Returning to Part II of the book, this chapter revisits the underlying metapsychology of victimhood. Exploring Freud’s account of mourning and melancholia, it considers the psychological need to mourn and the danger of melancholia. Mourning involves absorbing the loss of a loved identification and the need thereafter to return to an evolved sense of wholeness. This links it metapsychologically to guilt and the need to be at one again after violation. Melancholia is a way of internalising an external trauma and judging from it that one lacks worth. The case study is Patricio Guzmán’s film Nostalgia for the Light (2010) on the aftermath of Chile’s dictatorship (1973–90). The film focuses on women who search the Atacama Desert for remains of murdered family members or reflect on the loss of ‘disappeared’ parents. In a film that is the director’s own act of mourning, the women insist on their right to mourn and reject the state’s melancholia-inducing implication that their loss does not matter. The film’s metaphysical and aesthetic beauty places it on the victims’ side. ‘Nostalgia’ in its title reflects loving memory of the past as a means of anchoring engagement in the present rather than escaping it.

The primitive and mature kinds of guilt in Freud identified in Chapter 7 are revisited and related to the two parallel kinds of guilt Melanie Klein finds in infant life in the paranoid–schizoid and depressive states. In both accounts, guilt is seen to be either primitive and persecutory or mature and restorative, and these are foundational for adult life. I take the two accounts so consolidated to represent different ways of organising guilt in modern social, political and legal practices. I argue that legal guilt as understood in existing retributive theory is essentially primitive and punitive and consider the counter-productive impact of a persecutory penal regime on the immature and the maturing psyche. I argue that an alternative approach based on a mature retributivism is possible. I consider Jeffrie Murphy’s view that there is no logical reason why retributive theory should lead to persecutory practice and argue that there is an historical logic behind it. A mature retributivism based in moral psychology on a person taking responsibility leads to a conception of guilt as reparative and reconciliatory. This constitutes an ethically real basis for critique of law’s existing institutional practice, in what I call an ERIC critique.

The chapter explores the concept of the individual as a democratic citizen who voluntarily exercises rights and authority, and can both legitimize and delegitimize the government. It suggests that Western secular cosmological dualism, which separates the world from man, has led to the development of the modern individual, capable of introspection, autonomy, and agency. This dualism creates a divide between the physical human body and the autonomous human mind and spirit. It has facilitated the simultaneous growth of natural sciences and humanities. The chapter examines how this secular imaginary, based on the separation of Nature and man since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is reflected in the philosophical discourses of influential thinkers like Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, and Kant. They explored the potential of this separation to evolve human agency in politics and to derive universal rights from Nature to safeguard individual freedom in society and politics. This dual cosmology also led to the development of social sciences and varying views on voluntarism and natural determinism, as seen in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. Finally, it shows how Nature has become a cultural resource through art.

Desani leaps into a bewildering formal landscape in All About H. Hatterr that adapts the history of psychoanalysis in India to give the threat of castration – what Freud theorized as a kind of traumatic passivity – a thematic and comic centrality. Psychoanalysis will be the target of satire, as Desani engages the complicated interweaving of psychoanalysis, spiritualism, colonialism, and financial survival through the cycle of misfortunes that befall his protagonist. H. Hatterr may suffer a spectrum of losses in the novel as he becomes the butt of everybody’s joke, but Desani turns that passivity on its head. Drawing from a counter-tradition of psychoanalytic theory in India, I consider how Desani upends sexual difference and propose that in India the threat of femininity is no threat at all. In Desani’s novel, the possibility of castration is ever-present, yet is reinterpreted and downgraded; the novel celebrates the impotence that castration promises and claims impotence as a central aspect of love.

If there is a Greek tragedy that is not often associated with choral song this must surely be Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus. The play has become synonymous with the story about the young Oedipus’ fate made famous by Sigmund Freud, and as such it has been canonized as the founding myth of psychoanalysis. As Freud first put it, in the fourth of his Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis: ‘The child takes both of its parents, and more particularly one of them, as the object of its erotic wishes … the child reacts to this by wishing, if he is a son, to take his father’s place, and, if she is a daughter, her mother’s … The myth of King Oedipus, who killed his father and took his mother to wife, reveals, with little modification, the infantile wish, which is later opposed and repudiated by the barrier against incest.’

As a socially and politically engaged composer, Leonard Bernstein created works for the stage that dramatize and explicate the changing status of women, gender relations, and heteronormative sexuality in the society around him. His Trouble in Tahiti (1951), for all its parodic hilarity, constitutes a powerful critique of bourgeois marriage under McCarthyism and establishes the garden as a recurring trope in his subsequent theatrical compositions. The woman-authored Wonderful Town (1953) turns a nostalgic eye on working women in 1930s Greenwich Village, and, elsewhere in Manhattan, West Side Story (1957) both advances the garden trope and gives us Anita, the wise and powerful Latina. In Trouble in Tahiti’s sequel, A Quiet Place (1983) the garden returns musically and textually to prompt a loving reconciliation between non-binary characters and the family patriarch, brokered by a woman.

This chapter develops the topic of blood as a figure of species identity in readings of late Victorian anthropological writing on totemism and on blood brotherhood. The totem, according to its first theorist, is always a species, and totemism is a theory of species identity. Besides anthropology, the chapter discusses Kipling’s Jungle Book and Stoker’s Dracula. It closes with a return to Freud, to the species concept in psychoanalysis, and to species identity as constituted by diet.

