_a_Case_of_Hysteria">Dora</a> or the <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/464701?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">Wolf Man</a>, or belongs to someone or something else entirely. We are not told whether the forensic team was able to discover anything beyond being able to identify any given fibre as “cushion” or “feather”. And so the claim that the tapestry is “an abstracted portrait of one of its sitters” does not quite ring true. And although we are told that most of the dust on the couch is composed of skin, the magnified slide images are not skin: rather each slide is labelled: Cushion, Feather, Hair, Coat, Rug.</p>
<p>I could fairly be accused of pedantry for picking on such details. But if we are aspiring to the language of science, then detail is key. Minor inaccuracies, such as stating that Freud’s final years were spent in London, grate. In fact, Freud spent only 15 months in London, 12 of which were at the house in Maresfield Gardens where he died in September 1939, just weeks after the start of World War II.</p>
<p>This pedant will further admit to disliking the tired trend that insists artworks be accompanied by explanatory – yet inadequate (and inaccurate) – prose. But in the context of Freudian psychoanalysis, the misfit is even more pronounced.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99518/original/image-20151023-27580-1nl4c98.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99518/original/image-20151023-27580-1nl4c98.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99518/original/image-20151023-27580-1nl4c98.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99518/original/image-20151023-27580-1nl4c98.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99518/original/image-20151023-27580-1nl4c98.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99518/original/image-20151023-27580-1nl4c98.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99518/original/image-20151023-27580-1nl4c98.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Forensic art.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Broomberg and Chanarin</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Searching for meaning</h2>
<p>Psychoanalysis seeks for meaning beneath the surface. Bloomberg and Chanarin’s work overlays meaning clumsily on the surface, obscuring what lies beneath. This “blanketing” is made manifest – unconsciously, one must presume – by the gaudy tapestry overlaying the couch. I suppose one could make the argument that Freud himself, and certainly many of his followers, did precisely as the artists here have done: superimpose their own impenetrable and subjective meaning over their complex subjects like a dense and opaque blanket.</p>
<p>Alone in an upstairs room, the actual rug from Freud’s couch is still on display. Covered in dust, it somehow has the moribund air of a viewed corpse prior to a funeral. Perhaps more so knowing that the dust covering it is largely composed of human skin.</p>
<p>It’s impossible to know to whom those human fragments belonged, just as if they were specks of ash, cremations. To know that Freud’s life and death in this house came so swiftly on the heels of war, and in the context of Nazi persecution, adds a sobering dimension to the fragments of human skin on the couch. The shadow of the Holocaust looms large.</p>
<p>This was not perhaps the meaning the artists intended, but it was the one I took away with me, into that London street, amongst the dropping October rose petals; through memory, association, and a series of unconscious displacements.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/49551/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
In the middle of a rose garden, on a leafy road in northwest London, nestles the Freud Museum – though the petals, in October, are tumbling. The house, at 20 Maresfield Gardens, is the proud bearer of…
Victoria Anderson, Visiting Researcher in Cultural Studies, Cardiff University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/45889
2015-08-12T06:27:32Z
2015-08-12T06:27:32Z
Unravelling the mysteries of sleep: how the brain ‘sees’ dreams
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91554/original/image-20150812-18101-th7lih.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dreams and their purpose have been one of the enduring mysteries of sleep.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/sahlameche/10605814016/">diastème (Sarah Giboni)/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>We’ve known for some time that our eyes move around during the dreaming phase of sleep, much like when we’re awake and looking at a visual scene. The phase of sleep is called rapid eye movement sleep, or REM sleep. </p>
<p>New research, <a href="http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150811/ncomms8884/full/ncomms8884.html">published today</a> in the journal Nature Communications, shows brain activity during the dreaming phase of sleep is remarkably similar to brain activity when we’re awake and processing new visual images, suggesting the brain “sees” dreams. </p>
<p>While researchers have suspected this may be the case, it’s the first time investigators have been able to record brain activity from <em>within</em> the brain. </p>
<h2>A quick history of dream research</h2>
