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PubMed1998

The image of dentistry in contemporary culture.

The multimedia portrayals of dentists and dentistry have expanded in scope. Prevention and esthetics have replaced drilling and extraction in the public perception of dental practice. According to the author, dentists themselves are no longer treated exclusively as buffoons or sadists. Instead, he writes, they are more apt to be seen as solid citizens, occasionally as romantic figures and even as complex, realistic human beings.

Attitude to Health↗
PubMed2001

A psychoanalytic reading of Peter Høeg's novel Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow.

The author presents a psychoanalytic reading of the Danish author Peter Høeg's masterpiece 'Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow', focusing on the special linguistic style of the novel. Further, the author puts forward an interpretation of the heroine, seeing her as a literary example of female bisexuality. Investigating the heroine's fate, the author discusses Miss Smilla's phallic defence and identity. The narrative technique in Høeg's novel is analysed through Lacan's concepts of the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic. The main figure is interpreted as an imaginary example of female bisexuality. Miss Smilla has neither an unambiguous gender identity nor ethnicity. The heroine is pictured in a conflict between two cultures: the Greenlandish and the western European, and her bisexuality both reflects this and is part of it. The author proposes to interpret a significant memory from Smilla's early childhood as an example of a castration phantasy, which retroactively gives new significance to the little girl's pre-oedipal frustration.

Bisexuality↗
PubMed2005

Missing what was true: problems of seeing and knowing in Henry James's The wings of the dove.

The author examines a central theme in this late novel by Henry James in relation to current psychoanalytic ideas that link the Oedipus complex with the child's developing perception of reality (both psychic and external), specifically through the experience of seeing and being seen. Britton visualises the oedipal triangle as a psychic structure through which the child may achieve recognition not only of its parents' sexual relationship, from which it is excluded, but also of itself being observed by one parent while the child is with the other. Thus, it both observes and is observed. The differing perspectives achieved--of subjectivity and objectivity--promote the perception of objective reality, as the world of relationships grows and becomes more complex. James captures with great subtlety and penetration the experience of three characters living out a symbolic oedipal relationship in which the truth is evaded or perverted. A young couple in love exploit the situation of a dying heiress whose vulnerability is intensified by her reluctance to acknowledge the truth about their relationship. At the same time, she shrinks from the gaze of others and consigns herself to isolation and ultimate despair. The author presents three significant scenes in which seeing and being seen are central to the development. In each, the dying woman is forced to face, if momentarily, her exclusion from the sexual relationship. Increasingly this connects with her approaching death--but also with the anguished recognition that the couple have cruelly befriended her only to betray her. It is suggested that James's late style and novelistic technique require the reader to tolerate confusion and uncertainty. As the perspective shifts from one protagonist to another, we ourselves are in danger of 'missing what is true' in this characteristic Jamesian scenario, where relationships are gradually perverted by manipulation, evasion and lies. In psychoanalytic theory, this would represent a failure to work through the oedipal situation, where the struggle of the child to face reality is met by a parental relationship that is too weak or too perverse to contain the pain and conflict.

Famous Persons↗
PubMed2003

Hamlet as process: a novel approach to using literature in teaching psychiatry.

Psychiatrists have made many forays into literature for the purposes of theory building, clinical understanding, and teaching. Given how fascinating and fruitful such inquiries can be, one wonders why they have had a mostly episodic place in teaching. I submit that at least some limitations resulted from an emphasis on what I would loosely call "content" and, related to it, on comprehensive "formulations" of a single literary character. This paper argues instead for a shift in focus onto "process" and situations created by particular interactions between the characters. Rather than pursue "the psychology of the individual characters; what they are like, what makes them what they are, what intentions, often apparently not conscious, seem to motivate their actions and attitudes" (Silberger 1973), I would look instead at what characters do (what they say, what they appear to emote and think) in response to each others' speech and imputed feelings and designs. The give-and-take entailed in the collision of their wishes, needs, and pasts at specific points in the evolution of the plot, and their reciprocal (mis)perceptions and (mis)interpretations, is especially relevant to understanding and teaching what is often thought to be the most complex aspect of being/becoming a psychiatrist, namely, comprehending and managing the emotional valences of the therapist-patient relationship. While such interactions are often explicit in, or can be adduced from, novels, short stories, or poems, the one form to which they are intrinsic is drama.

Communication↗
PubMed2000

Developing a code of ethics for human cloning.

