Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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Review: Siôn Parkinson, Stinkhorn: How Nature’s Most Foul-Smelling Mushroom Can Change the Way We Listen (Sternberg Press, 2024)
Full text linkFascination with mushrooms has experienced a curious renaissance in the humanities within recent decades, as indicated by the scholarly interventions of Anna Tsing (The Mushroom at the End of the World, 2015), John Cage (A Mycological Foray, 2020), and Merlin Sheldrake (Entangled Life, 2020); to name but a few. To this ever-growing field of research, a new and highly evocative title is added. Siôn Parkinson’s Stinkhorn: How Nature’s Most Foul-Smelling Mushroom Can Change the Way We Listen is a volume perfumed with thought-provoking entries on the shared resonances between putrid smells, aural landscapes, and phallic fungi. Beyond the arresting image of a ripe dune stinkhorn proudly adorning the front cover, the reader encounters a heady concoction of etymological musings, philosophical provocations and punny wordplays, all of which waft together with each turn of a page. In stylish Plantin typeface, Parkinson crafts an elegant reflection on what is largely considered to be one of the strangest – if not the smelliest – mushrooms to have protruded from the ground below: Phallus impudicus, also known as the ‘common stinkhorn’. While the book reflects a thorough engagement with natural history and mycology, it is wonderfully generous in how it conveys the story of this shameless, earthy growth, and its power to captivate the minds (or indeed noses) of thinkers such as Pliny the Elder, Hadrianus Junius, and John Gerard
PEEKABOO! In Search of the Elephant in the Rubble: A Case Study of Art Psychotherapy with a Child Earthquake Survivor (English version)
No full textChildren are particularly vulnerable when exposed to natural disasters. Beyond immediate harm, they may also suffer from long-term psychological deficits, especially those who have experienced insecure attachment during early childhood. Taiwan frequently experiences damaging natural disasters, including earthquakes and typhoons. This paper explores the object-relations approach to art psychotherapy intervention from a cultural perspective. A case study is presented, detailing the journey of art psychotherapy with a 7-year-old earthquake survivor who suffered from acute post-traumatic stress symptoms, including anxiety, sleep disturbances, and hypervigilance.
This case study illustrates how the child externalised traumatic experiences and represented them through repetitive symbolic play and art-making. This repetition provided a space for the child to reenact, regress, and redefine the traumatic events. The paper discusses how the art therapist created a secure holding environment by preparing art materials, enduring the child’s attacks, and collaboratively exploring the multiple layers of trauma.
Key words
Natural Disaster, Earthquake, Art psychotherapy, Repetitive symbolic play, Object relations theory, Taiwa
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ‘Lafcadio Hearn’: A New Translation
Full text linkHugo von Hofmannsthal’s short essay ‘Lafcadio Hearn’ (1904) provides a brief but powerful insight into the resonance of Hearn’s Japanese writing for European decadent and modernist writing in the early twentieth century. Writers and artists turning to Japan since the mid nineteenth century were building on a history of transnational engagements between East Asia and Central Europe, as well as long-established artistic and intellectual practices of European Orientalism.[i] Studies of japonisme have demonstrated the specific place that Japan held in German and Austrian imaginations by 1900, especially in Hofmannsthal’s Vienna.[ii] As European knowledge of Japanese art and culture developed over the nineteenth century, Hearn’s work fuelled fascination with both the ‘old Japan’ and contemporary Japanese life.[iii] Hofmannsthal’s essay shows this tension in his response to Hearn’s work: his elegiac tone in describing ancient Japanese spiritual practices is combined with stark images of the ongoing Russo-Japanese War, his condescending praise of Japanese intellectuals placed alongside weary dissatisfaction with the ‘burden’ of Western culture.
[i] See especially Joanne Miyang Cho, Lee M. Roberts, and Christian W. Spang, eds, Transnational Encounters between Germany and Japan: Perceptions of Partnership in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). On German and Austrian orientalism in this period more broadly, see Todd Kontje, German Orientalisms (University of Michigan Press, 2004); Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Katharina Herold-Zanker, Decadence and Orientalism in England and Germany, 1880–1920: ‘The Indispensable East’ (Oxford University Press, 2024).
