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Medusa's Head
"Medusa's Head" (''Das Medusenhaupt'', 1922), by Sigmund Freud, is a very short, posthumously published essay on the subject of the Medusa Myth. Equating decapitation with castration, Freud maintained that the terror of Medusa was a reflection of the castration complex aroused in the young boy when the sight of the female genitals brought home the truth that females have no penis. Analysis The hair upon Medusa's head is frequently represented in works of art in the form of snakes. Freud considered that, as penis symbols derived from the pubic hair, they serve to mitigate the horror of the complex, as a form of overcompensation. This sight of Medusa's head makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him to stone. Observe that we have here once again the same origin from the castration complex and the same transformation of effect. In the original situation, it offers consolation to the spectator: he is still in possession of a penis, and the stiffening reassures him of the fact. ...
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Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating psychopathology, pathologies explained as originating in conflicts in the Psyche (psychology), psyche, through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst. Freud was born to Galician Jews, Galician Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Příbor, Freiberg, in the Austrian Empire. He qualified as a doctor of medicine in 1881 at the University of Vienna. Upon completing his habilitation in 1885, he was appointed a docent in neuropathology and became an affiliated professor in 1902. Freud lived and worked in Vienna, having set up his clinical practice there in 1886. In 1938, Freud left Austria to escape Nazi persecution. He died in exile in the United Kingdom in 1939. In founding psychoanalysis, Freud developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association (psychology), free a ...
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A Severed Head
''A Severed Head'' is a satirical, sometimes farcical 1961 novel by Iris Murdoch. It was Murdoch's fifth published novel. Primary themes include marriage, adultery, and incest within a group of civilised and educated people. Set in and around London, it depicts a power struggle between grown-up middle-class people who are lucky to be free of real problems. ''A Severed Head'' was a harbinger of the sexual revolution that was to hit Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. Plot Martin Lynch-Gibbon is a well-to-do 41-year-old wine merchant whose childless marriage to an older woman called Antonia has been one of convenience rather than love. It never occurs to him that his ongoing secret affair with Georgie, a young academic in her twenties, could be immoral. Martin is shocked when his wife tells him that she has been having an affair with Palmer Anderson, her psychoanalyst and a friend of the couple. Antonia informs Martin that she wants to divorce him and marry Anderson. Martin move ...
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1922 Essays
Nineteen or 19 may refer to: * 19 (number), the natural number following 18 and preceding 20 * one of the years 19 BC, AD 19, 1919, 2019 Films * ''19'' (film), a 2001 Japanese film * ''Nineteen'' (film), a 1987 science fiction film Music * 19 (band), a Japanese pop music duo Albums * ''19'' (Adele album), 2008 * ''19'', a 2003 album by Alsou * ''19'', a 2006 album by Evan Yo * ''19'', a 2018 album by MHD * ''19'', one half of the double album ''63/19'' by Kool A.D. * ''Number Nineteen'', a 1971 album by American jazz pianist Mal Waldron * ''XIX'' (EP), a 2019 EP by 1the9 Songs * "19" (song), a 1985 song by British musician Paul Hardcastle. * "Nineteen", a song by Bad4Good from the 1992 album '' Refugee'' * "Nineteen", a song by Karma to Burn from the 2001 album ''Almost Heathen''. * "Nineteen" (song), a 2007 song by American singer Billy Ray Cyrus. * "Nineteen", a song by Tegan and Sara from the 2007 album '' The Con''. * "XIX" (song), a 2014 song by Slipknot. ...
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Sándor Ferenczi
Sándor Ferenczi (7 July 1873 – 22 May 1933) was a Hungarian psychoanalyst, a key theorist of the psychoanalytic school and a close associate of Sigmund Freud. Biography Born Sándor Fränkel to Baruch Fränkel and Rosa Eibenschütz, both Polish Jews, he later magyarized his surname to Ferenczi. As a result of his psychiatric work, he came to believe that his patients' accounts of sexual abuse as children were truthful, having verified those accounts through other patients in the same family. This was a major reason for his eventual disputes with Sigmund Freud. Prior to this conclusion he was notable as a psychoanalyst for working with the most difficult of patients and for developing a theory of more active intervention than is usual for psychoanalytic practice. During the early 1920s, criticizing Freud's "classical" method of neutral interpretation, Ferenczi collaborated with Otto Rank to create a "here-and-now" psychotherapy that, through Rank's personal influence ...
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Vagina Dentata
''Vagina dentata'' (Latin for ''toothed vagina'') describes a folk tale in which a woman's vagina is said to contain teeth, with the associated implication that sexual intercourse might result in injury, emasculation, or castration for the man involved. The topic of "vagina dentata" may also cover a rare medical condition affecting the vagina, in which case it is more accurately termed a ''vaginal dermoid cyst''. In folklore Such folk stories are frequently told as cautionary tales warning of the dangers of unknown women and to discourage rape. The psychologist Erich Neumann wrote that in one such myth, "...a fish inhabits the vagina of the Terrible Mother; the hero is the man who overcomes the Terrible Mother, breaks the teeth out of her vagina, and so makes her into a woman." South America The legend also appears in the mythology of the Chaco and Guiana tribes of South America. In some versions, the hero leaves one tooth. North America The Ponca and the Otoe tribes tel ...
