“La Femme aux Deux Sourires”, “The Woman with Two Smiles”, is an psychotherapeutic enquiry into the dichotomy that is the female psyche and the many extremes that affect thought, behavior and personalities as women. Yalom’s client Marie is so full of contradiction – she can be demure or verbose, alluring yet awkward, reserved but impulsive, pleasing yet profane, or angelic but wild. Marie’s husband passed away seven years ago, but she hasn’t been able to manage her grief adequately, her facial expression, imagination, her body and her sexuality were frozen, and she wept every night. She wasn’t an easy client to work with and adequate therapeutic relationship hasn’t been achieved. Despite being an exceptionally statuesque and presentable, she
Her husband Ray is taken aback by her disappearance from a community that he loved very much and is left with feelings of grief. Ray’s behavior can be better understood using a psychological lens. Uncovering Ray’s fears and insecurities deepens
Deborah Tannen focuses on this concept of the markedness of women in her essay “There Is No Unmarked Woman” and her interview in She Said He Said. Here, she explores the idea of how linguistics, appearances, and actions can indicate one as a certain type of woman. Her claims are validated not only by examples present in our everyday lives and literature, but also through film. The infamous Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove or:
Cynthia Johnson is a 26-year-old single woman from Birmingham, Alabama. Being young herself, she takes care of her 5 children from non-marriages with different fathers. Not having a high school or college education, it is hard to obtain a proper job to take care of her children. At an early age, she became all too familiar with the idea of grief. Because of this reoccurring history of grief, Cynthia suffers with severe depression, has a history of substance abuse, and an overall unhealthy lifestyle.
Grief is often accompanied by feelings of anger, intense sadness, difficulty in engaging in happy memories, and obsession with the departed or with the situations surrounding the death of a loved one (Minuchin & Fishman, 2009). This is shown in the video “A Family Disrupted: Dealing with the Death of a Sibling”, when Lois cries uncontrollably and acts completely shocked and disconnected. The video also shows the effects of grief with Jerry, who feels angry and isolated, and often wishes to be alone. When an individual is grieving and cannot overcome the grief, it is important to seek a qualified therapist for help. Therapists will effectively tailor various therapeutic models to address the special needs of individuals or family members who are struggling with grief (Worden, 2010). To help the people who are grieving in this video, models like solution focused therapy are used.
The patient retracts himself from social interaction due to depression caused by the death of his brother Allie, at a young age. When
The two main women in Edna’s life serve as foils of each other and static characters to which Edna can compare. Adele Ratignole presents the ideal, socially-accepted woman figure. She exemplifies all that is perfect: devoted wife seeking only to please her spouse, loving mother, knowledgeable, conventional, “mother-woman,” elegant, charming, simple, and servant to both her family and society. Completely opposite of the dependent woman is Mademoiselle Reisz who personifies all that Adele would disgust. Reisz remains isolated from society, shunned as a recluse for her passion of music. She is unpopular, solitary, unmarried, childless, but also courageous, passionate, independent, inspired, and free. The two figures rest on polar ends of a societal spectrum. This distance creates a horrific gap within which Edna finds herself. Edna identifies with both women, having qualities and tendencies of each. This dual connection complicates Edna’s identity; she cannot fully embody either woman type while she possesses qualities of the other. Edna remains in a situation in which success cannot be achieved.
In the short story, The Old Chevalier by Isak Dinsen, the male protagonist, Baron von Brackel reflects on his past sexual encounters with two women whose personalities are extremely different from one another. In many novels, short stories and comics authors would create two women as “polar opposites” for a man’s sexual and/or possessive gaze, which is evident in the text. In order to understand, why a man may be attracted to different character traits in women, I will examine The Baron’s attraction to Nathalie and The Mistress by looking at how literary works men portray women, what they find attractive and the fulfilment that men seek from a woman.