[ii] Mirjam Dénes, Györgyi Fajcsák, Piotr Spławski, and Toshio Watanabe, eds, Japonisme in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (Ferenc Hopp Museum of Asiatic Arts, 2020), and Aglaja Kempf, ‘Oskar Kokoschka und der Japonismus: Wien um 1900 und die japanische Ästhetik’, in Oskar Kokoschka: Neue Einblicke und Perspektiven, ed. by Régine Bonnefoit and Bernadette Reinhold (de Gruyter, 2021), pp. 402–20.
[iii] See Kathleen M. Webb, Lafcadio Hearn and his German Critics: An Examination of His Appeal (Lang, 1984), and Gerhard Schepers, ‘Exoticism in Early Twentieth-Century German Literature on Japan’, in Japanese-German Relations, 1895–1945, ed. by Christian W. Spang and Rolf-Harald Wippich (Routledge, 2006), pp. 98–116
Jenseits des Aschenbechers (German Version)
No full textAshtrays portray a recurrent theme in the art therapy sessions with people dealing with addiction, often provoking ambivalent reactions to the therapist. Approaching the complex dynamics of addiction, I have found many similarities between the needs which both the addictive substance and the creation of the ashtray aim to cover. Through the creative process and the support of the therapeutic relationship, there can be a shift in the function of this artwork, from the destructive usability to the constructive symbolism. The ashtray can thereby pose a metaphor for integration and containing, representing the development of a more resilient and autonomous self.
Key words
art therapy, addiction, symbol, self-destruction, self-healing, containin
Mentalisieren in der Kunsttherapie –eine Fallgeschichte (German Version)
No full textDer Beitrag untersucht die wechselseitige Beziehung von psychodynamischer Kunsttherapie und dem Konzept des Mentalisierens vor dem Hintergrund der Objektbeziehungstheorien. Er versteht diese als hilfreiches Konzept Triangulierungsprozesse in der Kunsttherapie als mentalisierungsfördernd zu betrachten und in den bisherigen Literaturüberblick einzuordnen. Die Fallgeschichte untersucht die Entwicklung mentalisierungsfördernder Prozesse im Rahmen einer zweijährigen kunsttherapeutischen Behandlung mit einer 30-jährigen Person im klinischen Setting und in der ambulanten kunsttherapeutischen Praxis.
Key words
Mentalisieren, Bindung, Objektbeziehungen, Triangulieren, gemeinsame geteilte Aufmerksamkeit, Symbolisieren, Traumatisierung, frühkindliche Bindungstraumata, Depression, Essstörung, Suizidalität
Minnas Geschenk: Kunsttherapie mit einer 16-jährigen Jugendlichen in der stationären Jugendhilfe (German Version)
No full textDie Fallstudie ist eine bewährte Methode in der Psychotherapie und bietet die Möglichkeit, die Erfahrungen, Fragen, Erkenntnisse und Reflexionen der Therapeut*in zu artikulieren. Sie ermöglicht einen vertiefenden fachlichen Dialog durch das Erzählen und Teilen von Sitzungsmaterial und unterstützt zugleich den fortlaufenden Prozess der Therapeut*in, die psychologischen Erfahrungen der Klient*in zu konzeptualisieren und zu verstehen. Diese Fallstudie entstand aus meinem Wunsch heraus, das Phänomen des Schenkens meiner jugendlichen Klientin Minna genauer zu erforschen. Minna lebte in einer intensivpädagogischen Wohngruppe und verschenkte regelmäßig ihre Kunstwerke an andere – darunter ihre Eltern und das Betreuungspersonal. In diesem Artikel dokumentiere ich Minnas kunsttherapeutischen Prozess und meine eigenen Reflexionen dazu, die ich in einen psychodynamischen Rahmen und die einschlägige Fachliteratur einordne. Das Verfassen der Fallstudie dient dabei nicht nur als Methode des Nachdenkens, sondern auch als Möglichkeit, sich ihrer Erfahrung anzunähern und einen fachlichen Dialog innerhalb der kunsttherapeutischen Gemeinschaft anzuregen.
