Editors' Introduction

The application of psychoanalytic concepts and strategies by non-psychoanalysts for understanding human behaviors and their motivations as portrayed in literature, theater and art abounds over the last 60 or more years. In various fields in the Humanities including History, Philosophy, Sociology and Literature, many scholars approach their domains of interest using the lens of psychoanalytic theory. And as Anna Freud held, psychoanalytic ideas pervade society; most every college graduate and many others know that we have an unconscious mind, that dreams and slips of the tongue have meaning, that we use psychic defense mechanisms of all kinds. Psychoanalytic theory and thought is in the public domain and makes its contribution to people understanding each other and themselves.

The converse, the use of literature, theater and art by psychoanalysts to illustrate, to exemplify and detail psychoanalytic concepts goes back to even earlier times, for over one century, as evidenced in Freud's use of Sophocles' Oedipus, the King, and his taking from Plato's Republic, chapter seven, the tripartite model of the city - i.e. of its people - to conceptualize his “structural model” of the mind.

In this issue of the Journal we do both. We use literature and film to inform the psychoanalytic student of social events to a hypothesis conceptualized by an acknowledged creative thinker about given socio-historical events, and we use psychoanalytic concepts to understand the events portrayed in the literary or artistic work. The authors of this issue focus on humans watching events, and then look at some of the consequences of humans' watching and the actions -“inactions” as well since these too are “actions” - engendered in them that follow from this watching.

Margarete Landwehr, a scholar of German Literature, examines powerful portrayals by two strong observers of human behavior, author Elfriede Jelinek and writer and filmmaker Michael Haneke, and does two things at once: (1) Landwehr ex