Freud's Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer
What does it mean to live with life-threatening illness? How does one respond to loss? Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects attempts to answer these questions and, as such, illuminates the vulnerabilities of the human body and how human beings suffer harm. In particular, it examines how cancer disrupts feelings of bodily integrity and agency.

Employing psychoanalytic theory and literary analysis, Lana Lin tracks three exemplary figures, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, poet Audre Lorde, and literary and queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Freud’s sixteen-year ordeal with a prosthetic jaw, the result of oral cancer, demonstrates the powers and failures of prosthetic objects in warding off physical and psychic fragmentation. Lorde’s life writing reveals how losing a breast to cancer is experienced as yet another attack directed toward her racially and sexually vilified body. Sedgwick’s memoir and breast cancer advice column negotiate her morbidity by disseminating a public discourse of love and pedagogy. Lin concludes with an analysis of reparative efforts at the rival Freud Museums in London and Vienna. The disassembled Freudian archive, like the subjectivities-in-dissolution upon which the book focuses, shows how the labor of integration is tethered to persistent discontinuities.

Freud’s Jaw asks what are the psychic effects of surviving in proximity to one’s mortality, and it suggests that violences stemming from social, cultural, and biological environments condition the burden of such injury. Drawing on psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s concept of “reparation,” wherein constructive forces are harnessed to repair damage to internal psychic objects, Lin proposes that the prospect of imminent destruction paradoxically incites creativity. The afflicted are obliged to devise means to reinstate, at least temporarily, their destabilized physical and psychic unity through creative, reparative projects of love and writing.

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Freud's Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer
What does it mean to live with life-threatening illness? How does one respond to loss? Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects attempts to answer these questions and, as such, illuminates the vulnerabilities of the human body and how human beings suffer harm. In particular, it examines how cancer disrupts feelings of bodily integrity and agency.

Employing psychoanalytic theory and literary analysis, Lana Lin tracks three exemplary figures, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, poet Audre Lorde, and literary and queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Freud’s sixteen-year ordeal with a prosthetic jaw, the result of oral cancer, demonstrates the powers and failures of prosthetic objects in warding off physical and psychic fragmentation. Lorde’s life writing reveals how losing a breast to cancer is experienced as yet another attack directed toward her racially and sexually vilified body. Sedgwick’s memoir and breast cancer advice column negotiate her morbidity by disseminating a public discourse of love and pedagogy. Lin concludes with an analysis of reparative efforts at the rival Freud Museums in London and Vienna. The disassembled Freudian archive, like the subjectivities-in-dissolution upon which the book focuses, shows how the labor of integration is tethered to persistent discontinuities.

Freud’s Jaw asks what are the psychic effects of surviving in proximity to one’s mortality, and it suggests that violences stemming from social, cultural, and biological environments condition the burden of such injury. Drawing on psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s concept of “reparation,” wherein constructive forces are harnessed to repair damage to internal psychic objects, Lin proposes that the prospect of imminent destruction paradoxically incites creativity. The afflicted are obliged to devise means to reinstate, at least temporarily, their destabilized physical and psychic unity through creative, reparative projects of love and writing.

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Freud's Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer

Freud's Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer

by Lana Lin
Freud's Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer

Freud's Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer

by Lana Lin

Paperback

$33.00 
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Overview

What does it mean to live with life-threatening illness? How does one respond to loss? Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects attempts to answer these questions and, as such, illuminates the vulnerabilities of the human body and how human beings suffer harm. In particular, it examines how cancer disrupts feelings of bodily integrity and agency.

Employing psychoanalytic theory and literary analysis, Lana Lin tracks three exemplary figures, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, poet Audre Lorde, and literary and queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Freud’s sixteen-year ordeal with a prosthetic jaw, the result of oral cancer, demonstrates the powers and failures of prosthetic objects in warding off physical and psychic fragmentation. Lorde’s life writing reveals how losing a breast to cancer is experienced as yet another attack directed toward her racially and sexually vilified body. Sedgwick’s memoir and breast cancer advice column negotiate her morbidity by disseminating a public discourse of love and pedagogy. Lin concludes with an analysis of reparative efforts at the rival Freud Museums in London and Vienna. The disassembled Freudian archive, like the subjectivities-in-dissolution upon which the book focuses, shows how the labor of integration is tethered to persistent discontinuities.

Freud’s Jaw asks what are the psychic effects of surviving in proximity to one’s mortality, and it suggests that violences stemming from social, cultural, and biological environments condition the burden of such injury. Drawing on psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s concept of “reparation,” wherein constructive forces are harnessed to repair damage to internal psychic objects, Lin proposes that the prospect of imminent destruction paradoxically incites creativity. The afflicted are obliged to devise means to reinstate, at least temporarily, their destabilized physical and psychic unity through creative, reparative projects of love and writing.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780823277728
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Publication date: 11/07/2017
Pages: 224
Product dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Lana Lin is Associate Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School, New York.

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
LIST OF FIGURES
INTRODUCTION

Psychoanalysis and the Cancerous Object
Psychoanalysis and Death
Key Psychoanalytic Concepts
Psychic Life of Objects
Methodologies: Psychoanalysis and Pathography
Overview of Chapters

I PROSTHETIC OBJECTS: ON SIGMUND FREUD'S
AMBIVALENT ATTACHMENTS

The Prosthetic Contest Between Human and Nonhuman
The Prosthetic Condition as Technological Predicament
The Prosthetic as Psychic Object
A Narcoanalysis of Freud's Illness
Cancer as Not-Death
His Living Prostheses

II KEEN FOR THE FIRST OBJECT: A KLEINIAN
READING OF AUDRE LORDE'S LIFE WRITING

The Breast as Psychic Object
The Breast as Political Object
Objectification and Object Relations
Orality: Creation and Destruction, Parts and Wholes
The Breast as Fetish Object
Mourning the Lost Object

III OBJECT-LOVE IN THE LATER WRITINGS
OF EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK

A Public Discourse of Love
Love as Comic Instruction
Sedgwick's Forms of Love
Object-Use, Object-Love
Bad Pedagogy/Good Pedagogy
“Let Another Finish the Poem ...”

IV REPARATIVE OBJECTS IN THE FREUDIAN
ARCHIVES

The Museum as Creative Construction
Remedy and Re-animation at the Freud Museum,
London
The Life and Death of Objects
Melancholia and Reparation at the Sigmund Freud
Museum, Vienna
Fetishism of the Lost Object

CONCLUSION: LAST OBJECTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX
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