Literature is recognised as having significantly influenced the development of modern psychoanalytic thought. In recent years psychoanalysis has drawn increasingly on the literary and artistic traditions of western culture and moved away from its original medical–scientific context. Originally published in 1991 The Chamber of Maiden Thought (Keats's metaphor for 'the awakening of the thinking principle') is an original and revealing exploration of the seminal role of literature in forming the modern psychoanalytic model of the mind.

The crux of the 'post-Kleinian' psychoanalytic view of personality development lies in the internal relations between the self and the mind's 'objects'. Meg Harris Williams and Margot Waddell show that these relations have their origins in the drama of identifications which we can see played out metaphorically and figuratively in literature, which presents the self-creative process in aesthetic terms. They argue that psychoanalysis is a true child of literature rather than merely the interpreter or explainer of literature, illustrating this with some examples from clinical experience, but drawing above all on close scrutiny of the dynamic mental processes presented in the work of Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantic poets, Emily Bronte and George Eliot.

The Chamber of Maiden Thought will encourage psychoanalytic workers to respond to the influence of literature in exploring symbolic mental processes. By bringing psychoanalysis into creative conjunction with the arts, it enables practitioners to tap a cultural potential whose insights into the human mind are of immense value.


Chalcogenide nanostructures are an interesting platform for ultra-fast nonlinear signal processing. However, stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) can represent a major obstacle to achieving this goal for continuous wave pumps, as it depletes the high-power pump wave. In this paper, we assess the SBS gain in an As2Se3 nanowire, which is found to be much larger than the SBS gain in As2Se3 fibers. Such a large SBS gain poses a severe problem, and standard concepts for fibers, such as Bragg gratings and tapers are found not to work for nanowires. However, through the introduction of an amorphous polycarbonate cladding, the elastic modes and the optical mode can be separated, and SBS can thus be efficiently suppressed by three and a half-orders of magnitude. At the same time, flexibility for other design goals, such as phase matching, is maintained.


A mathematical model was developed to analyze the performance of a continuous sterilizer fed with a liquid fermentation medium containing suspended solids. This type of medium is commonly used in the industrial practice of a number of fermentation processes. The unsteady‐state energy balance equations for the liquid and the suspended solids passing through each component of the system were solved analytically. A computer model was then used to calculate the temperature profiles in the liquid and in the solid particles as they move through the sterilizer, as well as the level of sterility achieved under different operating conditions. It appears that the level of sterility is always lower when solids are present in the system, as one may anticipate. The temperature gradients produced in the solids as a result of the unsteady‐state heat transfer occurring as the media moves through the heat exchangers in the system result in lower temperatures in the solid cores. This reduces the effectiveness of the process by protecting the microorganisms against thermal death. In some cases it was found that the level of sterility was so low that operating under such conditions would fail to produce a sterile product. The model was also used to assess the sensitivity of the sterilization process to changes in the most significant design and operating parameters for the case in which solids are present in the medium. The sterilization temperature, steam temperature, heat transfer coefficients in the heat exchangers, particle size, and residence time in the sterilizer holding section appear to be the most important of these parameters. The model obtained in this work can be used to design continuous sterilizers processing slurry media or to evaluate the performance of existing sterilizers.