Freud's interpretation in "Medusa's Head" and some alternative psychoanalytic implications of Ovid's Medusa.

Freud's very brief 1922 paper on the beheading of Medusa by Perseus wisely concludes with a call for a further examination of the sources of the legend. A now widespread interpretation of this legend is based (often without acknowledgement) on an addition to traditions concerning Medusa made in Ovid's Metamorphoses. It is argued here that this Ovidian innovation has often been misinterpreted, and that a more careful reading of Metamorphoses supports neither a widely alleged exclusively vengeful portrayal of Medusa, nor Freud's portrayal of Medusa's decapitation as solely a pitiable and terrible symbol of castration. Instead, Ovid's complex treatments of myths involving Medusa, Minerva and Perseus present parallels with Kleinian insights into phantasy attacks on fecundity, and into imagined revivals of dead or damaged inside babies. Thus the "displacement upwards" of the fearful castrated maternal genital envisioned in Freud's "Medusa's Head" must stand beside a quite different "displacement upwards" of the life-giving maternal genital. Indeed, tradition holds that Medusa's beheading gives rise to the birth of vigorous twins. Together with allied details, this aligns Ovid's masterwork with theories that modify or displace the so-called "sexual phallic monism" that some believe taints Freud's theories of gender development.

Constitutive signifiers or fetishes in Shakespeare's the Merchant of Venice?

Assessments of psychodynamic structures and processes implicit in 'The Merchant of Venice' vary considerably according to whether Lacanian or object-relations tenets are applied. Aspects of the play resemble a pattern described in Lacan's seminar on E. A. Poe's story 'The purloined letter': the 'itinerary' of the 'signifier' represented by a roving letter in Poe's story closely matches in outline the adventures surrounding roving rings in Shakespeare's play. Using Poe's story as evidence, Lacan's seminar argues that human identity is a product of 'signifiers', and not vice-versa. This conclusion that human subjectivities are constituted by signifiers does not stand up well in relation to the power of the rings and other signifying physical objects appearing in Shakespeare's play and its source stories. Recently expanded understandings of Freud's ideas about fetishism better explain the often malevolent power of the play's many signifying physical objects. In these the essential potential for damage is to sound personal relations with inner and outer objects of love. Explanations emphasising that distorted object relations and damaged subjectivities may be redeemed accord well with the dramatic and poetic patterns of Shakespeare's play, indicating that it, while portraying painful dilemmas, is still a comedy.