Freud wrote some admittedly far-fetched speculative works addressing what he considered to be fundaments of the human psyche. Chapter 7 considers two of his most speculative pieces, “The return of totemism in childhood,” the fourth essay of his Totem and Taboo (1913), and Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).

Both writings, despite their fantastical nature, contain a coherence and completeness The Interpretation of Dreams lacks. Throughout the Totem and Taboo excerpt, Freud examines his suppositions and, in the end, offers an enlightening, if hypothetical, account of totemism, the evolution of religion, and a prehistoric piece of modern mentality. The steps, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, through which he reaches his improbable anchoring of mental life in dueling life and death instincts are clear, if avowedly extreme at the time.

Prior to shaping literary depictions of a nature classed both wondrous and terrible, sublime discourse addressed uplifting, transporting encounters with the written word. Nicolas Boileau’s influential French translation of Longinus’ ancient treatise On the Sublime (ca. first century CE) restyled the branch of sublime discourse dedicated to discourse itself, suggesting that sublime literature is not elevated simply because it is complex or because it is marked by a high or lofty style. Rather sublime works of verbal art carry a peculiar charge, a charge or spark relayed to audiences taking in sublime textual encounters. This emphasis on a charged sublime encounter would underwrite prominent philosophical and aesthetic accounts of sublime nature penned by Kant, Wordsworth, Burke, and Keats. Such literary representations of sublime nature are famously ambivalent, with aesthetic renderings of earthquakes, fires, or floods bearing out fraught questions of agency. Kantian and Wordsworthian models of sublime nature suggest human agencies of mind transcend vast powers of nature. Burkean and Keatsian accounts of dread nature or astounding material sublimities ultimately humble humankind.

Revenge probably features in most, if not all, lust killing. This chapter exemplifies where revenge for perceived transgression comes into the clearest focus and seems to occupy center stage. Of course, the revenge was disproportionate to the ‘offence’, a feature of displaced aggression and ‘revenge collecting’. Part of the trigger to revenge is a blow to self-esteem. The antagonism that Peter Sutcliffe felt towards women appeared to derive from suspicions over his partner’s infidelity and being cheated by a sex worker. Sutcliffe seemed to have a kind of love-hate relationship with sex workers. He was fascinated by them and engaged them in sex but was also disgusted by them and killed them. It can be speculated that Levi Bellfield’s toxic trajectory started when as a boy he was jilted by a blond girl. Most of his victims were blond girls, yet he sought this type as his girlfriends. Sergey Golovkin targeted boys.

Drugs and addiction are relevant to the present study: (1) by analogy with drug-taking, the term ‘addiction’ can be applied to serial killing even where drugs are not involved and (2) drugs play an important role in the lives of some serial lust killers. The discussion first turns to two killers where the term ‘addiction’ has been applied but where it appears that drugs were not used. It then looks at two examples of drug-associated killing. Serial lust killer Michael Ross described feeling assailed by intrusive thoughts urging the rape and murder of women. He published an account of his experience in an academic journal concerned with addiction. Joel Rifkin was adopted and seriously bullied by his peers. He described his sexual behaviour as addictive and gave evidence of ambivalence in his killings. Anthony Sowell appears to have been influenced in his sexual addiction by extensive use of crack cocaine.

Throughout his writing life, Anthony Trollope denied that his style, or any writer’s style, was worthy of much notice.  Despite the much-vaunted plainness of Trollope’s prose, this chapter shows that his style, apparently designed to erase itself, becomes the means of involving readers as active participants in unstable processes of moral and political adjudication. Building on recent accounts that have considered the ethics of prose style, the chapter suggests that Trollope’s style fosters a degree of moral ambivalence. His style is influenced by the idea of gentlemanly ease and is at the same time brought into rivalry with the professional lawyer. Although in novels such as Orley Farm (1861) Trollope (unreasonably) railed against lawyers willing to give a good defence to scoundrels, his own ‘elusive style’ is not as strident in judgement as such invective might lead us to expect.

This chapter, “God Too Laughs and We Can Laugh Too”: The Ambivalent Power of Comedy Performances in the Church, investigates the trend in Nigerian Pentecostal churches where comedians intersperse various church programs with comedy performances. In this chapter, I look at performance of power beyond acquisition and contestation to how power identity of an authority figure can be affirmed publicly and contested privately. Comedy performance has consistently been treated as a site of resistance by the marginalized subject, but my study of comedy in Pentecostal churches shows some complications in this functionalization of the art form. Using both ethnographic methods in my fieldwork with various interviews with “gospel comedians” (as some refer to themselves), I consider exchanges that constitute power identity whose radicality is not found in the public sites but in the backrooms where negotiations take place between the artist and the producers.

During Wallace Stevens’s lifetime, imperialism was already a global institution, but parsing Stevens’s relationship to imperialism was never an entirely transparent procedure. Siraganian’s chapter explores imperialism and colonialism through brief readings of some key poems, revealing how Stevens’s poetry investigates its relation to the competing imperial and colonial projects of his age. Throughout his poetic career, he closely followed geopolitical events, including Mussolini’s colonial invasion of Ethiopia, the invention of modern warfare, and the rise of totalitarian regimes. Various poems reflect this awareness. While Stevens’s views on the imperialist fantasies of his age were at times sympathetic, poems like “Anecdote of the Jar,” “Owl’s Clover,” “Life on a Battleship,” and “A Weak Mind in the Mountains” also provide alternative, more complicated accounts that question and sometimes oppose colonizing modes of cultural domination. Above all, imperialism, especially in its cultural variety, intrigued and worried Stevens as a particular variation on the question of knowledge that continually fascinated him. Contextualization of his poetry enables us to sort out Stevens’s competing allegiances at a chaotic historical moment: to anti-imperialism, to an embattled Western culture and ideology, to a unifying world of art and poetry.

