<p> Falling in love, for many individuals, begins with an inescapable, uncontrollable, transformative experience of intense emotions and intrusive thoughts; one phenomenon from the literature is the extreme love experience, limerence. Romantic love researchers have tended to lump extreme love phenomena into the limerence model viewed as pathology. Transpersonal psychology was chosen as the lens to examine an extreme occurrence of falling in love for its positive, transformational, and spiritual potential using a phenomenological approach. There were 25 U.S. born participants, age 30 and older, recruited from the internet who reported experiencing a very intense and very significant romantic love occurrence. Data from semi-structured interviews were thematically analyzed for emergent information, and then the data were compared to potential explanatory models including limerence, spiritual emergency, biopsychosocial, and passionate romantic love. The results revealed a unique experience unlike limerence and with limited correlations to the biopsychosocial model. The new phenomenon is called amigeist, characterized by immediate, intense soul-mate bonding, such as secure attachment with lifepartner potential. The larger themes were dynamic connection, intense emotions, astonishment, new behaviors, and passionate long-term relationships.</p>

In this paper I examine the nature of the relationship between art and reality, arguing for the centrality of the role of art in the creation and cognition of the shared reality which is the human world. I support this argument through reference to the developing discipline of psychoanalysis, specifically considering three “stages” of psychoanalysis: classic Freudian psychoanalysis, ego psychology, and object relations theory. I take the position that if we are to reap the full benefit of the explanatory power of psychoanalysis as it may be applied to an understanding of aesthetics, we must treat psychoanalysis as we do any other growing body of theory, recognizing that initial formulations may be transformed, superceded, or restricted to a circumscribed area of applicability by advances based on new evidence. To this end, I examine classic Freudian psychoanalysis in terms of concepts such as conscious/unconscious, repression, instinctual derivatives, primary and secondary process functioning, condensation and displacement, phantasy, symptom, and dream. I also consider the development of the psychoanalytic techniques of free association, transference analysis, and interpretation. I look at ego psychology in terms of the mechanisms of defense, the formation of the superego, adaptation, the “conflict free sphere of ego functioning,” and “regression in service of the ego.” And I examine object relations theory in terms of Melanie Klein's inner and outer reality, D. W. Winnicott's transitional space, and the elaboration of world and self through mechanisms of identification, introjection, projection, and regression to dependence. I tie each of the psychoanalytic theories to a theory of aesthetics developed from the psychoanalytic premises, and I provide concrete examples through interpretations of Hamlet based on each of the three aesthetic theories. I conclude that Winnicott's object relations theory grounds the most robust theory of aesthetics, one which supports the centrality of the role of art in our constitution of our selves and our world.

Writers of golden age crime fiction (1920 to 1945), and in particular female writers, have been seen by many critics as socially and politically detached. Their texts have been read as morality tales, theoretically rich mise en scenès, or psychic fantasies, by necessity emerging from an historical epoch with unique cultural and social concerns, but only obliquely engaging with these concerns by toying with unstable identities, or through playful, but doomed, private transgressions. The thesis overturns assumptions about the crime novel as a negation of the present moment, detached and escapist, by demonstrating how crime narratives responded to public debates which highlighted some of the most pressing legal and philosophical concerns of their time. Grounded in meticulous historical research, the thesis draws attention to contemporary debates between antagonistic psychological schools – giving equal space to debates within psychoanalysis and adaptive neuroscience – and charts how these debates were reflected in crime writing. Chapter two explores the contestation of the M’Naghten laws on criminal responsibility in light of Ronald True’s case (1922), followed by readings of crime narratives in which perpetrators have ambiguous and controversial legal status in regard to criminal responsibility. At the intersection of psychiatric discourse and the popular literary imagination, a critical and ethical perspective developed which not only conveyed a version of psychological discourse to a wider public, but profoundly reworked the foundations of the genre as the ritual unveiling of deviancy and the restoration of the rational institutions of society. In similar vein, chapter three explores the status of the ‘Born Criminal’ in law and medicine, and looks at crime writer Gladys Mitchell’s efforts to expose both the pitfalls of categorisation, and competing discourses’ limitations in adequately accounting for crime. Chapter four, whilst maintaining close medical-legal focus, opens up the study to consider how understandings of deviant selfhood in modernist writing inflected crime writers’ representations of unconscious and epileptic killers. Finally, chapter five continues this intertextual approach by asserting that certain crime novels express an exhaustion with the genre’s classic rational and scientific heroes, and turn instead to the affective epistemologies and notions of subconscious synthesis concomitantly being celebrated in modernist writing. Altering the position of the authoritative detective in ways that profoundly alter the politics of the form, the chapter and the thesis in total propose a reading of golden age crime fiction more responsive to cultural, psychological and legal debates of the era, leading to a reassessment of the form as neither escapist nor purely affirmative of the status quo.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed June 26, 2007). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 357-368).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Canterbury, 2007. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 322-336). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Instructional Systems Technology, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 15, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: A, page: 4645. Adviser: Sasha A. Barab.

The Pilgrim's Progress is accepted in the canon of children's literature due to its early adoption by child readers and because of its outstanding qualities. This thesis explores some possible reasons for the work's popularity and longevity. A New Historicist approach suggests the relevance of Bunyan's pilgrim hero and his narrative to each of the three centuries since the work's first publication. It focuses particularly on the interaction between society, child and text, considering the societal and psychic dimensions. History and Developmental Theory, including that of Faith Development, are drawn on as particular resources. A propositional model provides visual explanation for the interactionary role of the components and suggests a scientific basis for the relevance factors. A broad sample of copies of The Pilgrim's Progress, published from 1678 until 1994, is surveyed in order to test the hypothesis that the hero is a changing one, affected by society's changing norms and ethos. Bunyan's influence on writers for children over the three centuries is also considered, leading to recognition of The Pilgrim's Progress as a prototype for children's literature.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 246-258).

Thesis (M.A.)--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 1998. / Typescript. Abstract precedes thesis as preliminary leaves [1]-2. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 2844. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 109-110).

Previous research on the role that culture plays in reader response to literature generally has not been based on clear operational definitions of the term "culture." More often than not, researchers appear to be using the term synonymously with the reader's race, nationality, or social class, rather than including specific anthropological explanations. Moreover, there has been no research reported that isolates and then studies individual readers' cultural backgrounds as influences on their responses to American regional literature; and, while there have been some studies reported that use ethnographic methodology to examine how cultural context or setting affects response, there has been no reported ethnographic research that focuses on the influences of readers' cultural backgrounds and the cultures depicted in texts. / Ed. D.