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Though suicide in American literature seems to belong to the twentieth century, core patterns of suicide had already emerged in the nineteenth-century novel. Five suicide themes are analyzed in selected novels from 1798 to 1909, with chapter paradigms drawing on an array of historical, cultural, and social-scientific sources and medical theories from 1792 to the present. Chapter one argues that Charles Brockden Brown's dramatization of the murder-suicide sequence in Wieland (1798), filtered through semi-fictional experimentation on suicide and scientific readings in Erasmus Darwin, maps the new nation's violence, and prefigures contemporary theory about suicidal pathology. Chapter two identifies Nathaniel Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance (1852) as a >suicide-survivor novel< or >Uberlebendenroman.< Erich FROMM's insights about self-destruction and characterological necrophilia, and contemporary theory about suicide survivorship, structure my analysis of how suicide unsettles mode as the arhythmical journey of the survivor's healing and philosophical investigations are traced. Chapter three explores >symbolic-age crisis,< the modern term underscoring what Dr. Henry Morselli perceived in the 1890s: suicides often occur during failed developmental transitions. Such struggles in Rebecca Harding Davis's >Life in the Iron Mills< (1861), Stephen Crane's Maggie (1893), and Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) parallel the post-Civil War growing pains of our country as social observers such as Jacob Riis and Henry and William James voiced fears about the >epidemic< of suicide. Chapter four probes the choice of a suicide method vis-a-vis its lethality in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905), which follows the author's excursion into problems of self-determination in the bedrugged upper echelons of society. Modern suicidologist Edwin S. Shneidman's rubrics of classification explain Lily Bart's gradual and ambivalent self-poisoning as a >subintentioned< suicide; nineteenth-century pharmacology on chloral hydrate (in the work of Drs. David H. Tuke and George Miller Beard, among others) provides historical context. Chapter five is also grounded in nineteenth-century cultural perspectives about suicide, evaluating gender-specific features in the suicide deaths of male and female artists in Henry James's Princess Casamassima (1886), Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899), and Jack London's Martin Eden (1909).
This study involves the application of Erich FROMM's theoretical concepts. The more freedom mankind requests; the more isolated mankind becomes. The relationship between social support networks and depression in university students was studied to investigate FROMM's assumptions. The distinction between past social support networks and present social support networks was emphasized. Other variables addressed include place of residence, distance from home, number of contacts with home, and subjects' preferred social support versus their actual social support. – Data was collected from 100 students enrolled in three introductory psychology classes. Students responded to a Social Support Network Questionnaire and a Depression Screening Inventory. – The study failed to establish any relationship between the maintenance of long-term established social support networks that carried over from the past into the present and depression levels. No relationship was found between depression with regards to distance from home and number of contacts to home. No gender or ethnicity relationships with depression were established. One significant finding emerged. If there was discordance between how the subjects wished to spend their time and how they actually spent their time, depression was found.
The objective of this scientific research work is to develop the theme >Self - esteem and Development of Human Potential< in a psychoanalytical perspective. Within this proposal we intend to show the importance of this attribute in the life of the people mentioning the advantages of a healthy self-esteem as well as the losses of a deficit self-esteem. We will be discussing and evaluating the social influences in the formation and conservation of self-esteem, revealing that it is not born with the subject, but is formed through the first bonds and strengthened as the child finds favorable environments for its healthy development. We will look at the fact that every impression or internalized belief about inferiority comes from the interpretation of reality or the fantasy of rejection and abandonment, and that excesses or frustrations in excess in early childhood leave narcissistic wounds that can result in the existential void with reflection in the self esteem. We must prove that people with healthy self-esteem will be more courageous, bold, and confident, increasing the likelihood of being more assertive in their choices. We will look at the fact that there is enormous potential within each human being ready to be unveiled and utilized and the fertile ground by which the potential can manifest and develop is self-esteem. Finally, we must conclude that, in addition to being a daily achievement, self-esteem can be rescued at any moment, provided that one has a conscience, desire, attitude of change, courage and discipline.
This thesis is a critique of romantic love theoretically premised on the analytical psychology of Carl Jung and the humanistic psychoanalysis of Erich Fromm. The aim of this critique is to explore whether there are grounds for postulating a conception of love beyond the current romantic framework. As the critique is primarily concentrated at the depth level, romantic love is examined via the medium of Cinderella folklore, with particular focus on Andy Tennant's 1998 film adaptation of Cinderella, >Ever After<. Based on a Jungian approach to the psyche and psychic products, the methodological framework incorporates the three following tools: The tool of interpretation at the subjective level, in which the characters of the Cinderella fairy tale are read symbolically rather than taken to denote literal fictitious characters; the tool of constructive analysis, in which it is argued that romantic love is more than >nothing but< a boy/girl love story or >nothing but< a myth depicting patriarchal oppression; and the tool of amplification, in which archetypal similarities between the Christian myth and the Cinderella fairy tale are highlighted. The central argument of this critique is that while romantic love does not provide a viable model of relatedness if taken and practiced literally, the romantic myth nonetheless contains within it the basis for a fuller and richer experience of love and relatedness if read subjectively. The rationale for a depth critique of romantic love is based upon the Jungian postulate that phenomena such as dreams and myths issue fundamentally from the unconscious psychic realm, and further upon Jung's recognition of a psychological developmental process he refers to as >individuation< activated by engagement with the products of the unconscious. A symbolic/psychological reading of romantic love brings to light that romantic desire toward another is an outward manifestation of an inner desire for individual realisation, and is expressive of the individual's own capacity for wholeness. The value of a symbolic reading of romantic love is appreciated if it is conceived that it is precisely individual realisation that forms the basis for what is referred to by Erich Fromm as productive or knowledge-based love, argued here to be the ideal and only firm basis for human relatedness generally and intimate relatedness specifically.