In this paper, we examine similarities between Sigmund Freud’s tripartite theory of personality to foundational works across various religious and philosophical movements. First, conceptual similarities to the id, ego, and superego are illustrated through scriptural verses and commentators of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Next, elements of the tripartite theory in the Eastern religions of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sikhism are explored. Finally, this Freudian theory is viewed in relationship to various philosophical works from Ancient Greece to modern day. We suggest these earlier tripartite approaches emanating from diverse religious and philosophical movements emerge as a broader universal understanding of man from which Freud could have profited in developing one of his most seminal theories.

This paper considers Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, published in 1897, as a window into techno-scientific and sociocultural developments of the fin-de-siècle era, ranging from blood transfusion and virology up to communication technology and brain research, with a particular focus on the birth of psychoanalysis. Stoker’s literary classic heralds a new style of scientific thinking, foreshadowing important aspects of post-1900 culture. Dracula reflects a number of scientific events which surfaced in the 1890s and evolved into major research areas that are still relevant today. Rather than seeing science and literature as separate realms, Stoker’s masterpiece encourages us to address the ways in which techno-scientific and psycho-cultural developments mutually challenge and mirror one another, so that we may use his novel to deepen our understanding of emerging research practices and vice versa. Psychoanalysis plays a double role in this. It is the research field whose genealogical constellation is being studied, but at the same time (Lacanian) psychoanalysis guides my reading strategy. Dracula, the infectious, undead Vampire has become an archetypal cinematic icon and has attracted the attention of numerous scholars. The vampire complex built on various folkloristic and literary sources and culminated in two famous nineteenth-century literary publications: the story The Vampyre by John Polidori (1819) and Stoker’s version. Most of the more than 200 vampire movies released since Nosferatu (1922) are based on the latter. Rather than focus on the archetypal cinematic image of the Vampire, I discuss the various scientific ideas and instruments employed by Dracula’s antagonists to overcome the threat to civilisation he represents.

This is the first of five papers celebrating the psychological complexity of nineteenth century Russian novels authored by Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, and Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev. Using biography, letters, narratives, and literary criticism, the life and writings of each author will be reviewed as they contribute to the understanding of the human mind and the apperception of the human condition. More subtly than the case study, more fully than the clinical anecdote, more profoundly than the apt example, these novels animate sterile, empirical findings and add dimension to the flatness all too prevalent among psychological description. Herein, Pushkin’s tempestuous upbringing, cavalier belligerence, and eccentric oddities show that the Russian author, as much as his work, sustains and rewards close psychological study.

Little attention has been paid to some aspects of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s intellectual activity compared with others. His affairs as a diplomat, his contribution to music, and his affection for botany are only three of them. This article shows their connections with forms of expression in which words are replaced by other kinds of graphic representation, such as ideographic signs for their evocation and numbers for their efficiency and simplicity. These contributions were collected in his first and last intellectual projects: Project for Musical Notation (1742), a young man’s idealistic challenge presented before Paris Académie des Sciences–and rejected by them; and Characters of Botany (1776-1778), a private senescence enterprise.

The Beats perceived the ideals of corporate capitalism to be corrupting and destructive annihilating their individuality and freedom of choice. According to them, capitalism was as much of a dictatorship as communism. The Beats strived to introduce spirituality as an alternative to the materialism propagated by capitalism. They also believed that this system was so irrational that it led to wars and the invention and use of the nuclear bomb. They were discontented with American capitalism because it tried to socio-politically control the citizens. They claimed to have rejected or at least escaped capitalism which is debatable and the paper shows that in some cases they did not manage to do that.

Literary criticism of Shakespeare’s Othello since the early 20th century leaves us with various complaints that Shakespeare fails to achieve poetic justice therein, or that this work leaves us, in the end, with a moral enigma—despite what seems to be Shakespeare’s intent to represent a plot and characters having moral probity and, thereby, to foster our moral edification through the tragedy that unfolds. Here a number of interpretive views concerning the morality proper to Othello are reviewed. Thereafter, it is proposed that Heidegger’s thought about the relation of appearance, semblance, and reality enables a novel interpretation of the moral significance of this tragedy, thereby to resolve the question of moral enigma.

This paper looks at authoritarianism as an expression of nihilism. In spite of his rigorous critique of Platonism, I suggest that Nietzsche shares with Plato an authoritarian vision that is rooted in the cyclical experience of time. The temporality of the eternal return unveils a vista of cosmic nihilism that cannot possibly be endured. In the absence of metaphysical foundations, the vital will to power is assigned an impossible task – to create meaning from nothing. I suggest that when confronted with the horror of the ungrounded void, the self-overcoming of nihilism reverts to self-annihilation. The declaration that God is dead becomes the belief that death is God. I trace Nietzsche’s cosmic nihilism back to Plato’s myths and the poetic vision of Sophocles and Aeschylus. I argue that Nietzsche’s overcoming of nihilism is itself nihilistic. However, this does not mean that Nietzsche’s project is as a complete failure. On the contrary, I suggest that Nietzsche’s deepest insight is that the good life does not consist of the pursuit of truth, but the alleviation of suffering.

In June 1914, Franz Kafka found himself overwhelmed by his life. Struggling personally, professionally, and artistically he sat one night to compose a story in his diary of a man confronted by the Divine, In this story, never published outside of his diary, Kafka sought to measure the distance between God and the individual in a post-traditional world. The result was the story of an aborted mystical experence in which Kafka defined the post-traditional existential experience in terms of failure. In so doing, Kafka also defined the post-modern existential condition in terms of the overwhelming distance the individual feels from God.

Luce Irigaray's concept of the "sensible transcendental" is a term that paradoxically fuses mind with body while, at the same time, maintaining the tension of adjacent but separate concepts, thereby providing a fruitful locus for changes to the symbolic order. It provides this locus by challenging the monolithic philosophical discourses of the "Same" which, according to Irigaray, have dominated western civilization since Plato. As such, the sensible transcendental refuses the logic that demands the opposed hierarchal dichotomies between time and space, form and matter, mind and body, self and other, and man and woman, which currently organize western civilization's discursive foundations. Instead, it provides a useful means for helping women to feel at home in their bodies, and it signifies the implementation of an ethical praxis based on the acknowledgment of sexual difference. Such a praxis demands philosophical, theological, juridical, and scientific accountability for systemic sexism and, in its acknowledgment and validation of the alterity of sexual difference, it respects life in its various forms and its vital relationship with biological and physical environments.

Is there a significant difference between Plato's texts and what is known as 'Platonism', that is, the philosophical tradition that claims Plato as its progenitor? Focusing on the Symposium, an attempt is made here to show that, far from merely fitting neatly into the categories of Platonism—with its neat distinction between the super-sensible and the sensible—Plato's own text is a complex, tension-filled terrain of countervailing forces. In the Symposium this tension obtains between the perceptive insights, on the one hand, into the nature of love and beauty, as well as the bond between them, and the metaphysical leap, on the other hand, from the experiential world to a supposedly accessible, but by definition super-sensible, experience-transcending realm. It is argued that, instead of being content with the philosophical illumination of the ambivalent human condition—something consummately achieved by mytho-poetic and quasi-phenomenohgical means—Plato turns to a putatively attainable, transcendent source of metaphysical reassurance which, moreover, displays all the trappings of an ideological construct. This is demonstrated by mapping Plato's lover's vision of 'absolute beauty' on to what Jacques Lacan has characterized as the unconscious structural quasi-condition of all religious and ideological illusion.