Agnieszka Sobolewska

The Varieties of Psychoanalysis

The text is an introduction to the journal issue devoted to the changes and metamorphoses of doctrines formed in the field of psychoanalytic thought. The authors point out the polyphonic nature of psychoanalysis and emphasize the special value of its susceptibility to transformation. In this introductory essay, emphasis is placed on both psychoanalytic theory and practice. The authors try to prove that the methods of interpreting literary works emerging from psychoanalysis today should take into account perspectives derived directly from analytical practices. The authors aim to prove that among the most important of these is a relational understanding of humanistic work (based on reading and writing practices), as well as a pluralistic account of the constantly renewed acts of interpretation.

Autopsychography by Elemér Tábory. From Literary Interpretation of Dreams to Psychomedical Diagnosis of Modernity

This article aims to analyze the first modernist novel by the Hungarian writer Mihály Babits entitled Caliph the Stork (The Nightmare). The author points to the multidirectional character of psychomedical knowledge dissemination in the Hungarian modernist literature at the beginning of the 20th century. A close reading of Babits’ first novel in the light of psychoanalytic theories (especially Sigmund Freud’s and Otto Gross’s) and psychiatric theories of the split personality (developed primarily in France, then in the United States and Great Britain) allows the author to shed new light on Hungarian modernist literature and its relationship with the modern psychomedical discourses. In the article, Babits’ novel is interpreted as a space for creative appropriation and reinterpretation of the nineteenth and early-twentieth-century discourses on the human psyche.

* Artykuł powstał w ramach grantu przyznanego mi przez MNiSW, nr DI2017 004647 na lata 2018–2022, a także stypendium badawczego Józef Tischner Award and Junior Fellowship w Instytucie Nauk o Człowieku (Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen) w Wiedniu (2022/2023).