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Sexual Fetishism
Sexual fetishism or erotic fetishism is a sexual fixation on a nonliving object or nongenital body part. The object of interest is called the fetish; the person who has ''a fetish'' for that object is a fetishist. A sexual fetish may be regarded as a non-pathological aid to sexual excitement, or as a mental disorder if it causes significant psychosocial distress for the person or has detrimental effects on important areas of their life. Sexual arousal from a particular body part can be further classified as partialism. While medical definitions restrict the term ''sexual fetishism'' to objects or body parts, ''fetish'' can, in common discourse, also refer to sexual interest in specific activities. Definitions In common parlance, the word ''fetish'' is used to refer to any sexually arousing stimuli, not all of which meet the medical criteria for fetishism. This broader usage of ''fetish'' covers parts or features of the body (including obesity and body modifications), object ...
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Phallic Woman
In psychoanalysis, phallic woman is a concept to describe a woman with the symbolic attributes of the phallus. More generally, it describes any woman possessing traditionally masculine characteristics. Phallic mother Freud considered that at the phallic stage of early childhood development children of both sexes attribute possession of a penis to the mother—a belief the loss of which helps precipitate the castration complex. Thereafter males may seek fetishistic substitutes in women for the lost penis in the form of high heels, earrings or long hair to alleviate the castrative threat—terrifying phallic women such as witches (with their broomsticks) representing the failure of such substitutes to cover the underlying anxiety. The female, whose love (in Freud's view) was originally "directed to her ''phallic'' mother", may thereafter either turn to her father for love, or may return to an identification with the original phallic mother in a neurotic development. The phallic m ...
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Medusa Complex
Medusa complex is a psychological complex revolving around the petrification or freezing of human emotion, and drawing on the classical myth of the Medusa. Origins The term Medusa Complex was coined in 1948 by Gaston Bachelard to cover the feeling of petrification induced by the threat of the parental gaze. A mute, paralysed fury responds to the danger of the obliteration of an individual consciousness by an external Other (and perhaps by the corresponding internalised desire to obliterate the subjectivity of others in turn). Developments Later writers have developed Bachelard's idea in various ways. * Attachment theory uses the Medusa Complex to refer to a self-destructive early state of inwardly directed aggression produced by a disruption of the mother/child mutual gaze. * Marion Woodman saw the Medusa Complex as a dissociated state produced by paralysis of the fight-or-flight response in a state of petrified fear. She also saw it as the possible by-product of a conflict between ...
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Evil Spirit
Evil, in a general sense, is defined as the opposite or absence of good. It can be an extremely broad concept, although in everyday usage it is often more narrowly used to talk about profound wickedness and against common good. It is generally seen as taking multiple possible forms, such as the form of personal moral evil commonly associated with the word, or impersonal natural evil (as in the case of natural disasters or illnesses), and in religious thought, the form of the demonic or supernatural/eternal. While some religions, world views, and philosophies focus on "good versus evil", others deny evil's existence and usefulness in describing people. Evil can denote profound immorality, but typically not without some basis in the understanding of the human condition, where strife and suffering (cf. Hinduism) are the true roots of evil. In certain religious contexts, evil has been described as a supernatural force. Definitions of evil vary, as does the analysis of its motiv ...
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Counterphobic Attitude
Counterphobic attitude is a response to anxiety that, instead of fleeing the source of fear in the manner of a phobia, actively seeks it out, in the hope of overcoming the original anxiousness. Contrary to the avoidant personality disorder, the counterphobic represents the less usual, but not totally uncommon, response of seeking out what is feared: codependents may fall into a subcategory of this group, hiding their fears of attachment in over-dependency. Action Dare-devil activities are often undertaken in a counterphobic spirit, as a denial of the fears attached to them, which may be only partially successful. Acting out in general may have a counterphobic source, reflecting a false self over-concerned with compulsive doing to preserve a sense of power and control. Sex is a key area for counterphobic activity, sometimes powering hypersexuality in people who are actually afraid of the objects they believe they love. Adolescents, fearing sex play, may jump over to a kind of spu ...
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Abjection
Abjection is a concept in critical theory referring to becoming cast off and separated from norms and rules, especially on the scale of society and morality. The term has been explored in post-structuralism as that which inherently disturbs conventional identity and cultural concepts. Julia Kristeva explored an influential and formative overview of the concept in her 1980 work '' Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection'', where she describes subjective horror (abjection) as the feeling when an individual experiences or is confronted by the sheer experience of what Kristeva calls one's typically repressed "corporeal reality", or an intrusion of the Real in the Symbolic Order. Kristeva's concept of abjection is used commonly to analyze popular cultural narratives of horror, and discriminatory behavior manifesting in misogyny, homophobia and genocide. The concept of abjection builds on the traditional psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, whose studies often na ...
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