Secrets Between Selves and The Exchange of Desires: Mirror-Stage Politics and Self-Reflecting Wishes within Conrad's "The Secret Sharer" and Under Western Eyes
Thesis written by a student in the UNT Honors College discussing author Joseph Conrad's work in relation to self-realization, self-awareness, and the loss of self. Includes psychoanalytic theories, especially those of Jacques Lacan.
Under Western Eyes
Under Western Eyes traces a sequence or error, guilt, and expiation. Its composition placed such demands upon Conrad that he suffered a serious breakdown upon its completion. It is by common critical consent one of his finest achievements. Bomb-throwing assassins, political repression and revolt, emigre revolutionaries infiltrated by a government spy: much of Under Western Eyes (1911) is more topical than we might wish. Set in tsarist Russia and in Geneva, its concern with perennial issues of human responsibility gives it a lasting moral force. The contradictory demands placed upon men and women by the social and political convulsions of the modern age have never been more revealingly depicted. Joseph Conrad personally felt no sympathy with either Russians or revolutionaries. None the less his portrayal of both in Under Western Eyes is dispassionate and disinterested. Through the Western eyes of his narrator we are given a sombre but not entirely pessimistic view of the human dilemmas which are born of oppression and violence.
Moral reasoning and the child with psychopathic tendencies
This study investigates the ability of two groups of children with emotional and behavioural difficulties, divided according to their Psychopathy Screening Device scores (Frick & Hare, The psychopathy screening device. Toronto: Multi-Health Systems, in press), on the moral/conventional distinction and emotion attribution tasks. The 16 high Psychopathy Screening Device scoring children were found to make a significantly weaker moral/conventional distinction than the low Psychopathy Screening Device scoring controls. Moreover, while neither group could be distinguished in their emotion attributions to happiness, embarrassment and fear stories, the high Psychopathy Screening Device scoring children were found to be significantly less likely to attribute moral emotions to story protagonists than the low Psychopathy Screening Device scoring controls. The results are interpreted within the Violence Inhibition Mechanism model of the development of normal and atypical morality (Blair, Cognition, 57, 1–29, 1995).