This contribution considers a monthly seminar, Literature and Psychoanalysis, that has been taking place at Sofia University (Sofia, Bulgaria) since 2017. Three of the seminar\'s founders reflect on the transferences between literature and psychoanalysis, and on the ways in which literature and psychoanalysis can meaningfully converse. The exchange also touches on the fate of Freud\'s textual legacy in communist and post-communist Bulgaria.

This paper is an enquiry into some commonalities between fiction and atheism. It suggests that \'disbelief\' may be a state of mind shared by both and asks how a meaningful semantics might be derived from the mental stance of disbelief. Albert Camus\' The Plague, published in 1947 post the trauma of two successive world wars, is a key \'existentialist\' text that focuses on this dilemma. Not only is this work of fiction especially relevant to our current times of natural, political, economic and psychological distress gone \'viral\', it is also one in which a blunt question is posed to the atheist hero of the novel, Doctor Rieux, in Oran, a small French Algerian town fighting a terrible pandemic: \'Do you believe in God, doctor?\'. Rieux\'s answer is telling: \'No, but what does that really mean? I\'m fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out.\' It is this human \'struggle\' to discern the contours of the invisible \'in the dark\' that could animate the thought worlds of fiction as well as of atheism. The paper seeks to draw out some of these putative similarities through the lens of \'ordinary language philosophy\' and J.L, Austin and John Searle\'s classification of basic speech-acts. It also considers the evolutionary, affective and cross-cultural appeal of the parallel narratives of science and religion. Oran\'s most remarkable aspect, Camus insists, is its \'ordinariness\'; yet, it is here that the \'extraordinariness\' of the plague strikes. Quotidian local circumstances thus paradoxically set in motion the sorts of \'universal\' inquiries into \'what it means to be human\' that, my paper argues, alike motivate the fiction of atheism and the atheism of fiction.

Informed by medical science and biotechnology, Karoline Georges\'s novel Under the Stone offers a reflection on suffering bodies and imagines responses to an overwhelming sense of fear and passivity that embodied trauma and the world\'s many crises can create. In line with the editors\' reclaiming of the milieu for the medical humanities, I draw on Deleuze and Guattari\'s geophilosophy and Sara Ahmed\'s notions of stranger and encounter for reading the novel\'s spatialization of oppressive power dynamics and its imagination of subversive emergence. I also complicate the literary text\'s discourse on space and body by relying on wonder studies to examine further its alternative forms of careful attunement enacted through the protagonist\'s affective and disembodied awakening, the latter fueled by his escape from \"the incessant movement of automatic components that delineat[e] [his] presence in the world\" (Georges 2016, 61). Happening from and because of the Tower\'s milieu, this escape becomes a mitigating force to physical, affective, and social struggles. I thus contend that Georges\'s text provides thought-provoking material about the functions and effects of art for addressing the dangers and promises of bioethics, body sovereignty, and life protection.

Previous research has investigated how the context of perception affects emotional response. This study investigated how engagement with perceived fictional content vs perceived everyday-life content affects the way people experience negative emotions. Four studies with an experimental design tested how engagement with perceived fictional content vs perceived everyday life content affects the intensity of negative emotional response to negative emotional content, the motivation to decrease negative emotions, and cognitive reappraisal. Participants were presented with negatively valenced images and were asked to imagine either that they were witnessing them, or that a bystander was witnessing them, or that they were viewing a movie including these scenes. After the manipulation, all participants observed a different set of negatively valenced images or a set of negatively valenced videos and reported their emotional response. We found that the intensity of negative emotions and motivation to decrease them was lower among participants in the fiction condition compared to participants in the everyday life condition. Although perspective-taking had a similar effect on negative emotions, fiction condition was more successful in decreasing negative emotions. This might indicate that fiction plays a buffering role in decreasing the negative emotions people experience when facing negative emotional content.

As state-of-art technology can create artificial images that are indistinguishable from real ones, it is urgent to understand whether believing that a picture is real or not has some import over affective phenomena such as sexual arousal. Thus, in two pre-registered online studies, we tested whether 60 images depicting models in underwear elicited higher self-reported sexual arousal when believed to be (N = 57) or presented as (N = 108) real photographs as opposed to artificially generated. In both cases, Realness correlated with significantly higher scores on self-reported sexual arousal. Consistently with the literature on downregulation of emotional response to fictional works, our result indicates that sexual images that are perceived to be fake are less arousing than those believed to portray real people.

