Editions Rodopi BV is pleased to announce the following new publication(s)
in German Literature:
A Gorgon’s Mask. The Mother in Thomas Mann’s Fiction.
Lewis A. Lawson
Amsterdam/New York, NY 2005. 435 pp. (Psychoanalysis and Culture 12)
ISBN: 90-420-1745-7 € 86,-/US $ 120.-
Online info: http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?BookId=PC+12
More info:
The thesis of A Gorgon’s Mask: The Mother in Thomas Mann’s Fiction depends
upon three psychoanalytic concepts: Freud’s early work on the relationship
between the infant and its mother and on the psychology of artistic
creation, Annie Reich’s analysis of the grotesque-comic sublimation, and
Edmund Bergler’s analysis of writer’s block. Mann’s crisis of sexual
anxiety in late adolescence is presented as the defining moment for his
entire artistic life. In the throes of that crisis he included a sketch of
a female as Gorgon in a book that would not escape his mother’s notice. But
to defend himself from being overcome by the Gorgon-mother’s stare he
employed the grotesque-comic sublimation, hiding the mother figure behind
fictional characters physically attractive but psychologically repellent,
all the while couching his fiction in an ironic tone that evoked humor,
however lacking in humor the subtext might be. In this manner he could deny
to himself that the mother figure always lurked in his work, and by that
denial deny that he was a victim of oral regression. For, as Edmund Bergler
argues, the creative writer who acknowledges his oral dependency will
inevitably succumb to writer’s block. Mann’s late work reveals that his
defense against the Gorgon is crumbling. In Doctor Faustus Mann portrays
Adrian Leverkühn as, ultimately, the victim of oral regression; but the
fact that Mann was able to compete the novel, despite severe physical
illness and psychological distress, demonstrates that he himself was still
holding writer’s block at bay. In Confessions of Felix Krull: Confidence
Man, a narrative that he had abandoned forty years before, Mann was finally
forced to acknowledge that he was depleted of creative vitality, but not of
his capacity for irony, brilliantly couching the victorious return of the
repressed in ambiguity. This study will be of interest to general readers
who enjoy Mann’s narrative art, to students of Mann’s work, especially its
psychological and mythological aspects, and to students of the psychology
of artistic creativity.
Editions Rodopi BV
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