Argonaut
| dc.contributor.advisor | Brown, Duncan | |
| dc.contributor.author | Smith, Hélène | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2025-07-24T10:42:43Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2025-07-24T10:42:43Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2024 | |
| dc.description.abstract | Argonaut is a book written in the genre of creative non-fiction to fulfil the requirements of a master’s degree in creative writing in the Department of English at the University of the Western Cape. As a result of chronic anxiety and unbearable physiological symptoms, I entered therapy as a twenty-four-year-old, where I discovered that I had very few memories before the age of 14, and this unearthed a compulsion to recall and understand what happened to me as a child. Argonaut documents the process of recovering and piecing together my life story by combining fragments of memories, chronic physical and psychological symptoms, dreams, and the analysis of these dreams. In the process I discover a history of trauma that was deliberately obfuscated, denied and buried by the adults in my life while I was a child. The book weaves together the themes of trauma, posttraumatic stress and post-traumatic growth, and uses the discipline of depth psychology as a lens through which to view and understand my psyche, its experiences, and its coping mechanisms, one of which was to repress my unbearable and unacceptable memories. Depth psychology focuses on the functioning and role of the unconscious mind and its processes, which are often symbolically expressed in the form of dreams and body symptoms. With depth psychology as a theoretical framework, Argonaut explores the connections between my internal psychic landscapes and the external landscape of real-life choices, behaviours and events. From a literary perspective, the book weaves together the psychic imagery of the unconscious mind with the external imagery of the human and natural environments, elucidating the intimate and meaningful ways in which our experiences of these different worlds are linked. The story also explores the complicated psychological vacillation between the repression and the recovery of memories. | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/10566/20600 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.publisher | University of the Western Cape | |
| dc.subject | Early childhood | |
| dc.subject | Argonaut | |
| dc.subject | Chronic anxiety | |
| dc.subject | History of trauma | |
| dc.subject | Post-traumatic growth | |
| dc.title | Argonaut | |
| dc.type | Thesis |