Search

AbstractThe HIV pandemic in South Africa has tragically left a wake of vertically infected children who have suffered parental loss and social marginalization. Vertically infected HIV-positive children are those who have acquired the virus from their mother during pregnancy, childbirth, or breastfeeding. In this paper, the development and alienation of the self is explored in a psychoanalytically informed research case study of a black adolescent girl who was vertically infected with HIV and later fostered by a white mother. This case study explores the sociogenic meanings of raced maternal experiences and disease identified in a series of psychoanalytic interviews, using interpretive phenomenological analysis. Drawing from Melanie Klein, Franz Fanon and other feminist and post-colonial psychoanalytic theorists, the early primal raced and diseased scene is considered through internalizations and fixation on the body. Nosipho is first introduced through a short vignette and a discussion of her early maternal relational experiences. The paper then explores the ambivalence experienced by the participant as part of her HIV and raced lived experiences. HIV and raced subjectivities are both powerful internalized conscious as well as unconscious embodied experiences. For Nosipho, it has been a complicated process found in the shared dual mothering experiences between a biological mother who is black and the subsequent white maternal experiences. The interrogation of this embodied dual experiences of having black mothers who are HIV-positive whilst simultaneously having white mothering roles in children who are vertically infected with HIV is a terrain that is infused by deep contradictory and conflicting emotional and affective states around love and hate, joy and despair, fear, and hope, all at once. Consequently, holding both the HIV and the raced subjectivities is deeply painful for black children who are vertically infected with HIV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report on the proceedings of the "Rank Horror" symposium, convened in May 2024 to reconsider Otto Rank's life, work, and enduring contributions to psychoanalytic theory and practice, includes a brief historical survey of Rank's relationship to Sigmund Freud and other original members of the International Psychoanalytic Association's Central Committee, and an account of the symposium's wider intellectual and political context. It outlines the reasons for returning to Rank now, and a summary of the papers presented. Particular focus is afforded to Rank's 1924 book, The Trauma of Birth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paperwork analyses motherhood as literary theme in Ioana Nicolaie's novel Cartea Reghinei (2019). The novel forms a trilogy together with Pelinul negru (2017) and Tot înainte (2021), but it also communicates on different levels with the author's other novels. The first part of the study focuses on the relationship between the narrative perspective and the authorial subjectivity, especially since the autobiographical vein of the novel is quite significant, while the main character is also built on this autobiographical foundation. The novel, however, makes possible several reading perspectives, and the experience of motherhood is particularized by the socio-political context. Therefore, the second part of the paper deals with this particularization, but demonstrates that the novel also emphasizes deeper meanings of motherhood as an essential experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Karyn Kusama's Destroyer (2018) was reviewed as a neo-noir re-working and a star vehicle for Nicole Kidman. This article argues that it in fact offers a complex re-visioning of both the noir narrative to which reviewers compared it, and the 'woman's film' and its successor, the maternal revenge film. It examines the ways in which Kusama's film plays on cinematic genre codes and structures to suggest that they constitute a 'compulsion to repeat', in which femininity as performance is scripted, defined and positioned, and, where it threatens transgression, rendered abject as bodily excess. The film's flashback structure, it argues, first exposes the various scripts through which its protagonist Erin's younger self performs the roles she is given, and then stages the recovery of embodied memory, as generic codes and structures give way to the phenomenology of the process of remembering. Through its construction of a memory text in which time is fractured and/or slowed in moments of intensity, the film works against conventional accounts of subjectivity to suggest that Erin's recovery of memory is also a recovery of a specifically maternal body. It thus stages an attempt to retrieve, or construct, a subjectivity that is embodied, relational, and maternal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]