The Question of the Technique in Rainer Maria Rilkes (1875-1926) Sonnets to Orpheus (1922)

All the cycle of the 55 Sonnets to Orpheus was written by Rainer Maria Rilke in a rapture of inspiration in February 1922 some days after having finished his famous Duino Elegies What stimulated him to do it was the death in 1919 of a young and beautiful dancer Wera Ouckama-Knoop for whom he felt great admiration In a letter to Margot Sizzo of April 12 1923 the poet speaks of her in the following terms This beautiful girl who began first to dance and draw the attention of all who saw her by her innate art of movement and transformation declared one day to her mother that she could or would not dance anymore Her body changed in a very peculiar way without losing its beautiful Asiatic features it became strangely heavy and solid which already signaled at the beginning of her mysterious glandular disease which so soon led to her death In the time that remained to her Wera dedicated herself to music and finally only to drawing as if dance were to be cut off from her more and more gently and discretely but never outrigh

Phenomenology of emotions with special reference to dysphoria

Dysphoria is a complex phenomenon which must be defi ned in the framework of different forms of affections. It belongs to the broader field of emotions, which are characterized by some essential features: i.e. movement, passiveness, tran-sitoriness, and reference to the others. All these four essential features of emotion are specifi cally altered in depression, whose phenomenology is presented in a clinical case. In discussing dysphoria, a first distinction is made between par-ticular and global affections. The fi rst type encompasses emotions and feelings, while the second one includes humor, mood and temper. Dysphoria belongs to one of these global affective states: the humor, which has to do with the spatial dimension of existence. In dysphoria the patient experiences the world as oppressive and invasive of his/her intimacy; the others are lived as persons demanding answers or actions he/she is not able to fulfill. Finally, the phenomenology of dysphoria is analyzed through the four essential features described above and examples are given

Disturbances of embodiment as core phenomena of depression in clinical practice

This paper proposes a phenomenological approach to the diagnosis of depression, with the aim of overcoming the broadness and nonspecificity of the concept of major depressive disorder (MDD) in current systems of diagnostic classification of mental disorders. Firstly, we outline the methodological limitations of the current classification systems for the diagnosis of MDD. Secondly, we offer a conceptual differentiation between a "symptomatological"versus a "phenomenological"diagnosis of depression. Thirdly, we propose characteristic "disturbances of embodiment"as the fundamental phenomena of "core depression", which manifest themselves in 3 dimensions: embodied self, embodied intentionality, and embodied time. A more useful diagnosis of depression may be achieved by describing the phenomena that constitute a core depression, in order to avoid the overdiagnosis of MDD and its negative consequences in clinical practice