Stephen’s King’s brilliant and terrifying novel, The Shining, is an exploration of inter-generational psychosis in a family. The novel gives a multi-layered account of paranoid psychosis and provides a narrative framing of the development of a psychosis to a violent end, making it possible to explore the triggers to its violent expression. The goal of this paper is not to seek a precise cause-and-effect of psychotic and violent phenomena but to highlight and elaborate certain clinical features that allow different modalities of psychosis in the case of a father and his son to be distinguished, to trace their mutual points of overlap and convergence and to identify triggering moments of florid outbreak. While the psychosis is the one-by-one invention of a solution of every psychotic subject and is not the same in the father and son, there are moments of shared paranoid conviction and shared delusion (délire à deux). But there are also crucial differences in the father’s and son’s psychosis, in the relative strength of the defences, identifications and imaginary supports available to each of them. Points of divergence that arise between them are highly affecting and potentially devastating. These ideas are explored via their narrative and characterological development in the book.
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Keywords
Addiction
Aggression
Applied psychoanalysis
Architecture
Art
Body
Case study
Child analysis
Collecting
Death
death drive
desire
ethics
Fantasy
Freud
Gaze
Hysteria
Identity
Institution
Institutional Psychotherapy
interpretation
Jacques Lacan
Jouissance
Lacan
Language
Literature
Memory
Narcissism
Object a
Oedipus
Outsider Art
Paranoia
Psychoanalysis
Psychose
Psychosis
Repetition
Sade
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Sublimation
Transference
Trauma
Unconscious
Violence
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