You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Gediman brings to the complex topics of love and death a rich background of knowledge and clinical experience. She fearlessly explores the separate and interwoven themes in myth, literature, art, music, her own clinical material, and current psychoanalytic theory. Tristan and Iseult, Siegfried, and Brünhilde, are two of the pairs of legendary lovers the author uses to discuss subthemes—the femme fatale, “good” and “bad” deaths, twin narcissism, sadomasochism, and conflicts over merger and autonomy. The interweaving of clinical theory and cultural artifacts is masterful and persuasive, and the reader will come away with clearer conceptions of the many variations on the themes of loving and being in love. By categorizing and exploring both themes and subthemes, the author provides the reader with a compendium of ways to think about and understand subtle, complex topics often shrouded in muddle or mystery.
Gediman garners the fruits of others' works, such as that of Kohut, Mahler, Greenacre, Person, Bergmann, and Kaplan, and then adds compelling insights of her own. Addressing an audience of psychoanalytically informed readers, she brings order and clarity to her subject without reducing its complexity.
The book is divided into two parts. The first addresses Liebestod (love-death) fantasies, taking up narcissism, creativity, and Romanticism. It is a pleasure to discover new meanings in age-old fantasies when clinical thinking is set side by side with cultural exploration. Tristan and Iseult in their various incarnations are understood as embodying universal themes.