Schattschneider honored for essay on the uses of Japanese dolls

Ellen Schattschneider

Ellen Schattschneider, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women's and Gender Studies, has been awarded the 2010 CORST Essay Prize in Psychoanalysis and Culture by the American Psychoanalytic Association. The CORST Essay Prize, which comes with a $1,000 award, annually recognizes the best essay on psychoanalytically informed research in the biobehavioral sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities.

The winning essay will be presented at the national meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in New York City in January 2011.  Schattschneider's paper,  "The Fetish Goes to War: Disavowal and the Family Romance in Modern Japan," explores the use of doll figurines in Japan as symbolic doubles for  military combatants and victims of war.

In some cases these dolls have enabled thoughtful reflection by perpetrators and victims on the long term legacies of mass violence. In other instances, they have enabled what psychoanalytic theorists term "disavowal," an incapacity to acknowledge fully the implications of one's own actions and emotions.

The paper emerges out of Schattschneider's fieldwork and archival research in Japan on memories and experiences of war, supported by the U.S. Fulbright program and by Brandeis' Theodore and Jane Norman Fund for Faculty Research.

Categories: Humanities and Social Sciences, Research

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