This qualitative research uses a case study to observe non-binary representation in TV fiction. The Dan character from the Spanish series HIT (RTVE, 2020-present), who is the first openly non-binary character in Spanish TV fiction, is analyzed through the lens of Queer Media Studies. The research applies a combination of content and discourse analysis. Qualitative content categories include a character\'s visibility, identity, relevance, embodiment, and social interaction. Discourse analysis categories include character\'s construction, lexicalization, propositional framing, and focus. Results show that Dan\'s non-binary depiction revolves around three significant axes: dualism, confusion, and exceptional talent. These axes frame social attitudes toward non-binary people and are composed by a set of features identified in Dan\'s case which also informs society\'s mind-sets. These traits are proposed as an analytical-theoretical tool for further analyses of non-binary representation in different cultural contexts. The outcomes of this research may inform audiovisual industries, regulations and academia, and are useful to consolidate non-binary media studies.

Much of the information people encounter in everyday life is not factual; it originates from fictional sources, such as movies, novels, and video games, and from direct experience such as pretense, role-playing, and everyday conversation. Despite the recent increase in research on fiction, there is no theoretical account of how memory of fictional information is related to other types of memory or of which mechanisms allow people to separate fact and fiction in memory. We present a theoretical framework that places memory of fiction in relation to other cognitive phenomena as a distinct construct and argue that it is an essential component for any general theory of human memory. We show how fictionality can be integrated in an existing memory model by extending Rubin\'s dimensional conceptual memory model. By this means, our model can account for explicit and implicit memory of fictional information of events, places, characters, and objects. Further, we propose a set of mechanisms involving various degrees of complexity and levels of conscious processing that mostly keep fact and fiction separated but also allow information from fiction to influence real-world attitudes and beliefs: content-based reasoning, source monitoring, and an associative link from the memory to the concept of fiction.

Fictionality and fictional experiences are ubiquitous in people\'s everyday lives in the forms of movies, novels, video games, pretense and role playing, and digital technology use. Despite this ubiquity, though, the field of cognitive science has traditionally been dominated by a focus on the real world. Based on the limited understanding from previous research on questions regarding fictional information and the cognitive processes for distinguishing reality from fiction, we argue for the need for a comprehensive and systematic account that reflects on related phenomena, such as narrative comprehension or imagination embedded into general theories of cognition. This is important as incorporating cognitive processing of fictional events into memory theory reshapes the conceptual map of human memory. In this paper, we highlight future challenges for the cognitive studies of fictionality on conceptual, neurological, and computational levels. Taking on these challenges requires an interdisciplinary approach between fields like developmental psychology, philosophy, and the study of narrative comprehension. Our aim is to build on such interdisciplinarity and provide conclusions on the ways in which new theoretical frameworks of fiction cognition can aid understanding human behaviors in a wide range of aspects of people\'s daily lives, media consumption habits, and digital encounters. Our account also has the potential to inform technological innovations related to training intelligent digital systems to distinguish fact and fiction in the source material.

This research investigated the impact popular novels have on knowledge about and attitudes towards Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), compared to that of traditional college textbooks. Study 1 found that participants in the novel condition chose fewer correct and fewer incorrect responses to questions about ASD. Participants did not differ in their desired social distance from individuals with ASD. Study 2 found that participants in the novel and textbook conditions both showed the same amount of learning, with higher scores on the post-test assessment of knowledge than the pre-test. Participants in the novel condition showed significant improvement in their attitudes towards individuals with ASD after reading, while those in the textbook condition showed more negative attitudes after reading the textbook chapter. These findings add to our understanding of the potential of popular fiction to impact consumers\' knowledge about ASD while improving our attitudes towards individuals with ASD. These findings also raise concerns about traditional educational material used to teach about ASD.

Readers assume that commonplace properties of the real world also hold in realistic fiction. They believe, for example, that the usual physical laws continue to apply. But controversy exists in theories of fiction about whether real individuals exist in the story\'s world. Does Queen Victoria exist in the world of Jane Eyre, even though Victoria is not mentioned in it? The experiments we report here find that when participants are prompted to consider the world of a fictional individual (\"Consider the world of Jane Eyre . . .\"), they are willing to say that a real individual (e.g., Queen Victoria) can exist in the same world. But when participants are prompted to consider the world of a real individual, they are less willing to say that a fictional individual can exist in that world. The asymmetry occurs when we ask participants both if a real person is in the character\'s world and if the person would appear there. However, the effect is subject to spatial and temporal constraints. When the person and the character share spatial and temporal settings, interchange is more likely to occur. These results shed light on the author\'s implicit contract with the reader, which can license the reader to augment a fictional world with features that the author only implicates as part of the work\'s background.