Project MUSE®: American Imago - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/1
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in American Imago.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 52 (1995) through current issueLatest Articles: American ImagoTWOProject MUSE®American Imago1085-79310065-860XLatest articles in American Imago. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Dante’s Imagination—Down to Earth: Some Unconscious Roots of Dante’s Divine Comedy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982937
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Dante’s Commedia, called the Divine Comedy, has been the subject of literary scrutiny for many centuries since its appearance in the fourteenth century. It was Boccaccio, Dante’s first biographer, who called it Divine as opposed to the original title of simply The Commedia. It is a work of genius and extraordinary beauty, written in the poetic form of terza rima, describing Dante’s journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. In this essay, we suggest that Dante’s journey is best considered as a poetic, literary, and psychological journey through the regions of his mind, and therefore, a text that can also be subjected to psychoanalytic scrutiny. In this spirit of inquiry, we isolate several unusually emotional
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/1/image/coversmallDante’s Imagination—Down to Earth: Some Unconscious Roots of Dante’s Divine Comedy2026-02-11text/htmlen-USDante’s Imagination—Down to Earth: Some Unconscious Roots of Dante’s Divine Comedy2026-02-112026TWOProject MUSE®862272026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-11Lord Jim—I’m Him: The Double Ghost in Conrad’s Novel
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982938
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Jim, the young sailor-protagonist of Joseph Conrad’s novel, Lord Jim (1900)1, appears as a troubled and troubling figure. Overall, his complex story is told by Marlow, an older ship’s officer who becomes Jim’s friend and counselor. Sympathetic to Jim as he is, Marlow remains perplexed by the enigma of the fine-looking seaman from a good family, the handsome sailor, seemingly “one of us,” yet profoundly disappointing when he jumps from his ship in an apparent cowardly escape at a moment of crisis. We, the readers, descend to our own psychic depths as we consider whether Jim receives a degree of empathy that he does not seem to deserve. As Marlow tries to understand his sympathy for a man he cannot comprehend, he
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/1/image/coversmallLord Jim—I’m Him: The Double Ghost in Conrad’s Novel2026-02-11text/htmlen-USLord Jim—I’m Him: The Double Ghost in Conrad’s Novel2026-02-112026TWOProject MUSE®752632026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-11Can Tweedledum and Tweedledee Ever Become Friends?: Trauma, Doppelgänger, and the Freudian Uncanny in Satyajit Ray’s “Ratan Babu and That Man”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982939
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The encounter with the “Doppelgänger” and “Uncanny” is an important subject in literature and psychology. It captures the disconcerting synergy between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Sigmund Freud’s seminal essay on the uncanny, “Das Unheimliche” (1919) offers a framework for understanding this phenomenon, particularly its connection to repressed fears, unresolved traumas, and the disquieting experience of seeing oneself reflected in another. Freudian uncanny is not merely a literary device; it is a psychological disturbance that arises when the boundaries between reality and imagination blur as it leaves individuals grappling with their own fragmented sense of self. My paper seeks to explore how this Freudian
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/1/image/coversmallCan Tweedledum and Tweedledee Ever Become Friends?: Trauma, Doppelgänger, and the Freudian Uncanny in Satyajit Ray’s “Ratan Babu and That Man”2026-02-11text/htmlen-USCan Tweedledum and Tweedledee Ever Become Friends?: Trauma, Doppelgänger, and the Freudian Uncanny in Satyajit Ray’s “Ratan Babu and That Man”2026-02-112026TWOProject MUSE®893812026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-11What Is Uncanny About the Uncanny?