Under what conditions might the cloning of human beings constitute an ethical practice? A tendency exists to analyze human cloning merely as a technical procedure. As with all revolutionary technological developments, however, human cloning potentially exists in a broad social context that will both shape and be shaped by the biological techniques. Although human cloning must be subjected to technical analysis that addresses fundamental ethical questions such as its safety and efficacy, questions exist that focus our attention on broader issues. Asserting that cloning inevitably leads to undesirable consequences commits the fallacy of technological determinism and untenably separates technological and ethical evaluation. Drawing from the Report of the National Bioethics Advisory Committee and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, we offer a draft "Code of Ethics for Human Cloning" in order to stimulate discussion about the ethics of the broader ramifications of human cloning as well as its particular technological properties.

Cloning, Organism↗
PubMed2003

Les malades imagines: diseases in fiction.

Writers often introduce into fiction works characters who suffer from one disease or another. The purpose of this literary finesse is to enrich the intrigue or to create a favourable environment for the observation of a group of human beings. The introduction of the sick person sometimes offers a chance to warn against venereal diseases or alcoholism or an opportunity to critize medicine and doctors. The writers more exceptionally express visionary views on the future of medicine. This paper selects a few interesting examples of "imagined diseases".

Autobiographies as Topic↗
PubMed2000

Shakespeare on old age and disability.

The plays of William Shakespeare were reviewed for references to disabilities, aging and disability, and older characters with disabilities. Shakespeare's references draw from traditional cultural notions about older people with disabilities. These traditional notions include people with physical disabilities being evil, the entertainment value of disabilty, and those who were mentally ill being wild and animal-like. He viewed the aging process as disabling and old age as a time when individuals lost some abilities to function, particularly when it came to mental capacity and physical mobility. His writings show that he used disability as a literary tool to add dimension to characters and set them apart. Contemporary literature continues to share some of Shakespeare's view on aging and disability but also departs from them in important ways. For example, contemporary treatment of disabilities and aging places more emphasis on the human side of the affects of aging and disabilities. Disabilities and aging are not cast in the same negative terms as Shakespeare used.

Aging↗
PubMed1986

Sickness as cultural performance: drama, trajectory, and pilgrimage root metaphors and the making social of disease.

This paper examines the use of root metaphors in the description of social activity and especially the performance of sickness. It starts with a critical account of Susan Sontag's examination of the use of illness as metaphor in literature. There then follows a brief analysis of another account of society based on the discussion of creative literature-Kenneth Burke's "Dramatism," itself acknowledged as a source by Erving Goffman. Goffman's own expressed reservations about his supposed use of a dramatic metaphor are then extended to suggest that Goffman was more concerned with "performance" in a broader sense. The discussion of performative metaphors is then shifted by a critical consideration of Anselm Strauss and colleagues' view of sickness as manifold performances of work rather than drama, expressed in their metaphor of "trajectory." Sickness as a process compounded of many performances is further explored using ideas developed by the anthropologist Victor Turner toward the end of his life, in collaboration with his wife, Edith Turner. It is finally suggested that sickness as cultural performance enables us to understand the dialectical relationships between expressive and instrumental activities surrounding sickness. This in turn leaves room for the nonreductionist understanding, within a sociological framework, of individual idiosyncrasy, biological accident, and the discourse of healing.

Anthropology, Cultural↗
PubMed1993

Overwhelming remembrance of things past: Proust portrays limbic kindling by external stimulus--literary genius can presage neurobiological patterns of puzzling behavior.

Proust detailed inexplicable behavior long before the neurobiologists Goddard and McIntyre in 1972 demonstrated that intermittent repetition of harmless stimuli can cause "kindling" of a seizure (with or without motor convulsions). Such brief seizures can occur especially in the evolutionarily old limbic system which mediates basic drives, their concomitant emotions, and certain aspects of memory. It appears that in humans the influence of specific external stimuli that revive the memory of repeated past experiences may "kindle" a transient episode of limbic overactivation. Thereupon the normal balance between the limbic and frontal lobe systems is disturbed (for a few minutes) as are normal human decision making and control of action. Linked with such a transient frontolimbic imbalance is out-of-character behavior, psychosis (hallucinations or delusions), autonomic activation, and severe distortion of affect and of action, culminating in extreme cases in a "Limbic Psychotic Trigger Reaction," as proposed by Pontius in 1981, in motiveless homicidal acts with mostly preserved consciousness and memory for the acts.

Animals↗
PubMed1997

Elizabethan madness: on London's stage.

During the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603) a renaissance of both literary and political history occurred. The stage was transformed from primitive echoes of the morality plays to a vibrant and diverse exploration of human endeavor and man's place in the universe. The titanic literary figure of Shakespeare today veils a group of friends and challengers whose pens strove for the same goal. The depiction of madness was ubiquitous during plays of this time and reflection on the views of this group of men gives us a more reliable insight into mental illness then and today.

Drama↗