Allegorical Investigations: Autism, Applied Behavioral Analysis, and Medieval Poetry.

This essay explores the connections between the modern autism intervention Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) and medieval personification allegory to show how literature powerfully enables the work of neurodiversity. Invoking the theory of the language game to investigate the clinical history of ABA, the essay puts the fourteenth-century poet William Langland in dialogue with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell. I argue that the approach to language emerging from this constellation of voices works as a precise tool for diagnosing the ethical liabilities of ABA. By highlighting the shared interest in a set of animated terms across different historical and disciplinary domains, we can see how allegorical writing becomes an essential resource for exposing how ABA travesties human need and emotion. Working against the ethos of this "therapeutic" intervention, Langland, Wittgenstein, and Cavell join with autistic writers in advancing a model of language development based on mutuality, reciprocity, and shared forms of life.

Ateleological propagation in Goethe's Metamorphosis of plants.

It was commonly accepted in Goethe's time that plants were equipped both to propagate themselves and to play a certain role in the natural economy as a result of God's beneficent and providential design. Goethe's identification of sexual propagation as the "summit of nature" in The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) might suggest that he, too, drew strongly from this theological-metaphysical tradition that had given rise to Christian Wolff's science of teleology. Goethe, however, portrayed nature as inherently active and propagative, itself improvising into the future by multiple means, with no extrinsically pre-ordained goal or fixed end-point. Rooted in the nature philosophy of his friend and mentor Herder, Goethe's plants exhibit their own historically and environmentally conditioned drives and directionality in The Metamorphosis of Plants. In this paper I argue that conceiving of nature as active productivity-not merely a passive product-freed Goethe of the need to tie plants' forms and functions to a divine system of ends, and allowed him to consider possibilities for plants, and for nature, beyond the walls of teleology.

[Waking in the Blue: The representation and the role of the psychiatric disorder in Robert Lowell's confessional poetry].

BACKGROUND: Psychobiographical analyses of the significant representatives of confessional poetry are important in understanding both the genesis of the poems and the history of the authors' psychiatric disorders. Most of the American confessional poets have died by suicide but Robert Lowell avoided this sad faith. AIMS: The purpose of this present paper is to analyze how the psychiatric disorder has been captured in his confessio - nal poetry and what sorts of creative processes can be identified that have possibly contributed to the fact that Lowell avoided suicide. METHODS: Art-, biographical- and document analyses have been performed. The analyzed writings belong to the confessional-lyrical part of Lowell's oeuvre. The reconstruction of the biography- and the illness history have been conducted based on international publications. RESULTS: Robert Lowell was hospitalized for the first time due to a psychiatric disorder in 1949, at the age of 32. The diagnosis was bipolar disorder and he suffered from this disorder through the rest of his life. During his psychiatric treatments obvious relationships have been revealed between his hypomanic states and artistic creativity. Moreover, he felt that his illness had been playing an important part in his art and contributed to his identity. The onset of the episodes of his bipolar disorder and the processes of his artistic self-expression were intertwined. Accordingly, hypo - manic states served as sources for creativity and the illness itself became an important theme in his poetry. CONCLUSIONS: Robert Lowell's artistic viewpoint, his desire for freedom and the sensitive way he was able to show Ame - rica in the mid-twentieth century all might have been in relationship with his psychiatric illness. His unique per - spective and artistic and political sensitivity made him one of the most admired poets of his era and maybe the same sensitivity contributed to his unexpected death at the age of 60. Professional psychiatric treatments, creative generative processes and the received support from family members and friends were those factors that might have been helped him in avoiding suicide.

Cancer and the emotions in 18th-century literature.

This essay argues that the emotional rhetoric of today's breast cancer discourse-with its emphasis on stoicism and 'positive thinking' in the cancer patient, and its use of sympathetic feeling to encourage charitable giving-has its roots in the long 18th century. While cancer had long been connected with the emotions, 18th-century literature saw it associated with both 'positive' and 'negative' feelings, and metaphors describing jealousy, love and other sentiments as 'like a cancer' were used to highlight the danger of allowing feelings-even benevolent or pleasurable feelings-to flourish unchecked. As the century wore on, breast cancer in particular became an important literary device for exploring the dangers of feeling in women, with writers of both moralising treatises and sentimental novels connecting the growth or development of cancer with the indulgence of feeling, and portraying emotional self-control as the only possible form of resistance against the disease. If, as Barbara Ehrenreich suggests, today's discourse of 'positive thinking' has been mobilised to make patients with breast cancer more accepting of their diagnosis and more cooperative with punitive treatment regimens, then 18th-century fictional exhortations to stay cheerful served similarly conservative political and economic purposes, encouraging continued female submission to male prerogatives inside and outside the household.