<p>Dreams and their purpose have been one of the enduring mysteries of sleep. Early dream theorists, such as <a href="http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Freud/Dreams/dreams.pdf">Sigmund Freud</a>, argued that the function of dreaming was to preserve sleep by expressing unfulfilled desires or wishes in the unconscious state. </p>
<p>More recently, researchers have investigated the function and processes of sleep and dreams by measuring the physiological signals that characterise this state of consciousness. </p>
<p>Just over 60 years ago, American sleep researcher Eugene Aserinsky stumbled across rapid eye movements during sleep almost accidentally, during an overnight sleep study recording of his eight-year-old son. His seminal 1953 paper <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/118/3062/273.extract">reported</a> “rapid, jerky and binocularly symmetrical” eye movements during periods of sleep. </p>
<p>These eye movements were also associated with increased brain activity, thus discounting the idea that sleep is a completely passive phenomenon. During REM sleep, our brains are active and behave similarly to wakefulness or light sleep. But muscle activity is suppressed so we can’t physically carry out our dreams. </p>
<p>In a <a href="http://wardakhan.org/notes/Original%20Studies/Physiological%20Psychology/William-Dement-and-Nathaniel-Kleitman.pdf">pioneering 1957 paper</a>, American researchers William Dement and Nathaniel Kleitman examined the relationship between eye movements and dream content. They woke participants during REM sleep and asked them to describe their dream. The researchers then looked at how their dream description related to the type of eye movements they were experiencing at the time (vertical, horizontal, or a mix of both). </p>
<p>Participants who were woken after a series of vertical movements reported “climbing up a ladder”, and “standing at the bottom of the cliff operating a hoist and looking up at climbers”, whereas one participant who was woken after horizontal eye movements reported dreaming about “two people throwing tomatoes at each other”. In contrast, those who had mixed eye movements tended to be watching people close to them with no description of distance or vertical vision. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91557/original/image-20150812-18068-1cfvfcm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91557/original/image-20150812-18068-1cfvfcm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91557/original/image-20150812-18068-1cfvfcm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91557/original/image-20150812-18068-1cfvfcm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91557/original/image-20150812-18068-1cfvfcm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91557/original/image-20150812-18068-1cfvfcm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91557/original/image-20150812-18068-1cfvfcm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">When climbing, dreamers’ eyes move vertically.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/dahlstroms/5550750490/">Håkan Dahlström/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Since this study, the evidence for this association between the REMs and dream content is not consistent. Individuals who have been blind from birth, for instance, have REMs but no visual dream content. </p>
<p>But in support of Dement’s finding, a <a href="http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/133/6/1737.short">recent study</a> in patients with REM behaviour disorder (where people act out their dreams due to a lack of muscle paralysis), found a strong association between goal-oriented limb and head action and eye gaze direction during REM sleep.</p>
<h2>Brain activity during sleep</h2>
<p>In everyday life, when we see things, our eyes and brain behave in characteristic ways to gather and process the information in our visual field and give it meaning. But the function of eye movements during sleep and dreaming are relatively unknown. Today’s <a href="http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150811/ncomms8884/full/ncomms8884.html">Nature Communication paper</a> provides some insights. </p>
<p>Usually, brain activity is measured non-invasively from the scalp. But the investigators, from Tel Aviv University, recorded the activity of the brain, from <em>within</em> the brain, in patients with epilepsy. </p>
<p>Patients whose epilepsy cannot be controlled with medication have electrodes surgically placed within the brain as a clinical means to map their epileptic activity, and assess suitability for surgery as a treatment. These electrodes were implanted in the medial temporal lobe – a region that is associated with visual awareness. </p>
<p>Researchers compared brain activity of these patients across three settings: REM sleep brain activity, wakeful eye movements in darkness (no visual processing) and wakeful fixed-gaze visual processing (no eye movements). They wanted to test whether brain behaviour during sleep was more closely related to physical movement, or the processing of visual information. </p>
