Phantom Limbs and Body Integrity Identity Disorder Literary and Psychoanalytic Reflections

Phantom Limbs and Body Integrity Identity Disorder discusses the conditions of Phantom Limb Syndrome and Body Integrity Identity Disorder together for the first time, exploring examples from literature, film, and psychoanalysis to re-ground theories of the body in material experience.

The book outlines the ways in which PLS and BIID involve a feeling of rupture underlined by a desire for wholeness, using the metaphor of the mirror-box (a therapeutic device that alleviates phantom limb pain) to examine how fiction is fundamentally linked to our physical and psychical realities. Using diverse examples from theoretical and fictional works, including thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Blanchot, D.W. Winnicott, and Georges Perec, and films by Powell and Pressburger and Quentin Tarantino, each chapter offers a detailed exploration of the mind/body relationship and experiences of fragmentation, bodily ownership, and symbolic reconstitution. By tracing these concepts, the monograph demonstrates ways in which fiction can enable us to understand the psychosomatic conditions of PLS and BIID more thoroughly, while providing new ways of reading psychoanalysis, literary theory, and fictional works.

The first book to analyse BIID in relation to PLS, Phantom Limbs and Body Integrity Identity Disorder will be essential reading for academics and literary readers interested in the body, psychoanalysis, English literature, literary theory, film, and disability.

PART I. Why Psychoanalysis and Literature? 1. Introduction 2. "We didn’t ask for this pain" 3. Science, Literature, and Psychoanalysis 4. Negative Hallucination and "The Man from Burma" PART II. Symbolic Exchanges and Reconstitutions 5. The Mirror-stage, Blanchot, and "Orpheus’s Gaze" 6. The Red Shoes 7. Breakdown: D.W. Winnicott 8. Death Proof 9. Almost Artificial Limbs: Perec’s W or The Memory of Childhood 10. A Psychoanalytic Voyage: Perec and Symbolic Reconstitution 11. Conclusion

Monika Loewy, PhD, obtained her doctorate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. She teaches and writes on film, twentieth and twenty-first-century literature, and psychoanalysis.