Overview

Love and death are prevalent motifs in legend, art, literature, and opera, as well as in the fantasies of most people. In art and life, the love/death archetype transcends culture, time, and geography. This book addresses two kinds of fantasies of love and death, one the passionate wish to die together with a loved one, the other the desire to extend one's life—and loves—after death. Illustrating how these love/death phenomena span a continuum from the normal to the pathological, Helen Gediman delves into the psychoanalytic meanings of these fantasies and motifs, as embedded in the arts, as well as in the human psyche.

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9780814730683

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Reviews

<p> Drawing on the Tristan and Iseult myth, the operas of Wagner, Northern Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture, Dr. Gediman's study is a splendid example of psychoanalysis skillfully applied to literature and art...This well written work breaks new ground. -Joseph Reppen, Editor, Psychoanalytic Books: A Quarterly Journal of Reviews

<p> Drawing on the Tristan and Iseult myth, the operas of Wagner, Northern Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture, Dr. Gediman's study is a splendid example of psychoanalysis skillfully applied to literature and art...This well written work breaks new ground.

Drawing on the Tristan and Iseult myth, the operas of Wagner, Northern Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture, Dr. Gediman's study is a splendid example of psychoanalysis skillfully applied to literature and art...This well written work breaks new ground. -Joseph Reppen,Editor, Psychoanalytic Books: A Quarterly Journal of Reviews

We have come a long way from regarding passionate love as...simply a romantic agony of fatal perversions and deadly sex, writes psychoanalyst Gediman. Her provocative study examines such famous lovers as Tristan and Isolde, Siegmund and Sieglinde, even Sleeping Beauty and her Prince, to consider two common types of love/death fantasies: Liebestod, in which one longs to unite with the beloved eternally in death; and Resurrection, the idea of rebirth after death that often includes a desire for sensual bliss beyond mortality. These fantasies can encompass a wide variety of psychological processes, ranging from perfectly normal to decidedly pathological, argues the author, who buttresses her literary, artistic, and mythological references with analysis of real-life cases in the psychological literature. Those expecting a pleasant stroll through well-trodden lit-crit fields will find the clinical material rather heavy going, but Gediman's thoughtful appraisal reminds us that intense passion is in itself neither healthy nor diseased - it all depends on the uses we put it to. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Helen K. Gediman is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City.

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