Attachment And Loss In The Works Of James Joyce

Using Attachment Theory as a frame of reference to critically analyse grief in the works of James Joyce, Attachment and Loss in the Works of James Joyce allows for new and innovative readings to emerge, opening another avenue in the debate regarding cognition and literature.

James Joyce's life was just as complicated as his books; find out more about the man in this short biography about the life and times of James Joyce.

This book is an exploration of the internal world of James Joyce with particular emphasis on his being born into his parents’ grief at the loss of their firstborn son, offering a new perspective on his emotional difficulties. Mary Adams links Joyce’s profound sense of guilt and abandonment with the trauma of being a ‘replacement child’ and compares his experience with that of two psychoanalytic cases, as well as with Freud and other well-known figures who were replacement children. Issues such as survivor guilt, sibling rivalry, the ‘illegitimate’ replacement son, and the ‘dead mother’ syndrome are discussed. Joyce is seen as maturing from a paranoid, fearful state through his writing, his intelligence, his humour and his sublime poetic sensibility. By escaping the oppressive aspects of life in Dublin, in exile he could find greater emotional freedom and a new sense of belonging. A quality of claustrophobic intrusive identification in Ulysses contrasts strikingly with a new levity, imaginative identification, intimacy and compassion in Finnegans Wake. James Joyce and the Internal World of the Replacement Child highlights the concept of the replacement child and the impact this can have on a whole family. The book will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and child psychotherapists as well as students of English literature, psychoanalytic studies and readers interested in James Joyce.

A Companion to James Joyce offers a unique composite overview and analysis of Joyce's writing, his global image, and his growing impact on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literatures. Brings together 25 newly-commissioned essays by some of the top scholars in the field Explores Joyce's distinctive cultural place in Irish, British and European modernism and the growing impact of his work elsewhere in the world A comprehensive and timely Companion to current debates and possible areas of future development in Joyce studies Offers new critical readings of several of Joyce's works, including Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses

In a number of articles I published when I began my training as a psychoanalyst at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, now the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, I became intrigued by James Joyce's concern with mothers and maternal images. I found that writing "Stephen's Mothers in Ulysses" crystallized my sense that amor matris, to use Stephen Dedalus's phrase, the ambiguous "mother love" (a mother's love for her son or a son's love for his mother or both at once), was a way into many of the mysterious, unfathomed, even unfathomable passages in Ulysses. As I continued my training, while simultaneously teaching English literature at San Francisco State, I became more and more aware that the way I enjoyed teaching--the close, systematic textual analysis of literature, explication de texte--was dovetailing with the ways I was learning to listen to, and to muse about, my patients. In effect, I was learning that by focusing on the inner lives of patients and literary characters--on what Paul Schwaber in his psychoanalytic reading of Ulysses, The Cast of Characters (1999), calls "minds in action"--I was doing much the same thing. I was trying to pay the closest attention to the repeated thoughts, feelings, images, and associations that make human beings unique.

Given Ulysses’ perhaps unparalleled attention to the operations of the human mind, it is unsurprising that critics have explored the work’s psychology. Nonetheless, there has been very little research that draws on recent cognitive science to examine thought and emotion in this novel. Hogan sets out to expand our understanding of Ulysses, as well as our theoretical comprehension of narrative—and even our views of human cognition. He revises the main narratological accounts of the novel, clarifying the complex nature of narration and style. He extends his cognitive study to encompass the anti-colonial and gender concerns that are so obviously important to Joyce’s work. Finally, through a combination of broad overviews and detailed textual analyses, Hogan seeks to make this notoriously difficult book more accessible to non-specialists.

'... (MacCabe is) the most lucid, least blinkered expounder of the post-structuralist mysteries I have ever come across. This is an important, challenging book, which no Joycean can afford to ignore.'' David Lodge '... (this is) the most exciting and original book on Joyce to have appeared for many years ...' Terry Eagleton, New Statesman

Outside the Arch reverses the convention of measuring literature against psychoanalysis by using the work of five modern writers to suggest modifications to Heinz Kohut's self psychology if it is to become the paradigm to replace Freudianism. Catharine Rising applies the positions taken by Conrad, Forster, Lawrence, Joyce, and Woolf to point out Kohut's failure to provide an origin for the superego, his arguable faith in empathy as panacea, his stress on human dependency instead of autonomy, his demand for sympathetic self-objects to form and maintain the self, and his norm of a cohesive, conscious self, which undercuts the basis of human creativity. She proposes modifications, some of which have been discussed by followers of Kohut, but points out that no theory or paradigm solves all problems, though it may clarify some. In this case, self psychology provides a workable theory that undoes Freud's affronts that accounted for his own discoveries and those of Copernicus and Darwin. Rising argues that the theory of self psychology becomes much more pervasive when the works of the five writers assess the effects of the radical discoveries that proposed that man was not the center of the universe, that man was descended from apes, and that man lacks control over his own mind as Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud proposed.