Imaginary Existences: A psychoanalytic exploration of phantasy, fiction, desires and daydreams interweaves scholarly psychoanalytic wisdom and large medical adventure with insights derived from shut readings of serious literature in a uniquely innovative and artistic demeanour, convincingly demonstrating how those methods of considering – psychoanalysis and literary feedback – organically relate to one another. this is often concurrently a psychoanalytic ebook and a publication approximately literature, illuminating the resourceful percentages current inside either the psychoanalytic come upon and the act of studying fiction. Scholarly and good researched, the psychoanalytic principles awarded have their foundation within the paintings of Freud and Klein and a few in their fans; the wide and cutting edge writing concerning the nice authors in Western literature is both scholarly and lucent.

Here, Ignês Sodré explores creativity itself and, in particular, the impediments to artistic pondering: defences, in most cases narcissistic, opposed to dependency, guilt and loss, and the mis-use of mind's eye to disclaim fact. In her reviews of the characters created via authors corresponding to George Eliot, Cervantes, Flaubert, Thomas Mann, Proust and Shakespeare, Sodré examines the way in which nice writers create characters who mis-use their mind's eye, twisting truth into romantic daydreams or sado-masochistic enactments, which petrify event and freeze the fluidity of proposal. Her medical stories proceed and extend this subject matter, broadening the sector and lending verification and weight to the arguments.

These poles of Sodré’s pondering – psychoanalysis and literature – engage seamlessly in Imaginary Existences; the 2 disciplines interact, every one an intimate a part of a realized exploration of the human : our wishes, our fears and our delusions. This convergence will pay tribute to the good intensity of the fictitious paintings being studied and to the mental validity of the psychoanalytic rules. This e-book might be of curiosity to psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychotherapists, literary critics, and people attracted to literature and literary criticism.