{"id":167,"date":"2025-11-09T23:04:25","date_gmt":"2025-11-10T04:04:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/?p=167"},"modified":"2025-11-09T23:04:25","modified_gmt":"2025-11-10T04:04:25","slug":"freya-stark-and-freudian-psychology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/freya-stark-and-freudian-psychology\/","title":{"rendered":"Freya Stark and Freudian Psychology"},"content":{"rendered":"

In <\/span>Passionate Nomad<\/span><\/i>, Jane Geniesse ranges from implying to outright diagnosing Freya\u2019s adult choices and tendencies as a result of her tumultuous childhood. Her desire to please? A consequence of being devoted to a narcissistic mother. Her love for the outdoors? Her father\u2019s influence in making her walk through the woods alone. Her love for extravagances? A need to offset the poverty she grew up in. Her desire for freedom and exploration? The result of her helplessness while sequestered in Italy. The list goes on and on, and wrapped within the layers of her psyche appears to be an interlocking relationship between the Freudian idea of domesticity and childhood with the gendered fantasy of the East.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Alice in Wonderland<\/span><\/i>, or originally, <\/span>Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There <\/span><\/i>by Lewis Carroll is largely regarded as a metaphor for a young girls\u2019 psychosexual self-discovery. Written in 1871 and an instant literary classic, it feels a bit divinely coincidental when Freya writes in <\/span>Perseus and the Wind, <\/span><\/i>\u201cWhatever the ultimate origins, the book of Genesis gives a summary of the repeated story: delight in external things, and then human hunger for truth beyond. Eve, Psyche, Pandora, they would look, not, like the Lady of Shalot, away home the mirror, but through it, to see what is hidden behind the moving show: until the face of things becomes an impedi- ment to them and a torment, a barrier to the simplicity of truth.\u201d Here, Stark equates herself with mythical figures of creation and exploration, but the critical lens we\u2019ve applied to her in class makes her out rather to be the young Alice: bumbling through Wonderland, running away from the confines of mundane life, chased by some fear and ghost of her childhood. This analogy sets up how, in the minds of female colonial explorers such as Stark, the East functioned as a psychosexual space of \u201cself-discovery.\u201d In a world where every action was policed, freedom only existed and fantasy, and the East was a living embodiment. On some level this mentality persists even today, with common tropes of mid-life crisis prompting a trip to India<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Passionate Nomad, Jane Geniesse ranges from implying to outright diagnosing Freya\u2019s adult choices and tendencies as a result of her tumultuous childhood. Her desire to please? A consequence of being devoted to a narcissistic mother. Her love for the outdoors? Her father\u2019s influence in making her walk through the woods alone. Her love for … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Freya Stark and Freudian Psychology”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6527,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventure","category-colonial-fantasies","category-desire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6527"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":168,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions\/168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}