DOUBLINGS BETWEEN BEWILDERMENT AND ENLIGHTENMENT: READING FREUD WITH HEINE ON THE TROUBLED IDENTITY OF HIRSCH-HYACINTH.

The present paper examines Freud's collapse of Heine's poignantly observed multi-cultural narratives in discerning the joke's mechanism of doubling as it progresses from initial bewilderment to momentary enlightenment. In so doing, Freud opens the door to examination of the complex Jewish cultural identity he and Heine share, as represented by the fictional character, "Hirsch-Hyacinth". Hirsch-Hyacinth is a caricature of the "marginal man" in his doubled orientation between and within conflicting aspects of self, a condition reflecting oscillation between idealization, derogation, awareness and dissociation, conditioned by internalization of societal prejudice and traumatization. Freud's tightly focused demonstration of psychoanalytic method upon the Heine joke sample proceeds toward two forms of revelation. The first illustrates the universal applicability of psychoanalytic method. The second signals the individual's ongoing reckoning with the particularities of subjective psychological experience as embedded in identification with large group assumptions of social reality.

"The books and the night", neurological perspective on Jorge Luis Borges' blindness.

The works of Argentinian scholar Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) have captivated physicians. An assiduous reader, he was given, with magnificent irony, "books and the night". Borges suffered from chronic and irreversible blindness, which influenced much of his work and has been the subject of different literary and diagnostic analyses from the ophthalmological point of view. However, the characteristics of his visual impairment have escaped the neurological approach, which is why we reviewed his work looking for data suggesting a concomitant brain injury. On his autobiography, he recounts how, during an episode of septicemia, he suffered hallucinations and loss of speech; in addition, in some poems and essays he describes data that suggest "phantom chromatopsia", a lesion of cortical origin. After that accident, Borges survived with a radical change in literary style. Although a precise diagnosis is impossible, his literary work allows recognizing some elements in favor of concomitant brain involvement.

"Los libros y la noche", perspectiva neurológica de la ceguera de Jorge Luis Borges.

The works of Argentinian scholar Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) have captivated physicians. An assiduous reader, he was given, with magnificent irony, "books and the night". Borges suffered from chronic and irreversible blindness, which influenced much of his work and has been the subject of different literary and diagnostic analyses from the ophthalmological point of view. However, the characteristics of his visual impairment have escaped the neurological approach, which is why we reviewed his work looking for data suggesting a concomitant brain injury. On his autobiography, he recounts how, during an episode of septicemia, he suffered hallucinations and loss of speech; in addition, in some poems and essays he describes data that suggest "phantom chromatopsia", a lesion of cortical origin. After that accident, Borges survived with a radical change in literary style. Although a precise diagnosis is impossible, his literary work allows recognizing some elements in favor of concomitant brain involvement.

La obra del erudito argentino Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) ha cautivado a los médicos. Asiduo lector con magnífica ironía, le fueron dados "los libros y la noche". Borges padeció una ceguera crónica e irreversible que impulsó gran parte de su obra y ha sido objeto de distintos análisis literarios y diagnósticos desde el punto de vista oftalmológico. Sin embargo, las características de su ceguera han escapado al abordaje neurológico, por lo cual revisamos su obra en busca de datos que sugieran una lesión cerebral concomitante. En su autobiografía relata cómo durante un episodio de septicemia padeció alucinaciones y pérdida del habla; además, en algunos poemas y ensayos describe datos que sugieren "cromatopsia fantasma", lesión de origen cortical. Tras dicho accidente, Borges sobrevivió con un cambio radical en su estilo literario. Aunque un diagnóstico preciso es imposible, su obra literaria nos permite reconocer algunos elementos que sugieren involucramiento cerebral concomitante.

'And Eden from the Chaos rose': utopian order and rebellion in the Oxford Physick Garden.