<p>Results showed that during rapid eye movements in sleep, the brain activity was more closely related to the brain activity during visual processing during wakefulness (without movement) than physical movements of the eyes in darkness where no visual processing was taking place. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91558/original/image-20150812-18080-1curnsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91558/original/image-20150812-18080-1curnsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91558/original/image-20150812-18080-1curnsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91558/original/image-20150812-18080-1curnsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91558/original/image-20150812-18080-1curnsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91558/original/image-20150812-18080-1curnsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91558/original/image-20150812-18080-1curnsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Eye movements suggest dreamers’ brains were processing images rather than trying to move .</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/77682540@N00/3408864901/">Ali T/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These results suggest that the rapid eye movements that occur in sleep are linked to visual processing rather than just physical activation or movement. So, the participants may have actually been looking at a dream image, rather than these eye movements simply reflecting motor discharge in the brain. </p>
<p>While much remains unknown, this detailed processing of our dream images suggests that rapid eye movements may actually modulate our brain activity during sleep. We know that sleep is needed for rest and rejuvenation, but it’s likely to have other important functions as well. </p>
<p>In line with the earliest of theories about why we dream, are we processing content that has been consciously or unconsciously avoided during wakefulness, but somehow “needs” to be dealt with at least during sleep to maintain our psychological well-being? </p>
<p>Are the eye movements a simple byproduct of the visual processing that occurs of the images we dream? </p>
<p>Is there a psychological basis to why we need to process these images during sleep, and does this lend to better psychological outcomes in a similar way to sleep aiding physical functioning? </p>
<p>These and many questions drive the ongoing research into why we sleep, and what its precise benefits are.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/45889/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Melinda Jackson receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Defence Health Foundation and the Institute for Breathing and Sleep. She is affiliated with the Institute for Breathing and Sleep, and The University of Melbourne.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rachel Schembri has received funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council. </span></em></p>
Brain activity during the dreaming phase of sleep is remarkably similar to brain activity when we’re awake and processing new visual images, new research shows.
Melinda Jackson, Senior Research Fellow in the School of Health Sciences, RMIT University
Rachel Schembri, Post-doctoral research fellow, School of Health Sciences, RMIT University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/43709
2015-06-29T20:07:17Z
2015-06-29T20:07:17Z
Happiness is an illusion, here’s why you should seek contentment instead
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86670/original/image-20150629-9096-sptwtf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Feeling content means having a deep-seated, abiding acceptance of oneself and one’s worth, together with a sense of self-fulfilment, meaning and purpose. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/_theo_/4484245088/">James Theophane/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This article is part of a series, <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/on-happiness">On Happiness</a>, examining what it means and how it might be achieved in the 21st century.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>I want to share a personal view of what it is to be happy and how it differs from feeling content. Let me begin with a clinical story. </p>
<p>They met at a party; it was love at first sight just like one reads about in romantic novels. They married following an exhilarating courtship, and since they shared an eagerness to raise a family, Jennifer soon announced the joyful news of her pregnancy. They called their baby Annie after Adam’s late mother. </p>
<p>They felt blessed; every moment since their first encounter had been nothing but pleasurable. Everyone who knew them concurred that their lives as a couple had been replete with happiness. </p>
<p>Tragically, it was not to endure. Their first setback occurred only days after Annie’s birth. She was sleeping fitfully and her colic stubbornly persisted. Jennifer felt utterly demoralised as a new mother. Her mounting sense of guilt and melancholy led to her admission to a psychiatric ward (her first ever encounter with psychiatry); the fear of her harming Annie or herself spread through the family and circle of friends. </p>
<p>And then, quite shockingly, despite the most diligent medical and nursing care, Jennifer met her death after jumping off a second floor balcony. Her family and friends plunged into deep grief; the medical professionals who had looked after her were similarly bereft.</p>
<h2>An elusive goal</h2>
