2nd Global Conference

Monsters and the Monstrous:
Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil

Monday 10th May - Wednesday 12th May 2004
Budapest, Hungary

Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers

Session 10: Monsters Psychological
Chair: Peter Mario Kreuter

The Sick and the Dead: Some Vampires, Soren Kierkegard, and the American Psychiatric Association
Peter Remington
Eastern Mediterranean University , N. Cyprus

My paper aims to add to debate on the limitations in current treatment of depression by reading Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles in the light of the work of Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard famously described despair as the ‘sickness unto death'. Rather more colloquially, the Vampire Lestat might add “ … and beyond it, too, bro.” Indeed all of Anne Rice's vampires seem to fall within Kierkegaard's category of the despair “that wills to be itself … in terms of its misery,” occupying and developing within this spectrum a range of positions from the defiance of Lestat to Marius' quasi-religious observances towards the primal vampire parents, Those Who Must Be Kept.
There remains an essential distinction: Rice's vampires are in everyday human terms already ‘dead', and hence part of a whole different ball game; yet Kierkegaard's characterisation of despair relies on the assertion that “Christianly understood, death is … only a little event within that which is all, an eternal life.” Does, therefore, the monstrousness of vampire existence reside in its unqualified material access to this eternity; and, from this perspective, how can we understand Kierkegaard's construction of despair from the standpoints of necessity and possibility? Furthermore, what is the relation between the aesthetic vision of Lestat's “ Savage Garden ” and the aesthetic viewpoint depicted by Kierkegaard? What emerges from this contrast as more monstrous: the vampire, or common human understanding?
My paper at last year's conference, Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil, demonstrated a consonance between the characterisation of Rice's vampires and DSM-IV criteria for the diagnosis of depression. In linking despair to the spirit sub specie aeternitatis, Kierkegaard opens up for debate an area that the American Psychiatric Association completely eschews. A paradox: whilst I would be the first to proclaim the benefits of lithium and SSRI antidepressants in relieving my own chronic cyclothymia, I find its internal topography far more accurately delineated in Kierkegaard's depiction of the despair that fails to recognise itself. What bearing might this have on the rates of diagnosis and successful treatment of garden-variety chronic, ‘mild to moderate' depression? Is, then, the true monster to emerge from this comparison of death and undeath, the eternal and the quotidian, spirit and body, none other than homo DSM , the statistically- and neurobiologically-defined depressive?

Monsters in Isolation and Monsters-at-Large: The American Psychodrama and its Practical Application
Emily McMehen

No abstract is presently available

Face-Off: Beauty and the Beast
Susanne Ramsenthaler
Department of Photography, School of Visual Communications, Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom

Call them what you will: Jellyfish, Medusae or ‘the icky stuff on the beach you try not to step in'. Most people are ambivalent toward these creatures.
In our perception they inhabit a territory situated between attraction and repulsion. My interest in this liminal condition has led me to investigate this phenomenon in practical, historical and theoretical terms.
From their depiction as ‘Monsters of the Deep' in illustrations of Jules Verne's 1000 Leagues Under The Sea to the recently opened exhibit at the New York City Aquarium, entitled Alien Stingers , Medusae remain largely mysterious creatures with more than a hint of menace about them.
Their poisonous aspect looms large in the public's imagination, although there are few species whose sting is life threatening.
Finding Nemo, the recent Disney film, portrays the Jellyfish as inert, passive, but potentially deadly predators and, as signaled by their intense pink colouring, undoubtedly female.
I will examine our relationship to these creatures by looking at the notion of Freud's Uncanny, evoked, in this case, by something which is beautiful but frightening at the same time and as such disturbs any straightforward sense of the body's exterior and interior.
Having worked photographically with Medusae for a while now, I will show some examples of my work, which splits their image and reassembles it in a simple kaleidoscope style.
The discussion of this ‘making strange of the already unfamiliar' will include comparisons with historical examples of Mutation and Splitting such as Hieronymus Bosch's painting The Garden of Earthly Delights , itself an illustration of Ovid's Metamorphosis .

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