Abel Evans's poem Vertumnus (1713) celebrates Jacob Bobart the Younger, second keeper of the Oxford Physick Garden (now the Oxford University Botanic Garden), as a model monarch to his botanical subjects. This paper takes Vertumnus as a point of departure from which to explore the early history of the Physick Garden (founded 1621), situating botanical collections and collecting spaces within utopian visions and projects as well as debates about order more widely in the turbulent seventeenth-century. Three perspectives on the Physick Garden as an ordered collection are explored: the architecture of the quadripartite Garden, with particular attention to the iconography of the Danby Gate; the particular challenges involved in managing living collections, whose survival depends on the spatial order regulating the microclimates in which they grow; and the taxonomic ordering associated with the hortus siccus collections. A final section on the ideal 'Botanick throne' focuses on the metaphor of the state as a garden in the period, as human and botanical subjects resist being order and can rebel, but also respond to right rule and wise cultivation. However, the political metaphor is Evans's; there is little to suggest that Bobart himself was driven by utopian, theological and political visions.

[Mask and Self - and the Illness: Injuries of the Soul in Sylvia Plath's Poetry].

The study focuses on two features of Sylvia Plath's poetry that may be directly linked to her illness, her mask poetry and her female Bildung, where the former is informed by her sense of plural selfhood, while the latter gives account of the failures of her creative self-constructions. Although no direct connection can be set up between life and work even in the case of a confessional poet, it is probably safe to claim that multiple personality may manifest in a plural poetic self, while the Self developing in Bildung narratives contradicts the idea of a split personality. Enikô Bollobás explores the heteroclite diversity of artistic vision through discussing the pluralism of poetic masks and identities, insisting that, in the spirit of late modernism, no self-interpretive frame exists for Plath, one that would hold together the diverse identities. The long poems and poem cycles give narratives of female Bildung, portraying the woman's diverse attempts to break out of the traps of patriarchy; some of these are failed attempts, yet others offer allegories of the poet's creative self-constructions.

[Failure in the construction of the ego in confessional poetry - Sylvia Plath and Attila Jozsef].

The two poets, an American Sylvia Plath and a Hungarian, Attila József were separated by a quarter of century of time, they lived and worked in different spaces, cultures, but both created in their poetry a radically new style of self-expression, called confessional poetry. The "Belated Lament" of Attila József was written in 1936, and in the following year its author - after repeated earlier attempts - committed suicide. The "Daddy" of Sylvia Plath was written in 1962. She, again, after several attempts, killed herself the following year. They both talk about the powerful effect of the disruptive effect of unresolved Oedipal memories, both are deeply concerned with mourning of the Oedipal other a father and a mother (who died several decades before), and they also construct the death of their own. They both present themselves as an unsuccessful Oedipus and articulate a disturbing and disruptive arrival to Kolonos.

[From the experience to anger: The elaboration of the feelings against the parents in the art of Sylvia Plath].

AIM: The purpose of this present paper is to demonstrate the biographical antecedents and the adverse childhood experiences, which might have possibly contributed to those ambivalent feelings which can be observed in Sylvia Plath's confessional art in relation to her parents. METHOD: Biographical-, document- and artistic analyzes. The analyzed artistic pieces are the following: Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, The Bell Jar, Collected poems (from The Colossus and Ariel books) and the Journals by Sylvia Plath. The reconstruction of the biography was conducted based on international textbooks. RESULTS: Sylvia Plath at the age of 30, on the 12th of October, 1962 wrote her famous poem, Daddy, which starts with these lines: "You do not do, you do not do /Any more, black shoe/In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white,/Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. Daddy, I have had to kill you./You died before I had time/Marble-heavy, a bag full of God/Ghastly statue with one gray toe/Big as a Frisco seal/And a head in the freakish Atlantic /Where it pours bean green over blue/In the waters off beautiful Nauset./I used to pray to recover you. /Ach, du Dreck." A couple of months later, on the 11th of February 1963. Sylvia Plath committed suicide. Her journal entries and her works all testified that the emotional relationship with her parents significantly contributed to her genuine art and at the same time to the onset of her psychiatric illness. According to her journals, Sylvia Plath reported hate and ambivalent feelings several times to her psychiatrists. It is very likely, that the illness and death of Otto Plath and the emotional crises afterwards might have been that primary experience that might have exercised an adverse effect on Sylvia's life, and what have been composed very vividly in the poem called Daddy. CONCLUSIONS: Based on the analyzes of the biography, the journals and the poems, it can be stated, that the adverse childhood experiences, Sylvia had to experience during her father's illness, after his death, and during the restructuring of the family system are vital in the understanding of Sylvia Plath's art and her psychopathology.

