Psychoanalysis
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Item Love is a metaphor(Dublin Business School, 2006) Payne, Elin; O'Donnell, BarryWhat does love have to do with Lacan's idea of the transference and how is Plato's Symposium relevant to this topic? The statement implicit in the title and this question are found in Lacan' s Seminar VIII on Transference (Lacan, 1960-61, Seminar VIII, S.2, pA and S.1, p.ll). In the first twelve weeks of Seminar VIII, Lacan explores the functions of love and desire, illustrating their action and relation as the essence of transference with a detailed interpretation of Plato's Symposium. The Symposium is an account of a drinking party in Athens in 416 BC. At this party a collection of articulate men, including Socrates, discuss the nature of love. There also occurs at this party a scandalous incident involving an (in)famous Athenian character, Alcibiades, who crashes the party. In a state of extreme inebriation, Alcibiades completely disrupts the orderly proceedings of the Symposium. What emerges from the ensuing confusion is a poignant and immediate picture of the nature of love and desire, far more moving than the respectful speeches that precede it.Item The stress-eating relationship : how food can be used as a coping mechanism for stress and emotions(Dublin Business School, 2016) Donohue, Aisling; O'Keeffe, CathalA change in eating behaviour can occur as a result of stress or emotions a person may experience. This stress or emotion can be brought about by certain stressors a person can encounter. The purpose of this study was to assess the relationship between eating behaviour as a result of stress or emotions and a person’s belief in their ability to cope with the stress or emotions endured. It also aimed to investigate these variables differed in any way between men and woman, and between four different age groups tested. The Eating and Appraisal due to Emotions and Stress questionnaire (Ozier, 2007) and the Global Motivation Scale (Guay, Mageau & Vallerand, 2003) were used to collect data. The findings of this study suggest that there is a significant positive relationship between emotion and stress related eating and the perception an individual has in their belief of being able to coping, and between emotion and stress related eating and the appraisal of outside stressors when analysed using a Pearson correlation. It was also found that motivation, in particular the intrinsic motivations of to know and towards accomplishment and the extrinsic motivation of identified are positively correlated to the appraisal of one’s ability and resources to cope. Author keywords: Stress, eating, emotional eating, copingItem Extimacy and the evocation of the uncanny : between Freud and Lacan(Dublin Business School, 2003) Twohig, Victoria NaishThe uncanny comes as compulsion; that is, like Freud, one will feel compelled, "impelled" (Freud, 1919/1990, p. 339) toward its (infantile) researches, or rather not at all. Nicholas Royle suggests that Freud's essay on The Uncanny (1919) "presents us with someone who has found himself in an unfamiliar place or someone who, apparently without knowing why, has chosen to venture into such a place" (Royle, 2003, p. 7). The acquiescence of this present paper is perhaps an admission of the same; in a reversion, this paper is essentially about returning to familiar places made strange by repression, to other places where the uncanny resides: to the imaginary realm of Lacanian thought. It could be said that there is a theoretical coincidence between Freud's theory of the uncanny on the one hand, and Lacan's mirror stage on the other, where the theories of the Freudian uncanny coincide, as if by chance, with the experience of the body in the Lacanian mirror stage. This paper begins with a close reading of The Uncanny and its theories of affect as posited by Freud. In the second section, these theories are transposed to the Lacanian neologism extimacy, which expresses the evocation of the uncanny in the imaginary, mirror stage. Extimacy is that which is intimate while exterior, an equivocation of inside and outside which decentres the subject and provokes anxiety. This second section looks at the mirror stage and its reciprocal relationship with the imaginary realm before engaging with, what this author calls in section three, the intertextual coincidences between Lacan's (1949) paper The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the 1, and the Freudian uncanny. Here, three coincident themes between the texts are analysed: the specular or doubled other, the fragmented body, and the alter ego. The fourth section of this paper is the ironical illustration of these theoretical coincidences, found in both the Freudian uncanny and the Lacanian mirror stage, as they coalesce in the art of Hans Bellmer. Each thematic is developed into an intertextual trajectory traceable in Bellmer's psychobiography and The Doll (1933-35).Item An exploration of the link between anxiety and antisocial behaviour(Dublin Business School, 2005) McCoy, StephenDemographics and statistics show that crime, drug addiction, antisocial behaviour along with other social problems occur with the greatest frequency in communities that are, for the most part, a lot less well off than the rest of society. Though this issue has received enormous attention from psychologists and sociologists, psychoanalysis has a lot to contribute in terms of familial dynamics which are fundamental to the formation of the subject and as such are to be found at the core of these problems. Psychoanalysis places emphasis on the very stages of life as it is in this period that ones later subjectivity has its roots. Antisocial activity is not something confined to the poorer classes in society for we find that children and adolescents who come from what can be a considered stable, well off and caring backgrounds also exhibit the tendency to steal, assault, take drugs etc. What this demonstrates is that the root to the problem is not necessarily an issue of financial or geographical determination but rather a consequence of something more fundamental to our constitution as human beings. Our subjective experience of the world and our early experiences with the Other forms the basis of our functioning within the symbolic order of society and shapes the manner in which we deal with a fundamental affect which effects our subjectivity from the beginning, namely anxiety. An elucidation of anxiety and an examination of the antisocial tendency may shed more light on the psychical life of children and adolescents.Item Anorexia Nervosa and the dialectic of need, desire and demand(Dublin Business School, 2003) Mangan, SandraAs a pathology which stands impenetrable to all conscious logic, even when subjected to the empirism of medical science, anorexia nervosa remains an intractable mystery to those who seek to understand it. Despite the explosion of clinical discourse and investigation enshrouding the disease in recent times, the complexity, destructiveness and illogicity of the vanishing body has eluded scientific knowledge. This has allowed anorexia to remain 'an enigmatic, baffling and paradoxical phenomenon' (Santoro, 1995 p. 99). For while the anorexic offers her symptoms to the doctor on a silver platter, when confronted with the paragon of self-denial at-the brink of her body' s survival the master of medicine has no answer. The claim to need no food, one of the most elementary requirements of survival, constitutes a bodily privation which defies all rationalisation. Psychoanalyst Ripa di Meana describes the incredulous spectacle of Ha hungry person starving to death in front of a leaden table" as a stupefying image which renders modern medicine speechless (Ripa di Meana 1999, p. 121). The emaciated spectre of the anorexic's skeletal body betrays very little of what lies beneath its fragile surface. For this very reason, the distortion of the specular body as it diminishes into oblivion has become one of the most potent and arresting symbols of our times (Hamburg 1999, p. 762).