Essay Questions

What are the adverse ramifications of having two selves? - “Self and Dream Self”

One cannot uphold the ‘self and dream self’ concurrently. Les Murray elucidates, “Urgencies from your time/join with the browner suits/walking those arcades with you/but then you are apart,/aghast, beside the numberless/defiling down steep fence/into an imminence — ”Clearly, “the self and dream self” are absolutely irreconcilable. Attempting to actualize the ‘dream self’ imperils the ‘self’ which precipitates distressing episodes. The discordance of the two divergent selves intensifies the odds of a psychological clash.

In the context of Lacanian psychoanalysis, what does “Self and Dream Self” exemplify?

The self delineates definite Symbolic Order. The Symbolic Order renders an individual’s being a “laborious as science.” The “dream self” epitomizes an Imaginary Order that activates fragments of an individual’s story that comprises an invented cast.

In the context of capitalism, how would you interpret Les Murray’s experience in “Vertigo”?

Les Murray recalls, “Last time I fell in a shower room/I bled like a tumbril dandy/and the hotel longed to be rid of me.” The hotel’s reaction epitomizes the callousness of capitalism. The hotel considers Murray an encumbrance that would warrant extra accountabilities that could not contribute materially to its profits. The hotel management is self-seeking and inhumane for it hankers to get rid of him instead of certifying that he is not imperiled after the Vertigo.