Playing, Beyond the Fields of Trauma: An Interdisciplinaryand Multi-Media Approach to Reading Thanatos and Eros inPsychoanalysis, Literature, Science and Technology 公开
Sexton, Melissa Dawn (2008)
Published
Abstract
Abstract Playing, Beyond the Fields of Trauma: An Interdisciplinary and Multi-Media Approach to Reading Thanatos and Eros in Psychoanalysis, Literature, Science and Technology By Melissa D. Sexton Beginning with Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, I trace the structure of the traumatic neurosis within literary and psychoanalytic theories of trauma and suggest the evolution of consciousness results in bodily performances of play and myth. Since Freud performs the tension that exists between the life and death drives not only by playing with the play of his grandson but also in multiple references to Aristophanes' myth, I read very closely Plato's Symposium, where the conversations about Eros engender questions we continue to ask about how love is a drive for human relationships. I consider the neuro-psychoanalytic work of Jaak Panksepp as he charts the affective neuroscience of play, suggesting we are wired for joy. In the context of the 21st century where the great frontiers of brain-mapping and social networking technologies are rediscovering how language most significantly rewrites the human being, I address some of the early trends in how the increasingly dominant "flickering signifier" (N. Katherine Hayles) currently revamps communication systems. Web 2.0 technologies emphasizing "emergence" create new life forms as writing machines now also write us into being. New technological conditions create challenges and opportunities for pedagogical practices where students ask "What does literature do?" in ways that allow for no easy dialogue with the answers from the past. As somewhat of a case study, I consider the writing and biography of the physician-turned-novelist Walker Percy, together with Charles Sanders Peirce, for making meaning in post-modern times and I read Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome in dialogue with Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents. My dissertation concludes with a multimedia storytelling performance--a palimpsest--of the Percy family, the breech of the levees, and my students' own engagement with service learning, six months after Hurricane Katrina. From all layers beyond both the disciplinary and "ground-zero" fields of trauma, play becomes significant for performance of any story that emerges when there is a breech of consciousness that is experienced as a result of trauma.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Freud at Play: A Return from Beyond in Beyond the Pleasure Principle 14
A. Introduction: A Return to Studies on Hysteria 14 B. "Go to the fwont!" 29 C. The Economy of Pleasure 35 D. The Rupture of Consciousness 38 E. The Evolving Play of Psychoanalysis 41 F. Stories of Cathexes 49 G. Conclusion: Eros Holds All Living Things Together 54 Chapter 2 The Symposium's Conundrum: "What is (the truth about) love?" 56 A. Introduction: Eros Befuddles 56 B. An Ongoing Symposium 57 C. When One-of-Two Speaks: Eros as Hermeneutic 63 D. Reading Freud for Eros: `Ungebändigt immer vorwärts dringt' 71 E. A Mythic Performance 80 Chapter 3 The Aim of Love and Play: The Emergence of Soul as the New Hermeneutic for the Postconscious Posthuman 82 A. Introduction: Overcoming the Threat of Becoming Post-Human 82 B. It's All About Learning: We're Wired for Joy 85 C. Consciousness and the Hard Problem of Qualia 97
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Primary PDF
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Playing, Beyond the Fields of Trauma: An Interdisciplinaryand Multi-Media Approach to Reading Thanatos and Eros inPsychoanalysis, Literature, Science and Technology () | 2018-08-28 11:37:09 -0400 |
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