Intellau_Celistic
5'3 KHHV Mentalcel
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- Aug 26, 2021
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iv
Abstract
THE VASTNESS OF SMALL SPACES:
SELF-PORTRAITS OF THE ARTIST AS A CHILD ENCLOSED
by
Matthew J. Burgess
Advisor: Professor Nancy K. Miller
A tent of bed sheets, a furniture fort, a corner of the closet surrounded by chosen
objects—the child finds or fashions these spaces and within them daydreaming begins.
What do small spaces signify for the child, and why do scenes of enclosure emerge in
autobiographical self-portraits of the artist? Sigmund Freud’s theory that the literary
vocation can be traced to childhood experiences is at the heart of this project, especially
his observation that “the child at play behaves like a writer, in that he creates a world of
his own, or rather, re-arranges the things of this world in a new way.” Gaston Bachelard’s
exploration of space and poetic reverie is also foundational, and I situate Freud’s “child at
play” within Bachelard’s spatial topography in order to examine the ways in which
enclosures facilitate the discovery and development of the child’s creative capacity. The
paradoxical relation between smallness and vastness is a central theme in this
dissertation; as the child imagines a world of her own within the small space, spatial
constraints dissolve or vanish.
My first chapters consider representations of childhood space in the work of two
British memoirists at midcentury, Virginia Woolf and Denton Welch, and in the third
chapter, I analyze lyric self-portraits by three American poets of the postwar periodREVIEW
v
Frank O’Hara, Anne Sexton, and Robert Duncan. Others have suggested that childhood
enclosures are symbolic of “womb” or “cave,” but these interpretations fail to capture the
complexity of meanings at play within these scenes. I argue that this recurring figure is
less about a lost union with the maternal body or some atavistic memory of the beginning
of history; rather, for the author tracing the origins of her creative vocation to childhood,
the small space is where
Hallucinations are often considered a sign of psychotic illness, but are also
common in other diagnostic groups and individuals without mental health problems.
This thesis uses Perceptual Control Theory (PCT), a cybernetic model which
explains behaviour and cognition in terms of control processes regulating ongoing
perception according to internally represented goals, as a theoretical framework to
understand hallucinations.
First, a theoretical/conceptual paper (Paper 1) examines how PCT provides
an integrated account of (i) the mechanisms responsible for the formation of
hallucinations, (ii) their phenomenological heterogeneity, (iii) the interaction
between these mechanisms and environmental factors that might contribute to the
formation of hallucinations, and (iv) the processes leading to different affective
reactions to hallucinatory experiences (e.g. distress). The main implications of this
model are discussed in the context of pertinent theoretical and empirical literature,
and relevant clinical and research implications are considered.
Second, this thesis includes an empirical investigation (Paper 2) examining
two PCT-informed hypotheses in a cross-section of 22 clinical and 18 non-clinical
individuals with auditory verbal hallucinations (“hearing voices”), namely (i) that the
content of voices will be thematically linked to the participants’ personal goals, and
(ii) that affective reactions to voices will depend on the extent to which voices
facilitate and/or interfere with important personal goals. The analysis revealed that
82.5% of participants reported voices that thematically matched at least one of their
reported goals. As predicted, affective reactions to voices were strongly associated
with measures of interference and facilitation of goals, even when controlling for
important covariates (e.g. participants’ history of mental health difficulties; voices’
content, frequency and duration).
Finally, a critical evaluation is provided (Paper 3), where the methodological
strengths and limitations of the work presented in the present thesis are discussed
with the aim to reflect on the research process, and inform future investigations into
the topics considered in this thesis