Nevertheless, Haywood’s protagonist adopts different disguises so she may pursue her sexual desires and attract Beauplairsir while retaining her reputation in a society that separates the virtuous woman from the woman who asserts her sexual desires. The protagonist faces the same issues as women in today’s society who struggle between reconciling their virtue with their sexuality in romantic relationships. Women who freely engage in sexual activity are stigmatized as undesirable for ‘serious’ relationships. Meanwhile, the virtuous relationship women is seen as less sexual and as needing help to spice up her sex live and hold the attention of her partner. These two female identities are put at odds with each other, but just as Haywood’s protagonist attempts to stay the virtuous woman while playing as a seductress, today’s modern woman is expected to play both roles. The introduction to “Fantomina: or, Love in a Maze” in our Broadview anthology discusses Haywood’s vision of the story and its “central theme of disguise” and the allure of masquerade. The appeal of masquerade still lingers in present day society where role-playing is often cited as a means of maintaining a relationships and an exciting sex life. Clearly the love in this relationship comes from only Fantomina. She goes from pretending to be a prostitute to being depressed at losing her virture to being obsessed with gaining Beauplaisir’s love no matter what.
Simone De Beauvoir in The Second Sex suggests that to resolve the tension between bad faith and authenticity, people must regard women as subjects and not objects. They must also collectively fight against the idea of womanhood in order to remain authentic to themselves.
According to Hart (2012), those people who are suffering from grief often seek help from the health care professionals. This is important for the clinicians to identify and address their own experiences in the clinical settings. The main aim of this article is to explore the facts about grief, the common themes of grief and the different ways in which the patient process of the clinicians can be facilitated.
One must read this piece multiple times before its true genius can be seen; this story is much like peeling an onion, tear-jerking hard work included. It is revealed in this story that she does not fit the common portrayal of the protagonized woman, as “[she is] thirty-four years old after all…” (Jackson 1), which clearly puts her as an outlier for her nativity and rash decisions.
Looking into the eyes of the young woman, you see pain. A pain so deep that it almost becomes breath taking. The girl dressed in gorgeous gold and silver stands with her chin held up high towards the sky. She stands tall with class and dignity. The lady looks like she is mentally strong, yet has a weak, almost brittle looking body. The small smile she gives looks forced and as if it’s an act. She puts on a performance everyday of her life, whether it’s when she’s on the brightly lit stage or when she is pretending that she is actually happy… But why? Why is she putting on with the performance when she does not want to continue? She does not perform for the fun of it, she does not do it for herself, she does it because
653. This is the same mindset that Sartre applies to the anti-Semite- the refusal to consider the complexity of the world in favor of a system that provides easy answers to all life’s questions. Only, unlike the anti-Semite, the woman is turning her hatred inward; does she hate herself because she fears freedom or because she feels she is not worthy of it? De Beauvoir seems to believe that fear is the primary cause for this willing dependency. She cites the psychoanalytic view that women’s obsession with love does not comes from a desire for men at all, but from a desire to return to the secure dependency of childhood. This explains the lifelong refuge some women take in infantile (“cute”) behavior and appearance, but psychoanalytic explanations for human behavior have proven to be far less than perfect, and a woman’s self-worth (or, in this case, lack thereof) has far more complex roots than a Freudian theorem.
All characters in the novel are living in a man’s world; nevertheless, the author has tried to change this world by the help of her characters. She shows a myriad of opportunities and different paths of life that woman can take, and more importantly she does not show a perfect world, where women get everything they want, she shows a world where woman do make mistakes, but at the same time they are the ones that pay for these mistakes and correct them.
This tragic marriage and feelings of guilt and grief have been haunting her since the time which can be seen in a recurring motif of a polka tune Varsouviana which „[has been] caught in [her] head“ (Williams 113) and which she associates with the night her husband committed suicide. It is obvious that she has never come to terms with her past. Whenever someone mentions her dead husband, she does not feel well: „The boy - the boy died. Iʼm - going to be sick!“ (Williams 31) She realizes that she is responsible for his death and does not know how to deal with it which results in her love affairs, withdrawal from reality and the final mental breakdown.