Culture and Psyche

The volume comprises lecture notes on American literature from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century, and on cultural and clinical phenomena, starting with the works of Maria Cummins, William Faulkner, J.D. Salinger and John Updike, and moving to John Barth and DonDeLillo, arriving at rather clinical issues of the postmodern configuration in sexuality, conception, and in bulimia nervosa as a mode of postmodern non-digestibility. Contributions on psychodermatology, circumcision, and prenatal and infant development add to an attempt at integrating aspects of ritual, memory, and time, enlarging the view of subjectivity formation within a given societal structure. The epoch change from modernity to postmodernity seems to go along with quite a questionable narrowing from a culture-based toward a psyche-based view of man. Still it can be argued that postmodernity has severe implications for the human being under the influence of economics and loss of representation, making for existential disarray. The volume s base perspective is a life philosophy-inspired moderate approach of critical theory, with a pinch of post-structuralism, and quite a dash of vitalism.