Altered States Of Consciousness Essay

Consciousness is a state of awareness. This includes a person’s feelings, sensations, ideas, and perceptions. There are many different states of consciousness.

Numerous factors determine when and why you feel tired, full of energy, and hungry. A person's state of consciousness and awareness varies throughout the day and depends on a person's activity, environment, and time clock.

In Bly’s time, mental illnesses were not taken seriously. Bly described the asylum she was admitted to as overcrowded, cold, and dirty (ch. 7). It defeated the purpose of trying to give extra attention to those in need. It was easy to get admitted into an institution, but nearly impossible to make it out because the treatment was not treatment.

A deeper level is achieved in the mind of the narrator when she acknowledges her own mental state and that she is eager to leave her sad mood. While the man is described as animal-like and savage, she stands “In moody sadness, on the giddy brink” (9) full of contemplation and reflection on her own worldview. The poet is quite self-aware while the lunatic is not, and through her intelligent banter, the reader can see the extreme difference in personality. The poet’s own self-conception, however, is ironic in that she is wishing for ignorance that can only be achieved by lack of a self-concept. The catch-22 she experiences is perplexing, both to her and the reader.

Psychological elements appear in various gothic tales. Specifically, the Gothic tends to exploit the disorders related to abnormal psychology. A common psychological disorder that is portrayed in the Gothic is madness/insanity. Furthermore, madness in the Gothic is primarily attributed female characters, who were often initially diagnosed with hysteria or a nervous disorder that typically later led to the diagnosis of madness. In “A Whisper in the Dark” by Louisa Alcott, a female character is pushed to the point of madness after being subjected to perverse psychiatric treatment under the supervision of a male doctor. I will argue that the psychiatric treatment the doctor prescribes led to the madness of Sybil; moreover, the “psychiatric treatment” was a façade to cover an abuse of patriarchal power to maintain control of the female patient rather than provide true diagnosis or

“When the Elizabethan era started… the most prevalent type of insanity was situational rather than biological ("Historical").Things like the death of family or loved ones was a big source of the madness.” ("Elizabethan Times”)

In the article The Functional Eccentricity of Margery Kempe, Mary Hardman Farley presents numerous arguments regarding Margery’s mental well-being and her intentions as a writer. At one point Farley writes, “But while her experience has political implications, her career springs not from her strength and wholeness or from her perception of a lack of latitude in society to achieve her human potential, but rather from her anxiety to prevent her fragile ego from dissolving into periods of reactive psychosis, a common complication in histrionics” (Farley 15). Like the rest of the article and in this quote, Farley suggests that Margery not only suffered from a form of postpartum psychosis, but that in her recovery developed a disorder known as Histrionic Personality Disorder. Persons with the disorder are in constant need of attention and need the spotlight on them.

The human mind is a complex structure, perfectly designed to carry out tasks that give us life, but also weak in the face of adversity. In Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Jane Eyre, the character of John Reed can be described as having Bipolar Disorder, which is a mental ailment in which the affected individual experiences manic episodes followed by depressive episodes. The reader is able to do so by using the psychological lens to analyze his actions and the way in which he is described throughout the novel, and thus, is able to better understand Brontë’s message on discrimination and how it applies to modern day society. To make this analysis easier, one must establish an understanding of the psychological lens and Bipolar Disorder. The psychological lens is one of the critical reading lenses, which present different perspectives to reading a novel. The psychological lens focuses on the human aspect, since it is more geared towards social issues and the characters’ motives. To use the psychological lens, the reader may consider a few of the following questions: “do the characters act believable?”, “why do certain characters act the way they do?”, and “what did you think of any moral/ethical choices that the characters made?”. Bipolar Disorder is a mental illness that is characterized by an extremely active period, with emotions such as irritability and performing reckless acts, followed by periods of inactivity and depression.

The literal surface of a work of literature is sometimes called the “manifest content” and treated as “manifest dream” or “dream story.” The psychoanalytic literary critic tries to analyze the latent, underlying content of the work, or the “dream thought” hidden in

One of the most obvious, yet in the nineteenth century completely unrecognised and undiagnosed, reasons behind symptoms of supposed insanity would be post-natal depression. Gilmans narrator suffers from just this as she exclaims: ‘Such a dear baby! And yet I CANNOT be with him, it makes me so nervous’, conveying a certain disconnection with her son. The narrator feels her husband fails to understand her perspective: she is the complete opposite of her ‘public sphere’ husband who ‘is practical in the extreme… and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures’. She yearns for a life which she believes this domestic role has stolen from her: Gilman’s narrator longs to write but John warns ‘that with

Language has a large part in both essays and like mentioned in this paper before, Jentsch based his beliefs of the uncanny on the German definition while Freud took a much broader scope across other languages such as Greek, English, Spanish, Arabic, and etc. This posed a question as to where the boundary between uncanny and fear in consideration of language, where unheimlich gets lost in translation. Through other languages, Freud finds that many languages do not have something that is directly unheimlich but rather correlates to “evil,” “sinister,” and “daemonic,” (Freud 2 & 3). A quick conclusion might be that the uncanny is culturally-bound, or to be more specific, what each individual finds uncanny is determined by what their country and

Beveridge, A., 2016. ‘We are all a little mad in one or other particular’. The presentation of madness in the novels of Muriel Spark. History of psychiatry, 27(2), pp.153-171

Sigmund Freud’s says that the uncanny “undoubtedly belongs to all that is terrible- to all that arouses dread and creeping horror, it is equally certain, too, that the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with whatever excites dread.”(Freud), he also says that what makes something specifically uncanny is that it is opposite of what is familiar. . Certain components of the short stories “The Lottery”, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, and “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, highlight Freud’s definition of the uncanny. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Freud’s definition of the uncanny appears continuously throughout the story, especially when the woman believes that she is the figure lurking behind the wallpaper. Also, in the short story “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, Freud’s definition of the uncanny occurs within the mysterious plot and how the end revealed that the “winner” of the lottery had to be beaten to death with citizens of the city throwing stones at them. Lastly, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is connected to Freud’s definition of the uncanny since the story gives the reader a false sense of security, which makes the reader feel the horror and unfamiliarity that it brings

Freud’s concept of the “uncanny” is a highly influential and valued in psychoanalysis and literature. As Freud explains, it reveals much about his understanding of human beings as being essentially determined by their fears and unconscious desires. His interpretation of uncanny can be analyzed in two ways: linguistic and actual. In the beginning, he starts with the term “uncanny”, which is taken from German word “unheimlich”, literally meaning “un-home-like” – something unfamiliar and unknown, never experienced before. The problem is that the definition of the word and the linguistic peculiarities take half of the whole reading, so we get to the point after the second half.

At this point in his essay, Miller admits he is "alter[ing] Freud's formulas a little," despite discussing a presupposed variation of the uncanny from the start of the text (Miller 69). While Miller certainly calls to aspects of Freud's The Uncanny, such as the latter's insistence that realism can aid in producing a sense of the uncanny within a literary framework, he ultimately tends to misuse the concept, if not wholly ignore it, bending portions of Freud's essay to his will while scrapping what he does not deem necessary. Had he thoroughly engaged with Jentsch and Freud's variations of the uncanny in his literary criticism of Wuthering Heights-acknowledging the importance of the definitional variants of the uncanny as well as the significance of Freud's repetition compulsion in regard to his own argument-Miller would have evaded his misuse of the term altogether and likely would have strengthened his argument as well. In order to reach such a conclusion, though, we must begin with what Miller neglects to put forth in his essay: a brief explanation of Jentsch and Freud's work with the uncanny, as well as how as much may aid in enhancing Miller's