Between the Lines

Leda and the Swan BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS A sudden blow: the great wings beating still  Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed  By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,  He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.  How can those terrified vague fingers push  The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?  And how can body, laid in that white rush,  But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?  A shudder in the loins engenders there  The broken wall, the burning roof and tower  And Agamemnon dead.  Being so caught up,  So mastered by the brute blood of the air,  Did she put on his knowledge with his power  Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? WB Yates Leda and the swan is a daring sonnet by Irish poet William Butler Yates that retells the story from Greek mythology of Leda,s impregnation  by the god Zeus in the form of a swan. Yates wrote this sonnet at the height of his

Along with Nietzsche and Marx, Sigmund Freud was the third of the founding fathers of the hermaneutics of suspicion that I covered at the very beginning of this series of blogs. If you haven't read that blog, or have simply forgotten those founding principles, I recommend re-reading before you continue. Psychoanalytical theory centers around the works of Sigmund Freud which was brought back into importance during the 60s, supplemented with post-structuralist ideas, by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan . Jacques Lacan Psychoanalysis works by exploring that gap between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. Freud claimed that the deepest desires and wishes of the conscious will regularly erupt, uninvited, into our lives. Perhaps the most famous of his ideas are written in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). In the work, he sets out the theory of an Oedipal complex or Elektra complex  that is essential to development. He claims that a child's desire for sexual