<p>Having worked as a psychiatrist for over four decades and got to know dozens of men, women, and children of diverse backgrounds and with unique life stories, I have witnessed many a sad narrative, although suicide has mercifully been a rare event. </p>
<p>These experiences, in tandem with a lifelong fascination with what makes people tick, have led me most reluctantly to the judgement that while we may savour happiness episodically, it will invariably be disrupted by unwelcome negative feelings. Still, most of humankind will continue to harbour the expectation of living happily and remain oblivious that this wishful fantasy is an unconscious way of warding off the threat of psychic pain. </p>
<p>Rather than confront and demoralise those who have sought my help, I have gently but honestly responded to their plaintive yearning (“all I want is just to be happy”), by highlighting an inherent human sentiment. Namely that clinging to the fiction of being able to avoid suffering and enjoying a continuing state of pleasure is tantamount to self-deception. </p>
<p>I have offered them the hope – but not a guarantee – that they have the potential to lead a more fulfilling life than hitherto by participating in a challenging, and at times even distressing process of self-exploration whose purpose is to enhance self understanding and acceptance of the reality-bound emotional state I call contentment.</p>
<p>You may retort: “But you treat people who are miserable, pessimistic and self-deprecating, surely you must be hopelessly biased.” I would readily understand your reaction but suggest that all of us, not just those in treatment, crave happiness and are repeatedly frustrated by its elusiveness. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86668/original/image-20150629-9081-9ihrgk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86668/original/image-20150629-9081-9ihrgk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86668/original/image-20150629-9081-9ihrgk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86668/original/image-20150629-9081-9ihrgk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86668/original/image-20150629-9081-9ihrgk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86668/original/image-20150629-9081-9ihrgk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86668/original/image-20150629-9081-9ihrgk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Most of humankind continues to harbour the expectation of living happily and remains oblivious that this wishful fantasy is an unconscious way of warding off the threat of psychic pain.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/katerha/5129669316/">Kate Ter Haar/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As the father of psychoanalysis <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud">Sigmund Freud</a> emphasised in his 1930 essay, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_and_Its_Discontents">Civilization and Its Discontents</a>, we are much more vulnerable to unhappiness than its opposite. That’s because we are constantly threatened by three forces: the fragility of our physical self, “doomed” by ageing and disease; the external world, with its potential to destroy us (through floods, fires, storms and earthquakes, for example); and our unpredictably complicated relationships with other people (regarded by Freud as the most painful source of unhappiness).</p>
<p>So, am I simply a misanthrope? I hope not but I am inclined to agree with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbert_Hubbard">Elbert Hubbard</a>, the American artist and philosopher, who said, “Life is just one damn thing after another”. </p>
<p>We only have to think about the 50 million people who are currently displaced and unlikely to find a secure haven anytime soon, or the 2.2 billion people – including millions of children – <a href="http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview">who live on less than US$2 a day</a> to appreciate the validity of that remark. </p>
<h2>A better option</h2>
<p>Given the formidable obstacles to chasing after happiness or promoting its sustainability if we are lucky enough to come by it, what options do human beings have? I have not come across any meaningful approach to this question, even from the <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9744812-flourish">unswervingly confident proponents</a> of the contemporary school of positive psychology.</p>
<p>So, I espouse the following: given that we have the means to distinguish between happiness and contentment, we can examine how they differ and, in so doing, identify an alternative to the futile pursuit of happiness. </p>
<p>Happiness, derived from the Norse word <em>hap</em>, means luck or chance; the phrase happy-go-lucky illustrates the association. Many Indo-European languages similarly conflate the feeling of happiness and luck. <em>Glück</em> in German, for instance, can be translated as either happiness or chance, while <em>eftihia</em>, the Greek word for happiness, is derived from <em>ef</em>, meaning good, and <em>tixi</em>, luck or chance. </p>
<p>Thus, a mother may have the good fortune to feel ecstatic when responding to her infant’s playfulness, only to see it evaporate a couple of years later and be replaced by the initial features of autism. In the story we started this article with, Jennifer may have persevered had her baby slept peacefully and not been assailed by colicky pain in her first few weeks of life.</p>
