Four Cs to help nurses make changes.

Four of a novelist's dreams and two contemporaneous pieces of her fiction are examined through the lens of poststructuralism; thus viewed they display narrative coherence in form and content, a reciprocal interaction between dream and written day residue, and a rhetorical function in trauma resolution. Lacan's theories about the linguistic nature of the unconscious are particularly powerful in understanding these six works especially their recourse to figurative language in deconstructing and reconstructing the traumatized self. Dream narratology suggests the close relation of unconscious processes to creativity and the unity of storymaking and personal meaning. Narrative conventions in these dreams and related fiction illustrate the functions of metaphor and metonymy in traversing Lacan's "registers of experience" and his ideas about the "itinerary of the signifier," the way dreams and art capture the elusive object of desire. Creativity serves not only a wish-fulfillment function but also a self-fulfillment function. Dreams, then, as creative acts, claim a privilege unto themselves and support Lacan's argument for a therapeutic approach of "desirelessness."

Creativity↗

PubMed1997

The art of Pirandello: a psychoanalytic view.

Luigi Pirandello, a playwright of immense profundity and creativity, won the Nobel Prize for his work in theater. A brief history of his personal and educational development is presented here, followed by an excellent translation by Gigi Gatti and Terry Doyle of one of his plays, The Man with the Flower in His Mouth, written in 1926. It is a play that is little known in the United States, but which conveys his style and many of his views in a succinct manner. This is followed by an interpretation of some of the symbols, the psychodynamics, and the ego states of the characters that Pirandello described before those ego states were described in psychoanalytic literature.

Creativity↗