["The grasses unload their griefs on my feet" - the therapy of Sylvia Plath].

The study deals with the psychiatric treatment of the writer with a tragic fate, Sylvia Plath. Sylvia's treatment began with electroconvulsive therapy for suicidal thoughts at the age of 20 and soon afterended up in hospital for an attempted suicide with sleeping pills to McLean Hospital.Her treatment was trusted on Doctor Ruth Beuscher with whom she's been remaining in touch directlyor indirectly (phone, mail) all her life. At the age of 30 she passed away committing suicide at her flatin London after having been treated with antidepressant for her assumably psychotic depression.In the article we provide an insight to the main therapeutic events of Sylvia's treatment and invitethe colleagues for an imaginary experiment based on modern knowledge and family system approach with a trauma focus (on theory of structural dissociation)- hoping it provides us with a conclusionto use in the treatment of suicidal patients.

Legible lesbian lines: The bilingual poetry of Irena Klepfisz.

This article focuses on the poetry of Jewish lesbian poet Irena Klepfisz, written in New York starting in the 1970s. While drawing on the tradition of Yiddish women's poetry from the first half of the twentieth century, both as scholar and poet, Klepfisz also creates a brand new, bilingual, Yiddish-English poetic mode. By mobilizing both Yiddish and English to voice her poetic and political concerns, Klepfisz stages the English/Yiddish encounter as a site where dominant norms in both languages can be challenged and new possibilities emerge. Exploring both her turn to the past and her bilingual poetry, this article reveals how Klepfisz puts her politics and scholarship to poetic practice and suggests that Klepfisz offers a model of queer translation that undoes the borders between past and present, English and Yiddish, creating a unique mode of Jewish lesbian reclamation and invention.

[Devil and God - The double role of Ted Hughes in Sylvia Plath's life and death].

The relationship of two, equally talented poets, as it can have whether a beneficient or inhibitory effect on both person's creative processes, is informative in a 'literature psychological' way. The present study aims to analyse the marriage of the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Sylvia Plath's life was directed by several dualities; her polarized perspective, being likely the result of her psychiatric illness, has taken control over every area of her life. Although, its most important duality is in connexion with the laureate British poet, Ted Hughes: she idealized and hated the man - being both her love and spouse - at the same time. Their marriage, fecundating the poetry of both, has led to a tempestuous ending. Soon after, the young Sylvia took her own life, and the public - more or less implicitly stating - blames it on Ted Hughes. In the present study we tend to give a literature psychological analysis of their relationship, based on their autobiographical works and, focused on the stages leading to the crisis, to question whether the personality of Plath could have an effect on the ending of their marriage? Could these phenomena have contributed to the early death of Sylvia Plath - and, especially, what was Ted Hughes's role in this process?

[Oscar Castro Zúñiga, the poet who succumbed to tuberculosis]. / Oscar Castro Zúñiga: el poeta vencido por la tuberculosis.

The life of the renowned Chilean writer, Oscar Castro Zúñiga, was interrupted early, when he was 37 years old. He acquired tuberculosis during the epidemic in our country between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. He developed the disease during a crucial stage in terms of diagnosis and treatment, coinciding with the end of the sanatorium stage and the first chemotherapeutic attempts. The symptoms and treatments of the disease in that age are described analyzing the letters, both written by himself and by people close to him and the biographies published during the historical and personal context of the artist.

Intoxication and neurology: A Dream Within a Dream. / Rus og nevrologi: A Dream Within a Dream.

The author Edgar Allan Poe is one of many artists who describe how it feels to live with major, involuntary changes of consciousness. Are the large upturns and downturns in his life attributable to a neurological conditions, or can substance use and depressive thoughts explain these fluctuations?

The "Madness" of Friedrich Hölderlin: an iatrogenic intoxication.

The German poet Hölderlin, assumed to have suffered from schizophrenia, in fact has been the victim of a combined calomel and cantharidine intoxication administered by his physician Autenrieth. This new theory explains much better his behavioural changes and also his neurological and other concomitant symptoms; it can be tested by analysing a very few of his hairs for the presence of these compounds.