CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2008
| Author | Babovic, Jovana |
|---|---|
| Title | The Quest for Serbia's Imagined Phallus: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Yugoslavia's Socialist Family, 1945-1991 |
| Summary | The aim of this study is to contribute a new angle to existing literature on Yugoslavia’s state disintegrations, presently focusing on socialist Yugoslavia from 1945 to 1991, by proposing a psychoanalytic approach to discourses on history. In relying on a distinctly interdisciplinary framework, the project traces shifts in relations between Yugoslavia’s federal republics on three parallel planes: constructed literary rhetoric, political history often echoing cultural voices, and a metaphorical analysis of power relations using tools afforded by Freudian and Lacanian theory. The premise of this project accepts that socialist Yugoslavia mirrors a family, a configuration that allows transformations of internal relations and struggles for power. Within this matrix, Serbia is imagined in the position of an older sister, a demoted role from her metaphorical interwar motherhood, while the other Yugoslav republics comprise the familial brotherhood. The study’s deliberately gendered approach takes particular care to address the axis of gender relations in the context of socialist society and the constructed psychoanalytic framework actively promotes this discussion. The narrative traces the gradual changes in republican relations in chorus with accompanying psychoanalytic interpretations of behaviors that are metaphorical attempts at resolution of repressed unconscious conflicts – Serbia’s penis envy and the other Yugoslav republics quest for the imagined phallus. |
| Supervisor | Iordachi, Constantin |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2008/babovic_jovana.pdf |
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