PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

Marilyn Charles

Publications and source records attributed to Marilyn Charles.

9 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2004

The Hours: between safety and servitude.

This paper explores the issue of how character is created and re-created in the context of relationships. This theme, salient in the recent film The Hours, has been particularly problematic for creative women, who are often caught in tensions between self-development and relationship. Two case examples are given, in counterpoint to the film and to illustrations from Woolf's life and work. Through these various lenses, we can consider the complex interplays between our conjectures as to the expected price of relationship, and the actual price exacted as our various dramas unfold.

Character↗
PubMed2003

A beautiful mind.

It is often difficult to discern the line between creativity and madness. This presents a particular hazard for the analyst, whose failure to recognize real potential can result in undermining the individual's developmental strivings. This dilemma is explored through a case illustration of a woman whose creativity was undermined by a lack of recognition. To vivify the dilemma, the author invites the reader to look through her eyes into the lens offered by the film A Beautiful Mind, which portrays the struggles of Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash to maintain his sanity while also testing the limits of his mind and imagination. These illustrations encourage us to consider the dilemma of the gifted individual when excessive tension arises between absorption in one's medium versus needs for recognition.

Cognition↗
PubMed2003

On faith, hope, and possibility.

The idea of faith invites us into treacherous territory, as we try to negotiate the lines between hope and fear, possibility and madness. Our faith can open up untold possibilities or, alternatively, can leave us at the mercy of forces of destruction. In psychoanalysis, we need to be able to make our way through this difficult terrain, which necessitates fine-tuning our capacities to build the requisite ground on which hope might become possibility. Both Bion and Lacan have attempted to articulate the importance of being able to move beyond whatever is ostensibly known in order to be able to consider and to envision new possibilities. I would contend further that faith, at times, creates the possibility of profound growth and transformation. Several vignettes are presented by way of exploring the potentially transformative quality of faith.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Monogamy and its discontents: on winning the oedipal war.

This paper explores how idealized notions of "the beloved" constrain views of love and impede efforts to build satisfying relationships. The author begins by looking at psychoanalytic depictions of love. The effect of culture on beliefs about love is considered, exploring how cultural prescriptions, ideology, and group pressure (including psychoanalytic depictions of mature love) constrain and define views and values. Case vignettes and an example from literature illustrate ways in which cultural prescriptions obfuscate individual needs and impede self-definition, thereby interfering with real intimacy and satisfaction in love relationships.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Bion's grid: a tool for transformation.

The author explicates the principles underlying Bion's "Grid" in a way that makes them useful for the clinician. The grid represents an attempt to provide a tool by which we might better understand the abstract rules and principles that facilitate understanding in the analytic process. Bion believed that content often obscures meaning unless we can move beyond the ostensible meaning in our attempts to understand the complexity of a statement and the uses to which it is being put. For Bion, the grid itself was not so important as the attempt to increase one's powers of observation, intuition, interpretation, and transformation. A clinical illustration is provided in which the grid provides a useful means for facilitating these endeavours.

History, 20th Century↗