This chapter develops the concerns of Chapter 4 by discussing the relation between Freud’s concept of the symptom and Darwin’s reading of defunctioned and residual structures as evidence of species identity and affinity. Freud’s unconscious emerges in this analysis as emerging from the nineteenth century crisis of the species concept.

This chapter introduces the human as a question. It revolves around the figure of the Theban Sphinx and her interaction with Oedipus and traces her presence from the ancient world into the works of Sigmund Freud. The chapter invokes the Sphinx as a presence that both prompts and challenges the way we think the human. Oedipus’ troubled humanity stands at the intersection between his success in solving the Sphinx’s riddle and his apparent failure to understand how her words apply to his own existence. As such, the Sphinx’ intervention at Thebes exposes a deep-seated vulnerability at the core of the human condition – a vulnerability springing from the fact that while the riddle can be solved with the powers of reasoning, the human as a riddle remains enigmatic and beyond the application of logos.

How to theorise the pleasure of thinking? Psychoanalysis is the rare discipline of psychology that has accounted for the pleasure of thinking. Chapter 3 follows a historical presentation of psychoanalysis; it first presents how, when founding psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud theorised thinking and its pleasure, an experience he obviously himself had. The chapter then explores the two next generations of psychoanalysts. It thus focuses on two post-war authors, Wilfred Bion and Donald Winnicott, who, in very contrasting ways, give us elements to further understand psychic activity and its pleasures. Finally, it examines the work of contemporary theoreticians who, building on Freud, Bion, and Winnicott, turn their interests to the modalities of thinking and, with it, allude also to pleasure (André Green), whether in sublimation (Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor), daydreaming (Thomas Ogden), or the pleasure of insights.

Sebald virtually identified with Kafka. He published two substantial essays on The Castle, inspired by Walter Benjamin. Foregrounding the theme of death, he draws on Freud’s ambivalent concept of the death-drive, and associates Kafka also with Schubert’s Winterreise. Drawing implicitly on Canetti’s Crowds and Power, he interprets the protagonist of The Castle as a messianic figure seeking to confront the Castle’s power. Another essay uses Kafka’s ‘Report to an Academy’, with its Darwinian implications, as pretext for a meditation on cultural and evolutionary decline. In Sebald’s fictional works, Kafka is present throughout much of Vertigo, which in part follows Kafka’s own journey through Northern Italy from Venice to Lake Garda and alludes to Kafka’s ‘The Huntsman Gracchus’, set in the lakeside town of Riva. Sebald explores Kafka’s state of mind, as attested in letters and diaries, returning to the theme of death and also hinting at Kafka’s possible homosexuality. In Austerlitz, a significant quotation from The Trial is worked into the text. Altogether, much of Sebald’s work represents a homage to Kafka.

This chapter traces the origins of psychodynamic psychotherapy back to the late eighteenth century and to the development of ‘moral treatment’ by Pinel in Paris and William Tuke in York. It also considers the contribution of Mesmer’s theory of animal magnetism, and its revival as hypnotism in the second half of the nineteenth century by Jean-Martin Charcot and others. It then goes on to consider the work of Freud and the various critiques of his theories. Next the chapter considers the phenomenon of shell shock in the First World War and how it led to further developments in psychotherapy. It then looks at the creation of the Tavistock Clinic in the early twentieth century and the work of Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. Object relations theory is outlined, and the work of therapists such as Fairbairn, Bowlby, and Winnicott is examined. Finally the chapter briefly considers ‘the turn to the child’ in psychotherapy, the development of group psychotherapy, and the attempts to treat psychosis with psychotherapeutic methods.

4. This chapter gives a detailed account of LTMKs significance, unveiling important new influences and contexts. It provides an original reading of the novel centring on idiocy.

3. This chapter considers Waiting for the Barbarians with relation to a thematics of impasse and bafflement. It argues Coetzee designed the novel to stall the emergence of meaning.

This chapter explores short American fictions that are like jokes, drawing on Sigmund Freud’s contrast between the “tendentious” joke, which generates “pleasure by lifting suppressions and repressions,” and “innocent” humor, its pleasure based on “the liberation of nonsense.” In opposition to ideas of the classical American short story as a compact vehicle of epiphany, it argues for a countertradition of short fiction of “innocent” comedy, which features the linguistic slapstick generated by language learning and exposes the instability of language. It frames the immigrant Leo Rosten as an inheritor of Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and O. Henry, all of whom draw on lexicography and language learning to explore the “innocent” humor of unstable language. Like Boris Eikhenbaum in his description of O. Henry, Rosten’s best-known protagonist, the English-language student Hyman Kaplan, asserts that Russian Jews such as himself are especially attuned to the comic potential of English.

In the surrealist revolt against the state, the Church, and the family, the mother figure became a key target, both as custodian of bourgeois-patriarchal values and as symbol of Catholic doctrine. In works such as Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (1928), Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s L’age d’or (1930), and Joyce Mansour’s Jules César (1955), mothers are attacked and violated, suffering a fate similar to those of the detested mother figures in the fiction of the Marquis de Sade. Yet not all mothers in surrealist art and literature are portrayed in such unequivocally negative terms. Focusing on Leonor Fini’s Mourmour, conte pour enfants velus (1976) and Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm: A Weekend (2004), this chapter traces an alternative history of surrealist representations of the mother, one in which this figure is rendered more ambiguous and at times even invested with revolutionary potential. These novels, the chapter suggests, elaborate representations of maternity in critical dialogue with Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. As such they resonate to some extent with the (largely contemporaneous) work of French feminist theorists such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous, in which the concept of maternity becomes configured as an alternative to the phallocentric symbolic order.