In a number of articles I published when I began my training as a psychoanalyst at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, now the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, I became intrigued by James Joyce's concern with mothers and maternal images. I found that writing "Stephen's Mothers in Ulysses" crystallized my sense that amor matris, to use Stephen Dedalus's phrase, the ambiguous "mother love" (a mother's love for her son or a son's love for his mother or both at once), was a way into many of the mysterious, unfathomed, even unfathomable passages in Ulysses.

As I continued my training, while simultaneously teaching English literature at San Francisco State, I became more and more aware that the way I enjoyed teaching--the close, systematic textual analysis of literature, explication de texte--was dovetailing with the ways I was learning to listen to, and to muse about, my patients. In effect, I was learning that by focusing on the inner lives of patients and literary characters--on what Paul Schwaber in his psychoanalytic reading of Ulysses, The Cast of Characters (1999), calls "minds in action"--I was doing much the same thing. I was trying to pay the closest attention to the repeated thoughts, feelings, images, and associations that make human beings unique.

Author: Michael Zimmerman
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Ipbooks
Published: 08/01/2017
Pages: 234
Weight: 0.7lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.49d
ISBN: 9780998083377

About the Author
Zimmerman, Michael: - Michael Zimmerman received his BA from Columbia College and his MA and PhD from Columbia University. He has been practicing psychoanalysis for over 20 years in Berkeley after receiving his psychoanalytic training from the San Francisco Center of Psychoanalysis (formerly the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute). Simultaneously, he taught modern English literature at the University of California at Berkeley and at San Francisco State University where he is an emeritus professor of English. Currently, he is professor of English at the Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning at the University of San Francisco. In Tyrants of the Heart, he has enjoyed synthesizing his life-long interest in James Joyce, whose work he has taught extensively, and his fascination with the various kinds of psychoanalysis being practiced today.