Founded in 1939 by Sigmund Freud and Hanns Sachs, AMERICAN IMAGO is the preeminent scholarly journal of psychoanalysis. Appearing quarterly, AMERICAN IMAGO publishes innovative articles on the history and theory of psychoanalysis as well as on the reciprocal relations between psychoanalysis and the broad range of disciplines that constitute the human sciences. Since 2001, the journal has been edited by Peter L. Rudnytsky, who has made each issue a "special issue" and introduced a topical book review section, with a guest editor for every Fall issue.

Founded in 1939 by Sigmund Freud and Hanns Sachs, American Imago is the leading scholarly journal in the field of psychoanalysis. Published quarterly, American Imago features innovative articles on the history and theory of psychoanalysis, as well as studies on the reciprocal relationships between psychoanalysis and the wide range of disciplines that make up the human sciences. Since 2001, the journal has been edited by Peter L. Rudnytsky, who has designated each issue as a 'special issue' and introduced a topical book review section, with a guest editor for every Fall issue.

《American Imago》创刊于1939年，由西格蒙德·弗洛伊德和汉斯·萨克斯共同创办，是精神分析领域最重要的学术期刊。该期刊每季度出版，发表关于精神分析历史和理论的创新文章，以及精神分析与人文学科广泛领域之间相互关系的研究。自2001年以来，彼得·L·鲁德尼茨基担任主编，他将每期设定为“特刊”，并引入了专题书评部分，每个秋季期刊都有特邀编辑。

American Imago

This essay advances a novel interdisciplinary approach toward understanding the dialectical transmission, registration, and interpretation of meaning from sound in the psychoanalytic dialogue. The first step examines the profound formative influences of the earliest sound environment in psychological development. The second, utilizing clinical material, considers adult patients' abstract or ineffable nonlinguistic and nonverbal communications as a form of music being verbalized in a language of sounds—termed the verbalization of music—which audio-symbolically conveys derivatives of archaic auditory impressions, perceptions, and interactions. The last segment proposes a consilient view of music and mentation, founded in a conceptualization of music as a patterned sonic iteration of affect and ideation giving auditory tangibility to the incipient sound world, with the aim of clarifying how analysts hear and interpret meaning in idiolectic sonic renderings of individual interiority—the sound of memory.

Alexander Stein

American imago

The Sound of Memory: Music and Acoustic Origins

记忆之声：音乐与听觉起源

Early in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1831), Victor Frankenstein tells Captain Walton: "No human being could have passed a happier childhood than myself. My parents were possessed by the very spirit of kindness and indulgence" (43). But is what he says true? Is Victor's claim borne out by the details of his narrative? I would like to propose that it is not, that it is idealized and defensive, and that just as the monster suffers from parentlessness, so too does Victor, who is his double. The monster's story of emotional abandonment is Victor's story. One might suppose this would hardly be worth taking the trouble to argue, given the common view that, as George Levine puts it, "the hero and his antagonist are one" (1973, 209) and "the monster can be taken as an expression of an aspect of Frankenstein's self . . . re-enacting in mildly disguised ways, his creator's feelings and experiences" (209-10). But this insight has not informed most readings of Victor's early life. Indeed, a chorus of responses—all notable enough to be collected in the Norton Critical Edition (Hunter 1996) of the novel—despite their differences, unites in taking Victor's glowing report at face value. Strikingly, Levine himself writes that "Frankenstein's father. . . in caring for him, behaves to his son as the monster would have Frankenstein behave" (211). Christopher Small sees in Victor's upbringing an "atmosphere of perfect love, harmony, and parental indulgence" (1972, 102), and he calls Victor's father "benevolent . . . wise . . . altogether un-authoritarian" (103). For Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Victor's "Edenic childhood is an interlude of prelapsarian innocence in which, like Adam, he is sheltered by his benevolent father" (1979, 231); while for Mary Poovey he is "the son of loving, protective parents" who provide the "harmony of his childhood" (1984, 122); and for Ellen Moers he experiences "doting parents" (1976, 98). Typifying the way that Victor is [End Page 135] often contrasted with his double in this respect, Barbara Johnson sees the novel as "the story of two antithetical modes of parenting that give rise to two increasingly parallel lives—the life of Victor Frankenstein, who is the beloved child of two doting parents, and the life of the monster . . . who is immediately spurned and abandoned by his creator" (1982, 242). In counterpoint to this apparent consensus, Anne K. Mellor draws attention to "the many ways in which Frankenstein portrays the consequences of the failure of family, the damage wrought when the mother—or a nurturant parental love—is absent" (1988, 39). Like the above chorus, however, Mellor focuses on the consequences of Victor's absenting himself from the monster. Indeed, she echoes Johnson's opposition between Victor and the monster's experiences of their parents: "Throughout the novel, Frankenstein's callous disregard of his responsibility as the sole parent of his only child is contrasted to the examples of two loving fathers" (43-44), one of whom is Alphonse Frankenstein (the other being the father of the De Lacey family). 1 Everyone agrees, at least, that the monster suffers a horrible abandonment, and Mellor reads his murderousness as a measure of it, seeing in Victor "a classic case of a battering parent who produces a battered child who in turn becomes a battering parent: the creature's first murder victim . . . is a small child whom he wishes to adopt" (43). But why start the chain with Victor? 2 Doesn't this "battering parent" have parents of his own? Does he not himself suffer the absence of "nurturant parental love"? My approach to the monster's story of deprivation as a double of Victor's own is inflected by a particular psychoanalytic way of thinking. Going against the grain of Freudian and Lacanian readings, I invoke an object relations perspective that explores the centrality of an infant's early experiences with primary caretakers and of the intense feelings of love and hate that, even on the surface, are the main concern...

