This paper has two aims: 1. to apply Foucault’s theories of disciplinary systems to European Jewish history, which acts to enrich our understanding of this particular group’s own experiences under punitive powers; 2. to reconsider Foucault’s framework for Discipline and Punish (DP), a framework that is problematized when examined from the receiving (rather than the exercising) end of discipline, punishment, and torture. That said, the inspiration for this paper could not have been conceived without Foucault’s unique understanding of disciplinary structures to begin with. While scholarship owes a great deal to Foucault, this paper draws out the inherent problems in attempting to think about crime and punishment from a historical perspective, as the disciplines have not been, as Foucault claims, an evolutionary process.

A somewhat experimental opening to the paper, Part I attempts to invoke Foucault’s own factual descriptions of the disciplinary power configurations exercised over the leper colony and plague-stricken town by a comparative study of the disciplines employed in the medieval Jewish ghetto and the Lager, respectively.

PhD candidate, Curriculum and Pedagogy
The University of British Columbia
Vancouver, Canada

The present paper examines Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise based on the psychological theories of Ernest Becker and Robert Jay Lifton. Becker argued that people flee existential anxiety through the twin ontological motives of blending in and standing out. The novel’s protagonist, Jack Gladney, is plagued by thanatophobia because of his failed attempt to simultaneously pursue both motives in Hitler studies. In addition to death anxiety, another major theme of White Noise is the fragmentation of modern life due to media saturation. Lifton’s work connects these themes by showing how the rapidity of changing knowledge in the postmodern age threatens to undermine the sense of symbolic immortality connecting the self to past and future. Lifton is more optimistic than Becker about the human capacity for abating existential anxiety. DeLillo hints at a similar optimism by illustrating the creative and malleable ways in which the Gladney children symbolically confront their mortality.

Assistant Professor of Psychology
Lander University

This essay explores political violence and its relation to the disruption of interpersonal communication, with reference to the conditions of war in Africa and elsewhere.  A tribute to Sergio Viera de Mello, the paper is applicable to violence and shame in literature as well as the social and political realms.

16 Armory St.
Northampton, MA 01060

Vulnerability to both shame and the longing for approval and love is the core of what Silvan Tomkins has called the “depressive posture,” one that is found frequently among certain types of highly creative personalities. As Tomkins describes the depressive’s relationship to the other, as first formed in the parent-child dyad, the parent shows great affection and love to the child but also alternately distances her with shame, anger, and contempt when she is perceived as offending or falling short, thus creating a strong corrective identification with the parent. Thus arises a magnified greed for both love and respect, in which the latter become fatefully tied to achievement. The quest for love and respect through communion, concern, control, and achievement underlies the major themes of George Eliot’s life and work. The dynamic nature of this depressive drama is particularly well illustrated in Eliot’s last great novel, Daniel Deronda.

Professor, English and Cultural Studies
McMaster University,
Hamilton, Ontario Canada

The life-work of Salvador Dalí is a great challenge for the psychology of art from a psychoanalytic point of view. According to my theory, the inner experiences that were expressed and concealed in his works were formed by family secrets and related mourning process. I try to approach this hypothesis using the „crypt” theory of hungarian-french psychoanalysts Miklós Ábrahám and Mária Török. I also aim at associating Dalí’s certain typical animal motifs, such as the maned lion’s head, the crabs and the (praying) mantis with a universal symbol, the so called “vagina dentata”. The symbol of aggressive female sexuality and predatory motherhood represents the emergence of feelings and anxiety related to the castration complex and to the related universal topics of birth, death, sexuality and individuation, and its appearance in Dalí’s work reflects dramatic conflict solving mechanisms as the possible artistic elaborations of this developmental crisis.

• clinical psychologist,
  
• assistant lecturer, University of Szeged, Institute of Psychology,
  
• phd-student, University of Pécs, theoretical psychoanalysis program

Hungary, EU

In this essay I offer a reading of Sylvia Plath’s ‘Ariel’ in terms of how it subverts signification through the instability of the ‘I’ persona. Taking the notion of jouissance (as a destructive excess beyond language), I explore how ‘Ariel’ and other poems written in October 1962 begin to unravel the signifying network and, thus, the critic him/herself is faced with a profoundly difficult task in understanding them. Rather than trying to do so, I outline how, by replacing a focus on signification (the stable transmission of meaning) with the process of the text (its use of phonology, repetition and syntactic fragmentation) the critic can maintain the poems’ crucial ambiguity. They do not mean, therefore, in the usual sense of the word; rather, they mean only in an ambiguous, unstable and shifting manner, one that evades the critical desire to impose a certainty of interpretation upon them. 

Independent Scholar

80 chemin De-La-Montagne
1224 Chêne-Bougeries
Switzerland

Independent Scholar

29 Richmond Road
Cambridge CB4 3PP
UK

Senior Lecturer
International Film School Wales
Newport School of Art, Media & Design

University of Wales, Newport
Lodge Road, Caerleon
Newport
Wales, UK NP18 3QT

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