Tyrants Of The Heart: A Psychoanalytic Study of Mothers and Maternal Images in James Joyce

In a number of articles I published when I began my training as a psychoanalyst at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute now the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis I became intrigued by James Joyces concern with mothers and maternal images. I found that writing Stephens Mothers in Ulysses crystallized my sense that amor matris to use Stephen Dedaluss phrase the ambiguous mother love (a mothers love for her son or a sons love for his mother or both at once) was a way into many of the mysterious unfathomed even unfathomable passages in Ulysses.As I continued my training while simultaneously teaching English literature at San Francisco State I became more and more aware that the way I enjoyed teaching--the close systematic textual analysis of literature explication de texte--was dovetailing with the ways I was learning to listen to and to muse about my patients. In effect I was learning that by focusing on the inner lives of patients and literary characters--on what Paul Schwaber in his psychoanalytic reading of Ulysses The Cast of Characters (1999) calls minds in action--I was doing much the same thing. I was trying to pay the closest attention to the repeated thoughts feelings images and associations that make human beings unique.