<p>Contentment is derived from the Latin <em>contentus</em> and usually translated as satisfied. No multiple meanings here to confuse us. In my view, feeling content refers to a deep-seated, abiding acceptance of one’s self and one’s worth together with a sense of self-fulfilment, meaning and purpose. </p>
<p>And, most critically, these assets are valued and nurtured whatever the circumstances, or even especially when they are distressing or depressing. </p>
<p>I have had the privilege of knowing men and women who suffered grievously as children in the ghettoes and concentration camps of Nazi Europe but emerged from their nightmare to face the challenge of seeking strengths, emotional and spiritual, within themselves. With the passage of time, many succeeded in achieving a sense of deep-seated contentment. </p>
<p>What these survivors have clearly demonstrated is that accepting and respecting oneself, coupled with determining what is personally meaningful, stand a greater chance of accomplishment, even if never completed, than a relentless and ultimately futile pursuit of happiness. What’s more, contentment has the potential to serve as a robust foundation upon which episodes of joy and pleasure can be experienced and cherished.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/43709/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sidney Bloch supports GetUp.</span></em></p>
Happiness might seem like a worthy goal but it will invariably be disrupted by unwelcome negative feelings. Far better to seek contentment, which can serve as a foundation for both joy and pleasure.
Sidney Bloch, Emeritus Professor in Psychiatry, The University of Melbourne
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/33784
2014-11-11T19:29:54Z
2014-11-11T19:29:54Z
Assertive female sexuality is pathologised time and again
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/63830/original/m3z8tqpm-1415244698.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Sharon Stone, in Basic Instinct, dramatised the catastrophic actions of a clever yet unhinged woman. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/ Peter Foley</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Mental illness and women’s sexuality are frequently aligned – on screen and off. The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, pathologised women’s sexuality. Indeed his definition of a woman as someone lacking a penis has underwritten depictions of women’s sexuality. </p>
<p>Countless novels, films and TV programs continually pathologise women through and because of their sexuality. </p>
<p>Meron Wondemaghen rightly <a href="https://theconversation.com/homeland-carrie-mathison-and-mental-illness-on-television-33458">asserted</a> on The Conversation recently that the characterisation of Carrie Mathison in the TV series Homeland provides – at least in the initial season – a realistic and sympathetic portrayal of bipolar disorder, thus reducing the stigma attached to it. But what is overlooked is the obvious gender bias of her characterisation. </p>
<p>Mathison’s identity is wedded to a confident sexuality that refuses to be controlled. It provides a key narrative and psychological dimension to the program that is integral to its success and suspense. </p>
<p>Intelligent, desirable, yet psychologically unstable women characters are a common feature of thrillers. In fact they are a staple of the 1940s and 1950s Hollywood film noir genre. </p>
<p>Take for instance the extraordinarily glamorous yet unhinged character of Gene Tierney in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037865/">Leave Her to Heaven</a> (1945). She tries to avenge her husband and sister beyond the grave, which takes her egotism well beyond the cliff of acute narcissism. The equally self-centred Barbara Stanwyck in Billy Wilder’s classic <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036775/">Double Indemnity</a> (1944) also has her sexual prowess associated with deep-seated psychological problems.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/27cVqvP9QmQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Trailer for Leave her to Heaven (1945).</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>All too often, women’s uncontrollable sexuality has been pathologised. </p>
<p>Wondemaghen mentions a number of films that do this: <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067588/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Play Misty For Me</a> (1971), <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093010/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Fatal Attraction</a> (1987), and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100157/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Misery</a> (1990). Those films do not simply represent negative kinds of mental illness – they depict crazy women who are driven by sexual lust, jealously and possessiveness. </p>
