literary history for the day
I just watched Nora, which is based on a feminist history of Nora Barnacle Joyce, wife of James. Ewan McGregor plays Joyce, and so naturally there are several graphic sex scenes - does that guy do *any* movies unless he can fling his flute around?Anyway, I went to Wikipedia to refresh my memory of Joyce history, and found this quite poignant entry on Nora & James' daughter, Lucia, whose photos & artwork are above:
Lucia Joyce, daughter of Irish writer James Joyce and Nora Barnacle, was born in Trieste on July 26, 1907, speaking Italian as her first language. She studied ballet while she was a teenager, becoming good enough to train with Isadora Duncan. She started to show signs of mental illness in 1930, around the time she began casually dating Samuel Beckett. Her deteriorating mental state caused him to call off the relationship, and in 1934, Carl Jung took her in as a patient. Soon after, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia at a Burghölz psychiatric clinic in Zurich. She died in a mental hospital in Northampton, England, in 1982.
Wow.
...
Imagine Carl Jung of all people treating schizophrenia.
Much of Jung's insights regarding the unconscious was derived, not only from his work with individuals in the throes of a visionary state, but also from his own "dark night of the soul" in which he too, slipped into the chaos of the unconscious.
Posted by
Spiritual Emergency |
12:21 PM
Post a Comment