Key words
Kunsttherapie, Adoleszenz, Kinder- und Jugendhilfe, Objektbeziehungstheorie, Schenken, Trauma, Ausstellun
The Play of Authorial Voice in Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese Ghost Stories
Full text linkThe nineteenth century was critical for the development of the ghost story form as we recognize it today. As Nick Freeman has observed, it was during this century that the ghost story emerged as a ‘distinct genre of short fiction’, instead of its prior existence as interspersed episodes within longer works, and developed its own conventions, formulae, and investments.[i] Near the end of the nineteenth century, despite the proliferation of periodicals and publications publishing short-form supernatural fiction over the decades, the appetite for the genre was still ‘ravenous’.[ii] Significant innovations in literary forms of the fantastic also occurred at the turn of the century, with the genre of the ghost story providing a significant framework for Lafcadio Hearn’s cross-cultural encounters with strange places, customs, and folk traditions during his travels and then later during his Japanese years. As Nicholas Ruddick writes, ‘one of the greatest literary achievements of the fin de siècle was a successful break with fictional realism’, a development which proved crucial for the rising popularity of fantastic literature, experiments with existing forms such as the Gothic and the ghost story, as well as an interest in ‘the development of an old (oral) story-telling tradition’.[iii] The development of the ghost story as a narrative form at the turn of the century was therefore linked to writers’ interest in revisiting folktales as well as oral narratives to create supernatural tales, leading to innovations in narrative structure that are relevant to Hearn’s own literary experiments.
[i] Nick Freeman, ‘The Victorian Ghost Story’, in The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, ed. by Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 93–107 (p. 93).
[ii] Ibid., p. 101.
[iii] Nicholas Ruddick, ‘The Fantastic Fiction of the Fin de Siècle’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, ed. by Gail Marshall (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 189–206 (p. 189); Michal Peprník, ‘R. L. Stevenson and the Fin de Siècle Pre-Modernist Narrative Mosaic’, in The Fantastic of the Fin de Siècle, ed. by Irena Grubica and Zdeněk Beran (Cambridge Scholars, 2016), pp. 73–90 (p. 74)
Review: ‘Kwaidan: Encounters with Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904)’, Farmleigh Gallery, Dublin, 7 March-24 August 2025
Full text linkThe Kwaidan Exhibition project emerged from an invitation from Irish artist Stephen Lawlor to forty artists, twenty Japan-based and twenty Ireland-based, to create prints inspired by their choice of text from one of Lafcadio Hearn’s best-known works, completed in the year of his death in Tokyo in 1904. No stranger to curating collective creative crossovers between literature and the visual arts, Lawlor had previously organized an exhibition of the work of Irish writers and artists inspired by Hearn’s contemporary, the Irish ‘Celtic Twilight’ poet and Nobel laureate, W. B. Yeats. Indeed, it was while presenting this latter exhibition in Japan in 2017 that he first encountered Hearn’s potent aura
Netta Syrett’s Afterlife: From London to Hollywood
Full text linkAlthough the words above, spoken by the actor Katharine Hepburn in A Woman Rebels, were the creation of two male screenwriters – Anthony Veiller (1903-1965), an American, and Ernest Vajda (1886-1954), a Hungarian emigré to America – the source text for this 1936 film was a 1929 novel by a British woman writer. That the novel in question, Portrait of a Rebel, proved popular and successful enough on both sides of the Atlantic to be of interest to RKO Radio Pictures, a Hollywood studio, seems astonishing now. Its author, Netta Syrett, was a member neither of the current generation nor even of the Edwardian or Georgian ones immediately preceding it, for she had been born in 1865 – thus, in the middle of the previous century – and was nearing the end of a long career. Her literary fame had been achieved first in The Yellow Book with her short story ‘Thy Heart’s Desire’ for the July 1894 issue (Volume II), followed by further contributions in October 1895 (Volume VII) and January 1897 (Volume XII). She had, nonetheless, remained both relevant and appealing to a wide swathe of the reading public. Just how she accomplished what so many of her contemporaries did not can only be a matter for speculation. One possibility, however, was through her close attention to expressions of taste communicated via the medium of reviews, as these became more readily available to authors at the turn of the twentieth century thanks to the rise of professional press-cutting services, to which she herself was a subscriber, as evidenced by the collection of materials sent to her by Romeike and Curtice