Chapter 3 concerns attitudes as well as attitude dimensions and structure, including ambivalence. Attitudes have both a memory component and a judgment component. This aspect is important because recognizing attitude change is not possible without recognizing that these two components are part of attitudes. The chapter also covers the relation between attitude relevant memories and evaluative judgments, my research on specific and general attitudes toward objects and behaviors, including actions and inactions, and the degree to which attitudes predict behavior, including a meta-meta-analysis of the attitude behavior relation.

As the global Movement for Black Life continues its demands to end state violence in the USA and abroad, black feminists have cast motherhood as a radical site of political resistance. This chapter historicises popular and scholarly rhetorics of black mothering by returning to earlier black feminist voices from the 1970s and 1980s. In doing so, this chapter points to the theoretical contours and elisions undergirding canonical and contemporary black feminist treatments of motherhood and family. Through close reading of personal reflections by black mothers and writers Martha Southgate and Alice Walker, the author argues for theorists to reassess motherhood’s celebrated status in black feminist discursive landscapes and begin rethinking motherhood as a burdensome site of gendered labour and psychic antagonism in the intimate spheres of black women’s lives.

An explanation of the purpose of this book, highlighting what lies ahead. When I worked as a negotiator in international business transactions, I found much existing advice to be one-sided, focusing either on the win–win or the win–lose side of contracts when in reality most transactions consist of both. Part I: The basic paradox of the negotiation task means that we have to work with and against the other side. Because both sides face the paradox, they are jointly facing a dilemma: Their success is the result of their own choices as well as those of the other side. This leads to the third and deepest challenge: The ambivalence of thinking. Negotiators have to follow their own intuition as well as thinking deliberately to master the triple challenge of negotiation success. Part II: Each challenge sets up a specific trap for the learner. But if we identify these traps, they can turn into the three steps of negotiation learning, as Part III shows.

In Chapter 6, the author explores the interface between English as a lingua franca (ELF) and good language teaching and presents the findings of a small-scale exploration into teachers’ perceptions of ELF.

The chapter finds in Ulysses the logical end to Loyola’s project. It is Joyce’s most radical experiment thus far in creating his own ‘exercise’, his own set of impossible demands on the reader. It closely reads a particularly overloaded passage from the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode of Ulysses, a particular structure of paranoid frustration that Joyce has worked on before but one that here entails a most unstable position from the reader in the quest for that ‘sincere irony’ Loyola and Joyce demand.

The chapter moves from these positions of textual paranoia and frustration and makes the case for a Kleinian theory of aesthetics. It outlines how that theory would operate. It surveys the relatively scarce body of work on Klein and aesthetics and elaborates a framework for understanding the problems the previous chapters raise.

Clinicians who hope to modify patients’ unhealthy use of marijuana face potential frustration and difficulty trying to engage people in meaningful dialogue. The stages of change outlined by Prochaska and Di Clemente provide a useful guide for understanding how to initiate conversation with someone addicted to marijuana, whether they are in the precontemplation, contemplation, preparation (for change), action or maintenance stage. Utilizing the stages of change to guide the approach to promoting behavioral change introduces clinicians to one of the most essential principles of motivational interviewing (MI), often described as “meeting patients where they are”. Developed by Miller and Rollnick, MI shifts the focus away from resistance and denial in order to focus instead on ambivalence and moves clinicians away from confrontation and toward a more collaborative approach that is less likely to stimulate a patient’s defenses. Engagement through empathy for patients’ suffering enables clinicians to increase the cognitive dissonance between their behavior and their goals. Ultimately, the practice of motivational interviewing is an art, and not merely a set of techniques, that requires clinicians to explore their fundamental attitudes toward addiction.

Beginning with Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) and ending with Levi Pinfold’s Greenling (2015), this chapter contends that children’s literature provides an imaginative map for navigating the global industrial food system, superimposed on colonial circuits of yore. Several narrative dynamics dramatize the appetite and vulnerability of the child’s body. For example, the racialized child is the object of predation in late nineteenth-century US fiction, and then Harlem Renaissance literature repurposes this trope to cherish the black child. In The Secret Garden (1911) and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), white English children demonstrate and defend their virtue with hearty English repasts. In the postwar period, Green Eggs and Ham (1960) and Where the Wild Things Are (1963) imagine eating as an expression of childhood agency and rebellion. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, picture books reveal the enmeshment of the human and the nonhuman through the ecological intimacies of eating.

This chapter focuses on the assessment of eating disorders for the purpose of deciding on appropriate treatment pathways. Given the ambivalence inherent in eating disorders, in order to increase the likelihood of accurate and informative reporting as well as the likelihood that the patient will move to treatment, the aims of assessment should include (1) the initiation and establishment of rapport and therapeutic alliance; (2) the development of a collaborative understanding of the behaviors and cognitions that typify the eating disorder, where psychoeducational materials can be used to validate the patterns and cycles described; (3) the development of an understanding of ambivalence and obstacles for change; and (4) a review of any comorbidity that may require resolution before treatment can commence for the eating disorder. Each of these aims are explored in the chapter, along with specific suggestions for ways to achieve these.