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982940
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Freud’s Das Unheimlich (1919a) has been translated into English as The Uncanny.1 In German, there is also a term that designates the literary genre—today also a cinematographic genre—that has an unheimlich effect: Schauerliteratur or Literatur des Unheimlichen. English literature has the Gothic genre. Freud dedicated much attention to literary works that have an “uncanny” effect on the reader and noted that only rarely do ordinary people experience the uncanny in their everyday life. In fact, the gothic genre aims at “artfully” creating this effect. In particular, Freud analyzes Der Sandmann (“The Sandman”) by E. T. A. Hoffmann (1916).2 In our own time, cinema often attempts to convey the uncanny.Today, the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/1/image/coversmallWhat Is Uncanny About the Uncanny?2026-02-11text/htmlen-USWhat Is Uncanny About the Uncanny?2026-02-112026TWOProject MUSE®701972026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-11Self-Writing and the Psyche: Autobiographical Endeavors of Women Psychoanalysts
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982941
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Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) marked the beginning of self-writing1 as one of the most prevalent everyday writing practices in psychoanalysis. From early on, analysts employed life-writing genres to gain deeper insight into their patients’ and their own life stories (Sobolewska, 2024, pp. 6–10). Although Freud viewed memories as constructed images of the past, while conceptualizing memory itself as a constantly shifting phenomenon, the remnants of past experiences—fragments that reemerge in the mind and body—became essential material for structuring and understanding life in psychoanalysis (Sprengnether, 2012, pp. 215–239). Given the crucial role of life stories in psychoanalytic practice, it
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/1/image/coversmallSelf-Writing and the Psyche: Autobiographical Endeavors of Women Psychoanalysts2026-02-11text/htmlen-USSelf-Writing and the Psyche: Autobiographical Endeavors of Women Psychoanalysts2026-02-112026TWOProject MUSE®905612026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-11Harriet Jacobs’s and Jessica Benjamin’s Insights Into “Witnessing”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982942
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Despite living in a Victorian, racist, sexist, and gendered culture, in 1861—four years before the end of the Civil War—a former enslaved woman who had escaped from the South published a veiled (or pseudonymous) autobiographical narrative discussing the sexual abuse of Black enslaved women by White male enslavers.1 She wrote that she aimed to arouse “the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse” (Jacobs, 1987, p. 1). By crafting Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, the first full-length, authentic narrative written by an enslaved woman, Harriet Jacobs evolved into a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/1/image/coversmallHarriet Jacobs’s and Jessica Benjamin’s Insights Into “Witnessing”2026-02-11text/htmlen-USHarriet Jacobs’s and Jessica Benjamin’s Insights Into “Witnessing”2026-02-112026TWOProject MUSE®1155262026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-11Six Wolves, Seven Directions: Dreaming the Wolf Man Through Sufi Geometry
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982943
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The case of the Wolf Man remains one of the most enduring and elaborated case reports in the history of psychoanalysis (Meissner, 1979; Muslin, 1991; Thomas, 1992; Jacobs, 1994; Morley & Morley, 2012; Schafer, 2013; Thomas-Anttila, 2015; Gottlieb, 2017; Blum, 2018; Baker, 2019; Schmidt, 2019) First published by Freud in 1918 under the title From the History of an Infantile Neurosis, the text presents the treatment of Sergei Pankejeff, a young Russian aristocrat who entered analysis with Freud at the age of twenty-three. He arrived in a state of deep psychic distress, unable to work or sustain ordinary functioning. His symptoms included phobias, obsessive thoughts, constipation, hallucinations, and episodes of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/1/image/coversmallSix Wolves, Seven Directions: Dreaming the Wolf Man Through Sufi Geometry2026-02-11text/htmlen-USSix Wolves, Seven Directions: Dreaming the Wolf Man Through Sufi Geometry2026-02-112026TWOProject MUSE®620702026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-11Loss and Retrieval in Music
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982944
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“Loss and retrieval” is a fundamental theme of psychoanalysis. Those who consult a psychoanalyst are looking for something they have lost: inner balance, orientation, coherence, satisfaction, fulfilment, love... Even the unhappy, who have apparently never found such things in their lives, must already have some idea of what they are looking for; otherwise, they could not begin to search.If we follow Freud, then the desire to find again what we have lost is the first and primordial activity of our soul and the basis of all psychic life and all psychic structure. We humans are born unfinished before we provide ourselves with what we need. We are dependent on others to nourish, support, and protect us. This does not
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/1/image/coversmallLoss and Retrieval in Music2026-02-11text/htmlen-USLoss and Retrieval in Music2026-02-112026TWOProject MUSE®372332026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-11“Mother, Where Did Psychoanalysis Come From?”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982945
