Le titre de cette thèse, « Lacan et l’American way of life », est une façon d’interroger Jacques Lacan et les États-Unis afin de savoir pourquoi et comment son enseignement fut, pendant si longtemps, de ce côté-là de l’Atlantique, difficilement pris au sérieux dans la clinique. Si la théorisation lacanienne a été tenue à l’écart de la psychanalyse américaine, c’est parce que celle-ci avait d’autres repères. Nous en isolons trois : l’ego psychology, qui domina l’orientation de la psychanalyse américaine à partir des années 1930 ; Wilhelm Reich, le promoteur de la révolution sexuelle ; et les gender studies, pour lesquelles la psychanalyse est une pratique qui doit être abandonnée car trop soumise aux signifiants du patriarcat. Ces trois scansions – ego psychology, Reich, gender studies – sont trois théories du sexuel qui ont marqué les États-Unis, construisant chacune un sens sexuel qui exclut Lacan des enjeux cliniques. C’est ce que cette thèse se propose de démontrer. En commençant avec la réaction de Lacan à l’ego psychology et son retour à Freud, nous continuons vers la fin de l’enseignement de Lacan (à partir des années 1970) qui fonde une clinique orientée par le réel, qui repense la psychanalyse, y compris ce que Lacan avait d’abord affirmé. Le réel – le concept de réel – sera la boussole qui nous permet de déplier cette démonstration. L’œuvre de Lacan, particulièrement ses dernières formulations commentées par Jacques-Alain Miller, porte en elle des issues aux impasses de l’ego psychology et son culte du Moi, de Reich et sa jouissance phallique génitale, et des gender studies empêtrées dans les identifications et leurs contestations de celles-ci / This thesis, “Lacan and the American Way of Life”, examines Jacques Lacan and the United States in order to understand why Lacan’s teachings have had difficulty being taken seriously in American clinical practice. If psychoanalysts in the United States have kept Lacanian theory at a distance, it is perhaps because of the ways American practice has been oriented. We isolate three orientations: ego psychology, which had a strong influence in the United States as early as the 1930’s; Wilhelm Reich, the Viennese psychoanalyst and brilliant student of Freud who emigrated to the US and became known for his Sexual Revolution; and gender studies which considers that psychoanalysis, being overly subjected to patriarchal signifiers, should be abandoned. These movements represent three modalities of sexual theory that have left their mark on America, each bringing a meaning to sexuality in a way that excludes Lacan’s work. We examine these movements from a Lacanian point of view starting with his response to ego psychology (his return to Freud) and continuing with his later teachings (after 1970) that founded a practice oriented by the real – a re-thinking of psychoanalysis. The Lacanian concept of the real will be the compass that guides us through this demonstration. We will see that Lacan’s works, and especially his later formulations as explained by Jacques-Alain Miller, provide a way out of the impasses of ego psychology and its ego cult, of Reich and his genital phallic jouissance, and of gender studies and their entanglement with identity.

This study analyzed the reader's relationship to the sounds embedded in a written text for the purpose of identifying those sounds' contribution to the reader's interpretation of that text. To achieve this objective, this study negotiated Heideggerian phenomenology, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, linguistics, and musicology into a reader response theory, which was then applied to Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven." This study argues that the orchestration of sounds in "The Raven" forces its reader into a regression, which the reader then represses, only to carry the resulting sound-image // away from the poem as a psychic scar.

No description available.

Magister Artium - MA / Die moeder-dogter-verhouding is ʼn terugkerende en fassinerende tema in resente skryfwerk. Dit is die onderwerp van talle wetenskaplike navorsingsartikels, maar tog het dit tot dusver min aandag ontvang in die Afrikaanse letterkunde. Die verwikkelde moeder-dogter- verhouding is ʼn deurlopende tema in die werk van drie swart Afrikaanse vrouedigters, nl. Ronelda Kamfer, Jolyn Phillips en Shirmoney Rhode. Elkeen plaas ʼn eiesoortige fokus daarop. Die dimensies van hierdie verhouding word ontleed aan die hand van die psigoanalise soos deur Freud en Lacan uiteengesit. Postkolonialisme as raamwerk word ook betrek omdat dit fokus op identiteit en die subalterne wat ʼn kerngegewe in die genoemde digters se werk is. Hierdie raamwerk stel egter beperkings wanneer die sielkundige aspekte ter sprake kom. Hierdie studie maak dus gebruik van ʼn eklektiese benadering waarin insigte uit beide teoretiese raamwerke benut word. / South Africa

The essay analyzes how and why Moll Flanders’s childhood created mental and emotional patterns that would come to shape her personality and affect her behavior. The analysis will use psychoanalytical theories by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to discern what defense mechanisms and desires Moll developed in childhood and how these presented themselves throughout her life. The essay concludes that she has a fear of abandonment and intimacy and that she uses denial and sublimation to repress anxiety and guilt. Moll’s core desire is to find stability, which is why she continuously strives for financial security due to equating money to comfort and safety. She sublimates her unconscious desire to replace her childhood caretakers and her repressed fears of annihilation by finding new men to take care of her. However, Moll’s unconscious keeps causing her to repeat negative behavioral patterns which trap her in cycles of fortune and misfortune.