<p>Other additions to the genre – such as <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103772/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Basic Instinct</a> (1992) and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2267998/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Gone Girl</a> (2014) – repeat the narrative scenario of dramatising the catastrophic actions of clever yet unhinged women.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ym3LB0lOJ0o?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Trailer for Gone Girl (2014).</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But Homeland’s Carrie Mathison disrupts the cycle of demonising smart and sexually assured women since she is more of a danger to herself than to others.</p>
<p>We are encouraged to like and even to admire Carrie’s mental struggle because she thinks and acts beyond herself. This does not prevent her from using her sexuality as a means in which to gain intelligence. But unlike her <em>femme fatale</em> predecessors, she makes the mistake of falling in love. </p>
<p>Throughout the ages, love has been opposed to reason. It has even been considered a madness. In Homeland, Carrie experiences a form of madness in her love for the character Brody. </p>
<p>As a woman in love, she is not in control; because of this, she becomes less of an agent and more of an agency. </p>
<p>The shift from the noun “agent” to the verb “agency” is important: it signifies a transition in Carrie’s identity and place. She is not a solid person or subject but a fluent action that propels the plot and enables others. </p>
<p>Women have often been positioned as agents of change, fluid bodies who have suffered from rape and violence. What comes to mind is the violation of Rosemary Woodhouse in Roman Polanski’s disturbing <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063522/">Rosemary’s Baby</a> (1968), in which Mia Farrow plays the unwitting vessel of Satan’s son. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/63796/original/b9jhyjrt-1415229089.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/63796/original/b9jhyjrt-1415229089.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/63796/original/b9jhyjrt-1415229089.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/63796/original/b9jhyjrt-1415229089.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/63796/original/b9jhyjrt-1415229089.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/63796/original/b9jhyjrt-1415229089.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/63796/original/b9jhyjrt-1415229089.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/63796/original/b9jhyjrt-1415229089.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sexually aggressive women such as Barbara Stanwyck’s character in Double Indemnity are often also cast as mentally unhinged.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Leah/Flickr</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Although well-drawn and complex characters such as Carrie Mathison, and Cate Blanchett’s extraordinary performance of a narcissist in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2334873/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Blue Jasmine </a> (2013), provide writers and actors with great scope, there is still the nagging problem of a woman’s place in narrative as well as in life. For even the brilliant bipolar Carrie cannot change the trajectory of her fictional existence as it seems steadfastly focused on aligning her unstable mental health with a rogue sexuality. </p>
<p>Wondemaghen names two films that depict positive mental health cases — <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0268978/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">A Beautiful Mind </a>(2001) and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0821642/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">The Soloist</a> (2009) — but doesn’t dwell on the fact that these films are both about extremely talented men. One is a genius mathematician and the other a musical prodigy. Both suffer from schizophrenia, yet their condition is no way linked to their sexuality. If anything, it is associated with exceptional skills and talents.</p>
<p>Rain Man (1988) is another film that depicts mental illness in a positive way. Again, it dramatises the life of a man, this time a brilliant autistic savant. </p>
<p>It is hard to think of a single film that represents a woman’s mental illness as a condition that has nothing to do with her looks or body. Carrie Mathison comes close to providing us with a rare positive portrayal of a smart woman who also happens to be bipolar. The problem, though, is that she is always compromised by the fact that she is female. </p>
<p>Perhaps then being a woman is the real mental illness our films and stories seem to oscillate around? That is a confronting idea yet has leverage in the fact that narratives repeatedly associate women’s psychological ill health with an aberrant sexuality. </p>
<p><br>
<strong>See also:</strong> <br>
<a href="https://theconversation.com/homeland-carrie-mathison-and-mental-illness-on-television-33458">Homeland, Carrie Mathison and mental illness on television</a></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/33784/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Suzie Gibson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Mental illness and women’s sexuality are frequently aligned – on screen and off. The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, pathologised women’s sexuality. Indeed his definition of a woman as someone…
Suzie Gibson, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Charles Sturt University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.