Lee Zimmerman

Frankenstein, Invisibility, and Nameless Dread

弗兰肯斯坦、隐身与无名恐惧

Abstract: Sigmund Freud and Søren Kierkegaard, using completely different categories, addressed the concept of trauma and what it means to move past it. Trauma removes us from representative time or the time of ongoing human projects and instead deposits its victim in what has been called anarchic time, a beginning that never proceeds toward a future. These events are not known; they are instead compulsively repeated. The challenge for treatment is returning patients to ongoing, narrative time, where the trauma can be left behind. This proves to be an unpredictable process in which analysts must not only use but rely on their mistakes to create tensions whereby they become witnesses to what patients cannot represent. Kierkegaard’s repetition tells us therapy tries to return an actual event to the status of what is future or merely possible, in which case it can be repeated as something different than before. Kierkegaardian repetition makes the analyst into a narrator with whose story the patient may identify.

Vance Sherwood

As Chance Would Have It: Freud and Kierkegaard on Repetition and Trauma

碰巧如此：弗洛伊德与克尔凯郭尔论重复与创伤

Abstract: This article unfolds a broadly Lacanian reading of Shakespeare’s poem, Venus and Adonis (1593). In this mythological tale of a mortal youth whose relation with a goddess is fatally severed when a boar gores him in the thigh, it finds an allegory of oedipalization: the experience of “castration” which impels the subject into absence, difference, language, adult sexuality, and desire. In its compensatory and redemptive capacity, language offers to fill the gap with words, giving us the whole order of art, all that can be imagined, narrated, and believed (the Imaginary). But insofar as it is based on loss and lack, language testifies to an insatiable desire for meaning it is unable to fulfill (the Symbolic). Here we find Shakespeare, still at an early stage in his writing career, weighing up these two radically different linguistic registers—comic and tragic, respectively—as he contemplated the different modes and potentialities for his craft.

Catherine Bates

The Imaginary and the Symbolic in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis

莎士比亚《维纳斯与阿多尼斯》中的想象与象征

Abstract: Images of childhood have a pivotal place in the writings of both Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin. The present paper offers a discussion on the subject of childhood memories that embody a return to infantile experience both in content and in form, mainly in the form of visual images. Freud’s visual image ( visuelles Bild ) and Walter Benjamin’s Denkbild (thought-image) present a dialectic between a condensed experience of the past and the inevitable transformation of experience into language. Childhood memories are not necessarily retrieved as realistic events but rather embody the potential to create new experiences in the present of remembrance, which are merely referred to the past. These notions are examined through a psychoanalytic reading of Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900 (2002 [1938]). This memoir is constructed through a singular collection of Denkbilder that presents the experience of being a child in the city of Berlin around 1900. It expresses a lamentation by the author and on behalf of his Jewish generation for the abyss in which they found themselves in the face of the rise of the Nazi regime. The present reading will focus on three main themes: replacements for the original in modern society, images of childhood as prefigurations of later developments, and translations from images to words as vital transformations, especially in times of turmoil.

Anat Tzur Mahalel

“An Intimation of Mourning”: Freud and Walter Benjamin on Images of Childhood

“哀悼的暗示”：弗洛伊德与瓦尔特·本雅明论童年形象

Abstract: Manifest as the trauma of birth by being ejected from the womb, abandonment spread like grief and anxiety throughout Louise Bourgeois’s life (1911–2010). She transformed this anxiety into works of art, for which words are inadequate since the origin is preverbal and therefore unrepresented. She uses a capacity for figurability , creating objects that give shape to emotions and fantasies that have not been conceived or represented but registered on a primordial unconscious level. This capacity is possible through a state, not of regression, but regredience , a creative transformational process, which, as a “loom of the psyche,” is constantly weaving threads and ideas together that form links to ahistorical unrep-resented trauma for the work of figurability. I seek to give meaning to three of Bourgeois’s sculptures here, Fée couturière (1963), Le Regard (1966), and Portrait (1963), by suggesting that they bring shape to and illuminate the trauma of birth, laying to rest, at least temporarily, the ghosts that haunt the artist.

Abbreviation	Am. Imago.
Journal Impact	0.08

ISSN	0065-860X, 1085-7931
h-index	17

Publication Information	Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press，Publishing cycle: ，Journal Type: journal，Open Access Journals: No
Basic data	Year of publication: 1996，Proportion of original research papers: 100.00%，Self Citation Rate:0.00%， Gold OA Rate: 0.00%

American Imago

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The Sound of Memory: Music and Acoustic Origins

Frankenstein, Invisibility, and Nameless Dread

As Chance Would Have It: Freud and Kierkegaard on Repetition and Trauma

The Imaginary and the Symbolic in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis

“An Intimation of Mourning”: Freud and Walter Benjamin on Images of Childhood

As Chance Would Have It: Freud and Kierkegaard on Repetition and Trauma

The Imaginary and the Symbolic in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis

“An Intimation of Mourning”: Freud and Walter Benjamin on Images of Childhood

Figurability in the Art of Louise Bourgeois

Norman N. Holland: The Dean of American Psychoanalytic Critics by Jeffrey Berman (review)