Presented By: University Library
On the Death Instinct and Creativity: Freud, Yeats, Joyce, and Us
A talk by Paul Schwaber, Professor of Letters at Wesleyan University, a practicing psychoanalyst, and author of The cast of characters: A reading of Ulysses.
The forces of living, of eros, of dreaming and of creativity only have meaning in relation to forces of non-living, destruction and a pull toward dissolution of the self. Dr. Schwaber re-traces Freud’s path in first conceiving a death instinct and contemplates two “patients” triumphing in the face of the negative, and who were dreamed into life by Freud’s contemporaries: James Joyce’s Molly in Ulysses (1922) and W. B. Yeats’ Leda in his 1923 poem “Leda and the swan.”
The forces of living, of eros, of dreaming and of creativity only have meaning in relation to forces of non-living, destruction and a pull toward dissolution of the self. Dr. Schwaber re-traces Freud’s path in first conceiving a death instinct and contemplates two “patients” triumphing in the face of the negative, and who were dreamed into life by Freud’s contemporaries: James Joyce’s Molly in Ulysses (1922) and W. B. Yeats’ Leda in his 1923 poem “Leda and the swan.”
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