Romantic Psyche and Psychoanalysis

Romantic Circles

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Romantic Psyche and Psychoanalysis Public Deposited

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Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/books/pv63g210h

Abstract

This volume of Romantic Circles Praxis Series includes an editor's introduction by Joel Faflak, essays by Ildiko Csengei, Matt ffytche, Mary Jacobus, Julie Carlson, Tilottama Rajan, and Ross Woodman.

"Romantic Psyche and Psychoanalysis" offers a series of shifting perspectices on the emergence of psychoanalysis and a psychoanalytical consciousness in early and later British and German Romantic poetry, fiction, philosophy, and science. Rather than read psychoanalysis as one of Romanticism's inevitable outcomes, this volume reads for what remains unthought between Romantic thought and contemporary theory and criticism about Romanticism and psychoanalysis. The papers herein map versions of a psychoanalysis avant la lettre, but more crucially these essays imagine how psychoanalysis before Freud thinks itself differently, as well as anticipating and staging its later concerns, theorizations, and institutionalizations. Together they offer what might be called the profoundly psychosomatic matrix within which the specters of modern subjectivity materialize themselves. Ildiko Csengei reads the faints/feints of eighteenth-century sensibility through novel developments that critique the blind spots of Freud's interpretations. Matt Ffytche examines how the Romantic soul or psyche is neither divine power nor archetypal reality but a mediation between psychology and ontology that brings the psyche into its own radically embodied being. Mary Jacobus explores in Romantic 'autothanography' an uneconomized nad uneconomical Romantic feeling--a way of seeing feeling and of feeling what we see--that we are only beginning to udnerstand. Jule Carlson sees in the 'in/fancy' of Romantic (self-) writing a Romantic phantasy that is our reality test, a psychoanalysis wilder than Freud's. Tilottama Rajan examines how Germanmm idealist thought, veering toward a psychoanalysis it both entertains and cannot avoid, suggests more broadly how psychoanalysis is always the detour that history and thought take, making both (im)possible, yet forcing history to think the human otherwise. And finally, Ross Woodman reads between Jung's work on analytical psychology and alchemy and Blake and Shelley Romanticism's unavoidable turn sideways from rationality toward the uncanny work of understanding and imagination that makes reason possible in the first place.

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