The Psychoanalytic quarterly
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Biography Historical Article
The inability to mourn and the inability to love in Shakespeare's Hamlet.
The author discusses the special role played by Shakespeare's masterpiece Hamlet in the history of psychoanalysis. Freud and many of his followers have treated Hamlet as if he were a real person inhibited by the Oedipus complex. ⋯ The author proposes that, if Hamlet is autobiographical, it expresses Shakespeare's inability to mourn and love until a childhood homosexual memory has emerged. Hidden in Hamlet is a cure through the recall of a childhood memory.
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Biography Historical Article
Kafka, Borges, and the creation of consciousness, Part I: Kafka--dark ironies of the "gift" of consciousness.
The ways in which Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges struggled with the creation of consciousness in their lives and in their literary works are explored in this two-part essay. In Part I, the author juxtaposes a biographical sketch of Kafka with a close reading of his story "A Hunger Artist" (1924), in which a character (whose personality holds much in common with that of Kafka) spends his life in a quasi-delusional state starving himself in public performances. The hunger artist's self-awareness (of having lived a life devoid of the experience of love and mutual recognition) is achieved in the context of an interpersonal experience in which he has, in fact, found/created "the food [he] liked," that is, an experience of loving and being loved, of seeing and being seen, of being aware of and alive to his own imminent death. This fragile, paradoxical state of consciousness is sustained for only a moment before it is attacked, but not entirely destroyed.