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.

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).

The article attempts to describe Witold Gombrowicz’s oral system in Kosmos from the perspective of cultural interpretations of psychoanalysis (Jean-Paul Sartre, Guy Hocquenghem, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) and schizoanalysis (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari). Understood as a specific network of connections that organizes the map of Witold’s unconscious mind, this system focuses on the mouth, tongue/language, speaking, eating, etc. The fantasy of spitting in the mouth plays a significant role here, read in the context of a similar motif from Jean Genet’s novel Miracle de la rose. The novel interpretation revolves around an attempt to escape from the power of the Oedipus complex, presented as a network of familial heteronormative relationships and connections. The failure of heterosexuality is treated as an act of queer resistance.

Taking as his point of departure Sigmund Freud’s famous remark on the extension of the psyche, in the first part of the article the author develops the idea of the relation between “soul,” body and space in the psychoanalytical tradition. In doing so, he refers to the interpretation given to Freud’s remark by Jean-Luc Nancy. Crucially modifying Nancy’s perspective and moving back to the psychoanalytic tradition, the author develops a general notion of das Unbehagen im Raum – the discomfort felt in space. In the second part, the author deepens this analysis by looking at a certain desperate strategy of confronting this discomfort – a strategy adopted by the protagonist of The Piano Teacher, a novel by Elfriede Jelinek.

The text is an attempt at a psychotherapeutic reading of fiction written by Andrzej Stasiuk. The method assumes the application of psychodynamic theory and practice in the process of literary reading. The structure of the text corresponds to the story of the patient (case study). The article contains a presentation of the biographies of the characters and narrators of Stasiuk’s prose. The analysis focuses on their fears and attempts to overcome these fears. The synthesis includes metaphors and the sequence of scenes, the arrangement of the text. Reading of Stasiuk’s prose is based on the theory of unconscious expression, which proves that the sequences of our utterances reveal lines of unconscious thinking.

The article describes various meanings of the adjective “post-Oedipal,” while trying to stabilize it as an art term in the psychoanalysis of culture. The main tool for reconstructing this concept is a case study: an analysis of Pusty przelot, a novel by Daniel Odija. The familial history of schizophrenia – as presented in the novel – is interpreted as a synecdoche and – at the same time – a metaphor of the current state of the provincial culture, contrasted with the traditional Oedipal patriarchy.

The author of the article reviews the book of Piotr Krupiński, Co się śni zwierzętom? Eseje z pogranicza zoofilologii i psychoanalizy (What Do Animals Dream about? Essays on Zoophilology and Psychoanalysis). The initial parts of the article introduce the concept of zoophilology and discuss its paradoxical nature. Then, the author re- constructs the content of the reviewed book. In the following parts, he challenges Krupiński’s ideas, focusing on the issues of Freudian psychoanalysis and representationalism as ineffective ways of overcoming the anthropocentrism. For, they leave the big Other of the anthropocentric reality principle untouched. Therefore, the author suggests moving beyond representationalism. In his opinion, it would result in better implementation of Krupiński’s objectives. He follows mainly the practitioners of the new materialism: Donna Haraway and Karen Barad.

This article is a review of two anthologies published in 2021: Polskie zmory. Psychoanaliza w międzywojniu (Polish Phantoms. Psychoanalysis in the Interwar period, edited by Bartłomiej Dobroczyński), and Imago psychoanalizy (Imago of Psychoanalysis, edited by Agnieszka Sobolewska). The paper aims for a critical assessment of both volumes concerning the pre-war psychoanalytic milieu in Poland (Dobroczyński) and the Vienna-Budapest center of psychoanalytic thought (Sobolewska). In the evaluation of Dobroczynski’s and Sobolewska’s anthologies, special emphasis is put on the concept and composition of each volume. Introductions for each anthology are also examined and treated as separate contributions to the socio-cultural history of psychoanalysis.