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In my experience teaching classical psychoanalytic principles, I have come to realize that a specific kind of permissionis required for students to learn stirring analytic discoveries. Without such consent, or when met with institutional anxiety, candidates will become “good” while hiding their curiosity and capacity for depth, mirroring the psychic split of a child faced with sexual mysteries.When faced with the inkling of sexual mysteries, each child, Freud (1914, p. 75) tells us, begins to have a scientific mind of her own. The child has burning questions. Where do babies come from? What about naked bodies? Why are they different? What do the parents do behind the closed door? These are not extinguished with
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/1/image/coversmall“Mother, Where Did Psychoanalysis Come From?”2026-02-11text/htmlen-US“Mother, Where Did Psychoanalysis Come From?”2026-02-112026TWOProject MUSE®237312026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-11The Musical Embrace: Auditory Contiguity and the Unifying Function of Music-listening
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982946
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“Some . . . turn of mind in me rebels against being moved without knowing why I am thus moved and what it is that has a hold on me [was mich ergreift]1”When something affects us deeply, we tend to say that it touches us. Such expressions allude to the intimate, immediate, and “contiguous” nature of touch, in contrast to distal senses that allegedly involve separation between the perceiver and the perceived. They are often metaphoric, insofar as that which touches us is not actually given via the tactile modality. Yet, occasionally, what we see or hear may be felt to be in direct contact with us and hence resemble touch in a more concrete sense. Here, I am not referring to natural-scientific matters, such as sound
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/1/image/coversmallThe Musical Embrace: Auditory Contiguity and the Unifying Function of Music-listening2026-02-11text/htmlen-USThe Musical Embrace: Auditory Contiguity and the Unifying Function of Music-listening2026-02-112026TWOProject MUSE®1056762026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-11Visual Culture in Freud’s Vienna: Science, Eros, and the Psychoanalytic Imagination by Mary Bergstein (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982947
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This book is another contribution to the growing history of visual culture in relation to psychoanalysis, along with Bergstein’s previous Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography, and the History of Art (Cornell University Press, 2010) and Diane O’Donoghue’s On Dangerous Ground: Freud’s Visual Cultures of the Unconscious (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2020), which appears in the same Psychoanalytic Horizons series as the book under review.At first it might seem a paradox that so much interest in the visual emerges from a fundamentally verbal practice, one that Freud himself declared could not be witnessed by a third party (much to the disappointment of the medical students who attended his first lectures).1 Though a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/1/image/coversmallVisual Culture in Freud’s Vienna: Science, Eros, and the Psychoanalytic Imagination by Mary Bergstein (review)2026-02-11text/htmlen-USVisual Culture in Freud’s Vienna: Science, Eros, and the Psychoanalytic Imagination by Mary Bergstein (review)2026-02-112026TWOProject MUSE®361592026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-11Lacan, Kris and the Psychoanalytic Legacy: The Brain Eater by Sergio Benvenuto (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982948
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Sergio Benvenuto ends his recent monograph, Lacan, Kris and the Psychoanalytic Legacy: The Brain Eater, at what is arguably its beginning. This is a book about writing: about analysts’ writing (about their work with patients; about each other’s work), about a patient’s writing (or rather difficulty with writing), about how the figure of writing as both symptom and as form of transmission gets refracted and theorized in the psychoanalytic field. It centers on the case of Professor Brain (as Benvenuto calls him), the subject of Ernst Kris’s case study (and a former patient of Melitta Schmideberg, Melanie Klein’s daughter) that Lacan made much of in several of his works of the 1950s; ostensibly centering Kris’s case
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/1/image/coversmallLacan, Kris and the Psychoanalytic Legacy: The Brain Eater by Sergio Benvenuto (review)2026-02-11text/htmlen-USLacan, Kris and the Psychoanalytic Legacy: The Brain Eater by Sergio Benvenuto (review)2026-02-112026TWOProject MUSE®248232026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-11Nine Lives: My Risky Road from Fifties Rebel to Feminist Critic by Claire Kahane (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982949
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Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate . . .Readers of American Imago may have encountered Claire Kahane’s essay (2020) about Ian McEwan’s A Child in Time (1987), which won the Silberger Prize from the Boston Psychoanalytic Society. Interdisciplinary scholars familiar with the history of psychoanalytic feminist writings will know of ground-breaking anthologies she contributed to and co-edited, The (M) other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation (1985) and In Dora’s Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism (1985). Academic colleagues of her generation may have read her Passions of the Voice: Hysteria, Narrative and the Figure of the Speaking Woman, 1850–1915 (1995). We may remember the landmark conference
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/1/image/coversmallNine Lives: My Risky Road from Fifties Rebel to Feminist Critic by Claire Kahane (review)2026-02-11text/htmlen-USNine Lives: My Risky Road from Fifties Rebel to Feminist Critic by Claire Kahane (review)2026-02-112026TWOProject MUSE®285782026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-11