Psychologizing Physics. Book Reviews

Psychologizing Physics. by Shakespeare Studies Book Summary

IN HIS ESSAY "The Uncanny," Freud describes unheimlich "forms of ego-disturbance" as a "harking-back ... to a time when the ego had not yet marked itself off sharply from the external world and from other people" (236). This process of demarcation and differentiation--of the self from others, of the self from the greater environment--is of course central to psychoanalysis as a mode of therapy and critique. Freud, Lacan, and the multitude of scholars in their wake are invested in theorizing the various processes by which this differentiation takes place, and the manifold psychological consequences of this division of internal and external, self and world. For Freud, "harking back to a time" of the undifferentiated self means retracing the line of an individual's developmental chronology, working backward until one reaches a state of infantile unity with the mother, or at least the naive fantasy of such unity. But if we hark back along a different type of chronology (remaining sensitive to the risks of transposing a developmental paradigm onto historical progression), we also find ourselves arriving at "a time when the ego had not yet marked itself off sharply from the external world and from other people." Early modern England was a place of competing and often contradictory models of subjectivity. To be sure, one model was indeed that of the differentiated self. This self was given imaginative expression in the idea of the homo clausus; it was also taking form in the emerging meaning of "individual" as a unique and separate person. This particular self has received extensive critical attention, in large part because we identify here the origins of the "modern" subject. This subject has been approached largely through a study of the classical body, a form that is self-contained and whose functions are carefully regulated. The focus on the body is an intuitive one for studying the state of the psyche, given that psychic experiences are often caused by and registered through bodily experiences. The body provides a particularly salient site of analysis for literary scholars, as it operates in both material and metaphoric registers; it brings together a study of material culture and representation.

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Psychologizing Physics. (Shakespeare Studies) Book Reviews 2024

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