Dr Laura Martin
Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature
Laura.Martin@glasgow.ac.uk
https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/mlc/staff/lauramartin/
Dr Laura Martin is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Glasgow and is currently training to be a Jungian psychotherapist. She has published on German, American and British literature of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, having focused mostly on short narratives, including fairy tales, of the nineteenth century. Her recent work has been on German exilic writer W.G. Sebald, whose complex narrative style throws up difficult ethical questions about the appropriation of others’ stories in our own self-narratives, as well as on the detective author Dorothy L. Sayers’ work in the light of Jungian theory. Currently Laura is developing an interdisciplinary research project on the idea of ‘magical narratives’—those which mingle inner and outer worlds—across a wide expanse of cultures and millennia, which will incorporate into her work on literature some insights gained from work by and with therapists working in the modalities of narrative therapy, dreamwork and psychotherapy. Eco-criticism and the challenges of the Anthropocene are becoming ever more her concerns. Laura has developed and teaches on the MLitt in Comparative Literature as well as on the well-established undergraduate programme in Comparative Literature.
Research and Teaching Interests
• Psychology of CG Jung (Training as an analyst) • Jungian interpretations of literature • Narrative therapy/narrative in therapy • ‘Magic’ of inner/outer connections as a psychological (and therefore real!) phenomenon • Also strong background in Freudian psychology and its literary applications • Feminist revisions and reactions to both Jungian and Freudian psychologies. • Also interested in developing ideas for ‘neurosis as creative illness’—as part of a short study of the history of neurosis (and its disappearance from the DSM). • Ecocriticism: madness/sanity in our relations to the world (sorry—this sounds stupid—but I can’t formulate it better just now) I am currently developing a project with the working title: Magical Narratives from Ovid to Avatar: Inner/Outer Links in Narrative Fiction of the Two Worlds. I envision this project to have intensive work in the latter parts of it with fairy-tale enactment therapy, storytelling as therapy, reading groups on fairy tales or other; dream groups and more. I.e. it will have its start in academic scholarship, but branch out in the wider community including the mental health community. I am starting work soon part-time at the Surehaven Mental Health Hospital in Glasgow, and I have been doing some volunteer work at the Gartnavel Royal for much of the past year.
Keywords:
Carl JungCreative WritingLiteratureNineteenth CenturyPsychoanalysisPsychologyTherapy