Abstract: The author re-examines Freud’s essay, The Uncanny ( Das Unheimliche ), placing it in dialogue with other authors who wrote on the same subject, such as M. Heidegger, J. Lacan, and T. Todorov. He also shows how Freud’s theory hovers between an interpretation of the uncanny as a “return of the repressed” or as a “return of surmounted beliefs”—the latter making the uncanny the product of a specific historic moment in civilization (the hegemony of modern rationalism)—and opens up the unresolved question of the history of the unconscious. The author dwells particularly on the uncanny in literature and cinema, with special attention to Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby . He highlights the mostly “demonic” character of the supernatural that emerges in uncanny works, and hence questions the deeper origins of belief, both in the divine and in the diabolical. His basic thesis is that the uncanny marks an uncertainty, a source of both anxiety and pleasure, between the world of things and the dimension of the signifier.

Abstract: Even when students of psychoanalysis are prepared to learn provocative and even controversial analytic discoveries, their teachers can hinder them. If they encounter institutional anxiety, trainees will become “good” while suppressing curiosity and the ability for depth, reflecting the psychic split of the child confronted with sexual mysteries.

Abstract: This paper offers a reinterpretation of Freud’s Wolf Man case through the lens of Persian Sufi cosmology. Rather than treating the dream of the six white wolves as a disguised memory of the primal scene, it is read here as a rendering of psychic structure, six closed directions representing blocked pathways of movement, memory, connection, authority, imagination, and bodily rest. Drawing on Sufi conceptions of spatial and spiritual orientation, the paper argues that the dream embodies a saturated, paralyzed psychic world in which no direction is safe. The seventh direction, understood in Sufi thought as the inward path of mourning and transformation, never opens in the patient’s life or analysis. The dream, far from concealing meaning, reveals a soul’s impasse, and a path that could not yet be taken.

Abstract: This study investigates the interrelation of isolation, psychological trauma, and Freud’s notion of the “uncanny” within Satyajit Ray’s short story, “Ratan Babu and That Man,” with particular attention to the motif of the doppelgänger as a framework for examining fractured identity and unresolved trauma. By exploring Ratanlal’s self-imposed seclusion, my paper demonstrates how extended solitude becomes a precursor to psychological turmoil, ultimately culminating in the uncanny emergence of Manilal, the doppelgänger. This figure is presented not merely as an embodiment of Ratanlal’s suppressed fears and desires but also as a destabilising force that disrupts his sense of individuality, emphasising the relational dimensions of identity. In anchoring the discussion in Freudian theory, the doppelgänger is interpreted as both a representation of narcissistic unity and an omen of mortality, thereby intensifying Ratanlal’s existential crisis. This paper’s detailed examination of Ratanlal’s violent encounter with Manilal affirms the cyclical and paradoxical nature of trauma, wherein the desire for connection exists alongside a simultaneous rejection of the other. The study ultimately posits that the doppelgänger acts as a destabilising element, magnifying Ratanlal’s isolation and psychological disintegration. Furthermore, it illustrates how the uncanny operates as a powerful narrative mechanism which reveals the persistence of repressed desires and the precariousness of selfhood.

Abstract: The author explores how psychoanalytic thought might lead to a deeper understanding of Erik Erikson’s personality. Who was he beyond the words he wrote or the interviews he gave? Jacobs combines facts of Erikson’s life with his own psychoanalytic insights to deliver a psychological portrait of Eriskon.

Abstract: Psychoanalysts and researchers in the field of psychology identify several stages in the creative process, the most compelling or exciting of which is the muse or the “rush” stage. Many connect this stage with the transitional space and claim that aggression, disintegration, and chaos are preliminary stages. In this article, I will explore the creative process with particular emphasis on the rush stage. I will rely on Bion’s theory of thinking and the concepts of the ‘selected fact’ and reverie in order to distinguish between pathological dissociation and dissociation that is at the core of the creative process, a state of dissociative immersion in which the artist lets go of the present in terms of time and space awareness thereby becoming receptive to what emanates from within and outside. I suggest that dissociative immersion differs from pathological dissociation in the person’s ability to shift between levels of consciousness freely without falling into pathological dissociation.

Abstract: The article examines Sabina Spielrein’s model of the development of language and thought formulated in 1920–1931, in comparison with the concepts of écriture féminine first introduced in the mid-1970s. Spielrein’s model comprises three stages: autistic, magical, and social. In her positioning of the mother as a central, active figure in the process of creation and acquisition of all language—from the preverbal language to the symbolic one intended for communication with fellow human beings—Spielrein seems to foretell the “second wave” feminist critique of male-centered Freudo-Lacanian thinking about language development. Post-structuralist thinkers and critics, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, each in their own way, advocated for feminine agency and creativity.

Abstract: This article is based on a presentation given on April 10, 2022, as part of a panel during the international conference” Sabina Spielrein and Early Female Pioneers of Psychoanalysis”. It is an effort to answer the question that was the title of the panel: “Is the Death Drive Gendered?” My answer was, and remains simple: Yes, it is: the death drive is masculine. To say it in a more nuanced and accurate way, the construct of the death drive, as it has been developed in psychoanalysis, is derived from the concept (or conceptual field) that we call “masculinity,” especially as it has been defined and enforced in the late nineteenth and twentieth century in those parts of the world under the sway of Europe’s mindset.