The Talking Cure as Action: Freud's Theory of Ritual Revisited

Freud made creative use of late Victorian theories of ritual as empty modes of behavior, using the idea of seemingly meaningless ritual to offer a compelling comparison with obsessive behavior. However, analytic hours, with their repetitive frame and repetition of unconscious conflicts, have stronger links with rituals than Freud admitted. Recent theories highlight the extensive power of rituals to organize and instantiate models of effective action, especially in terms of the multifunctionality of language. These new theories of ritual offer in turn new tools for understanding the therapeutic action of analytic hours. © 2011 Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis

'Black diamonds', 'clever blacks' and other metaphors: Constructing the black middle class in contemporary South African print media

South Africa (SA) has been undergoing a process of transformation since the end of White minority rule (apartheid) in 1994. During this period, various employment and lifestyle opportunities have given rise to a growing Black middle class (BMC). Against this backdrop, the article draws upon an intersectional approach to corpus-assisted discourse studies in order to examine the construction of the BMC in a 1.4 million-word corpus composed of 20 mainstream Anglophone South African newspaper titles published between 2008 and 2014. With the help of the corpus tool AntConc, the article investigates the collocates of ‘black middle class’, ‘black diamonds’, ‘clever blacks’ and ‘coconuts’, classifying results according to semantic categories in order to provide an idea of the multiple but nuanced representations of the BMC in contemporary SA. The analysis finds several lexically rich moralizing and paternalistic discourses that, in accordance with an intersectional perspective, enact a complex pattern of strategies that are simultaneously exclusionary and inclusionary