This dissertation approaches the question of taste and aesthetic dislike from a combined sociological and psychoanalytic perspective. Building on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of art (most notably La distinction from 1979), I attempt to reconcile a view of aesthetic judgments as acts of distinction with a legitimate subjective dimension of aesthetic enjoyment. I make a parallel between taste and the psychoanalytic conception of the symptom and analyse the way they both transform the repressed content of the unconscious drives into a manifest one with the use of Freud’s theory of the dream. I relate the question of pleasure and displeasure in art with the dichotomy Eros/Death Drive (Freud) and argue that both aesthetic like and dislike arrive from a combination of these two drives, as in Lacan’s jouissance. I argue that the love of art can, as any love, be understood as a transference, the repetition of unconscious desires projected onto an other. In the conclusion, I refer to Sándor Ferenczi’s work and argue that one should relate to one’s aesthetic judgments with the same elasticity (Elastizität) that the analyst should show towards the resistance of the analysand in order to understand her symptom. Finally, I reject a mystifying view of art and the sublime and argue that the very nature of art should instead be conceived as the objet a (Lacan) of our desires, i.e. that which cannot ever be fully obtained from the other but which at the same time structures our desires.

No description available.

Magister Artium - MA / Die moeder-dogter-verhouding is ʼn terugkerende en fassinerende tema in resente skryfwerk. Dit is die onderwerp van talle wetenskaplike navorsingsartikels, maar tog het dit tot dusver min aandag ontvang in die Afrikaanse letterkunde. Die verwikkelde moeder-dogter- verhouding is ʼn deurlopende tema in die werk van drie swart Afrikaanse vrouedigters, nl. Ronelda Kamfer, Jolyn Phillips en Shirmoney Rhode. Elkeen plaas ʼn eiesoortige fokus daarop. Die dimensies van hierdie verhouding word ontleed aan die hand van die psigoanalise soos deur Freud en Lacan uiteengesit. Postkolonialisme as raamwerk word ook betrek omdat dit fokus op identiteit en die subalterne wat ʼn kerngegewe in die genoemde digters se werk is. Hierdie raamwerk stel egter beperkings wanneer die sielkundige aspekte ter sprake kom. Hierdie studie maak dus gebruik van ʼn eklektiese benadering waarin insigte uit beide teoretiese raamwerke benut word. / South Africa

This thesis is aimed at investigating the concepts of otherness and the abject/abjection in the various characters' discourses in the two short stories "Dimensions" and "Child's Play" in Alice Munro's collection Too Much Happiness from a psychoanalytic perspective in conjunction with a Critical Discourse Analysis. Both texts share features of otherness which manifest in various forms in the characters. In "Dimensions" otherness has to do with insanity, domestic terror, and self-alienation in a dysfunctional marriage, whereas in "Child's Play" it concerns children's othering of a disabled young girl which eventually leads to her death. What both stories also show is that certain characters experience a sense of abjection or can be seen as embodying the abject, which eventually make them commit murder. Moreover, this thesis also argues that certain characters in both stories attempt to control and manipulate the course of events in both narratives even retrospectively. A psychoanalytical approach based on Jacques Lacan's and Julia Kristeva's theoretical framework in conjunction with Norman Fariclough's Critrical Discourse Analysis serve as the basis for this investigation.

In this dissertation, I present the score for the opera Ganymede 5 – Act I and the research paper on Kate Soper’s opera Here be Sirens. Ganymede 5 was first written in the summer of 2019 and premiered at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival on 18 September 2019 by ENAensemble at the Plays and Players Studio Theatre. Following this production, the creative team (myself, the librettist Aleksandar Hut Kono, the director Rose Freeman, and our producers Nicole Renna and Anaïs Naharro-Murphy) met and decided that the opera’s first act was dramaturgically unsalvageable. Working with Aleksandar, Rose, and my composition advisor Andrea Clearfield, I set about rewriting the first act. This new act, with an entirely new libretto, new plot, and a larger orchestra is included here in full score. In the paper, I present three approaches to understanding Kate Soper’s 2014 opera Here be Sirens. In the first chapter, I develop an analytical model using Jacques Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage as a scheme to map the evolution of the sirens Polyxo and Peitho. I argue that their evolutionary arcs together form one complete cycle of the mirror stage, where Peitho begins the opera immediately before the mirror stage and finishes well in the middle, while Polyxo starts in the middle of the mirror stage and is ultimately able to exist via sublimation. With this mapping in hand, elements of the musical and dramaturgical unfolding are contextualized, and most importantly, the relationship between speaking and singing is understood. In the second chapter, I look at the diegetic/nondiegetic orientation of the opera’s musical discourse, the narratological registers within which the opera unfolds, and the role eclectic musical styles play in the plot and in the perception and meaning of time. Together, these three windows into the work illuminate a complex, dynamic set of interactions that generate an astonishingly novel but immediately accessible opera. In the third chapter, I present the transcript of an interview I conducted with Kate Soper where we discuss a variety of topics, from the symbolic meaning of spoken language to the practical considerations of using an onstage piano played by the singers. I annotate in footnotes parts of the interview that deal directly with other parts of the analysis, and specifically those parts where Soper’s statements contradict my own analytical conclusions. The last chapter is a brief, rhapsodic consideration of this work as an analyst and composer. It first presents some paths forward for future research using the tools developed and wielded in this analysis. It then moves on to the way my own compositional dispositions framed my analysis and how they are vital to understanding what is included and what is left out of this work. Soper’s compositional voice deserves consideration on a composer-to-composer level, as it challenges some of the prevailing value-systems around contemporary music. To that end, I reconsider my analysis as if it were a composition lesson, looking at what questions – such as those around technique – are not worth asking from a compositional or analytical perspective. / Music Composition / Accompanied by one .pdf score: Ganymedes 5: An Opera in 3 Acts