THE ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE

  I'll probably never use the titular term "obsessive-transgressive" on a regular basis, for the phenomenon I'm addressing...

  in 1924, Freud elaborated on masochism, suggesting for the first time that it is quintessentially feminine to find pleasure in pain—indeed...

 In the history of humankind, the reasons for cultures to impute shame to their members are as varied as snowflakes-- failure to honor dead ...

 I decided I needed to follow up PART 4  with a couple of variations on the thymotic/epithymotic word-pair-- but this time, taken from Ameri...

  In THYMOS BE DE PLACE PT. 4 , I gave two examples of my new categories, thymotic and epithymotic, as they applied to two characters from R...

The last installment of THYMOS BE DE PLACE appeared in 2009 , while the last time I wrote about Frank Fukuyama's magisterial application...

I've used my own term "escalation" twice on this blog for separate literary operations, though with the sense that they do con...

I''ve never read any of the PUNISHER features with any regularity, even back when the character's popularity skyrocketed in the ...

In the essay SADISM OF THE CASUALKIND , I pointed out that writers like Legman and Wertham viewed every apparent act of fictional sadism to ...

 When I began this blog in 2007, ultraliberal SJWs were still in the process of attempting to brainwash American audiences into viewing stra...

  In one crucial respect, the French writers of the degeneracy school differed from their American counterpart...

If Stanley Kubrick's film A CLOCKWORK ORANGE had married a 1990s Freudian treatise on the inter-relation of sex and violence, their baby...

H.G. Wells' 1897 WAR OF THE WORLDS novel spawned countless "BEM-chases-babes" stories along the lines of this image from INVAS...

My essay THE NARRATIVE RULE OF EXCESS was the primary argument in which I connected Nietzsche's specific idea of "high spirits...

Nietzsche's "high spirits" line from TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS prompted this current line of thought. Once more, with (high) feeli...