Chapter 6 : Freud and Psychoanalytic Criticism

Question 1

What period of time did Sigmund Freud write during?

Answer 1

From 1880s to late 1930s.

Exhibited a sharp increase in industrial competition and imperialist competition for colonies and rise of Nazism.

Question 2

What happened in European literature during the 50 years of Freud’s writing?

Answer 2

European literature displayed a post-Romantic turn to subjectivism, psychic reality, and fantasy.

Ex: Aestheticism and late Victorian Gothic.

Question 3

Whose ideas are most resonant to Freud’s multiplicity of the self?

Answer 3

Wilde, Pater, and Nietzsche (all celebrated flux and multiplicity of the self)

However, Freud’s influence is not yet felt in late Victorian gothic literature. In the 20th century, modernists are much more aware of Freud and implicitly or explicitly engage with and respond to him as a major interlocutor.

Question 4

Where the Romantics Coleridge and Shelley turned to Plotinus and Neoplatonist idealism to support their belief in the unifying role of the imagination, what does Freud pose instead?

Answer 4

Freud posits a RADICAL DECENTERING of consciousness, that is a demotion of consciousness from its traditional position as the highest part of the human self

as well as the SPLITTING OF THE SELF

Question 5

Before Freud, from Descartes until Freud and Nietzsche, how did modern thought keep the “self” together?

Answer 5

By assuming the centrality of consciousness and related ideas, including the power and

the CLARITY OF REASON and the AVAILABILITY OF THE SELF to introspection and free will

Question 6

According to Lacan’s “The MIrror Stage”, what is the DEHISCENCE of the self?

Answer 6

The psychoanalyst Lacan stresses the irreducible “DEHISCENCE” of the self as envisioned by Freud.

Lacan captures Freud’s revolution in thought and philosophical importance as lying in this decentering of csonsciousness in favor of Freud’s most important idea THE UNCONSCIOUS

Freud brings center stage those parts of the self that remain forever inaccessible to reason, primitive drives and instincts and automatisms beyond one’s conscious control

(Everything that Plato feared in human nature and wished to check with the Rule of Reason is claimed to have been in the drivers seat all along.)

We come face to face with the self as a dangerous and threatening other.

Question 7

In Freud’s analysis, what displaces consciousness?

Answer 7

The centrality of sexuality, defined very broadly and scandalously, beyond normative genital heterosexual and reproductive sex - and sexual energy (libido) is one of Freud’s lasting contributions.

Question 8

What is the pleasure principle?

Answer 8

For Freud, sexuality is accompanied by resistance and repression.

The human pursuit of pleasure within the psyche, clashing with the reality principle (the internalized limitations of external reality, including social reality and social commands.

Question 9

What results in repression and resistance resulting from the pleasure principle? What does repression repress?

Answer 9

The Unconscious is born out of repression. Without repression, there would be no Unconscious.

(Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson:

Stevenson suggests that a character less repressed than Dr. Jekyll would not have been forced to unleash Mr. Hyde and that excessive repression is dangerous.

Question 10

Post WWI, Freud’s last phase was initiated by essays “The Uncanny” (1919) and “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920) and tells a more complex story.

What new hypothesis is triggered by his experience of WWI and war-traumatized veterans?

Answer 10

He posits that there are two basic instincts warring with each other :

Eros (love life and preservation)

Thanatos (hate, death, and loss)

Thanatos is a death instinct unleashing aggression and destruction, a desire to return to inorganic matter, to purge excitations, stimuli, and intensity,

“such that we will be compelled to say that the aim of all life is death”

Question 11

Freud’s “second topography” of the pscyhe, developed in “The Ego and the Id” (1923) divides the psyche into:

Answer 11

The id, the super-ego and the ego, as a fragile mediation between instinctual forces of the id and social imperatives of the super-ego, or as armor defending the psyche against both.

Question 12

In “The Uncanny”, what does Freud mean by “compulsion to repeat”?

Answer 12

Freud’s new hypothesis of the death instinct as a power “beyond he pleasure principle” is supported by his seminal idea of the “compulsion to repeat” traumatic experiences, a foundational concept in contemporary trauma theory.

Unable to properly experience a traumatic loss at the time it happened, and unable to remember, represent and symbolize it properly, we repeat the same painful experience compulsively, stuck in unconscious repetition and “the return of the repressed”

In Beloved, there is a suggestion by the text that the representation of trauma is bound to be “improper”, experimental in form, and only partially successful since it knocks against the limits of representation

Question 13

What is the concept of “deferred action” for Freud?

How is it related to repetition compulsion?

Answer 13

In “Wolf Man” Freud’s minor concept of “deferred action” or “afterwardsness” is developed.

Traumatic events, exceeding the self’s powers of comprehension and representation are not properly experienced when they happen.

However, they find an INDIRECT and PARTIAL expression in the future, when they are reactivated through REPETITION COMPULSION,

or they might be more fully recognized and experienced if and when they become fully symbolized.

In instances of “deferred action”, time moves in loops rather than forwards in the sense that the self is experiencing the traumatic event in-between the two selves separated by such temporal distance and cannot be exactly located in time.

Question 14

In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud describes the three preconditions of melancholia as:

How does this support the idea of the multiplicity of the self?

Answer 14

1. Loss of the object
2. Ambivalence (love and hate)
3. Conversion of the object into a part of the self

Not only is the self fragmented and multiple, it includes “external” fragments, incorporated others, as well as social norms

In addition to including “external” fragments, the self also projects itself onto external reality and onto others

Question 15

What Freudian concept does Kristeva develop in her idea of “abjection”?

Answer 15

Kristeva’s concept of abjection develops Freud’s concept of projection and cross-pollenates it with that of Melanie Klein.

In Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, the very boundary between self and other, inside and outside, is fundamentally fragile and imprecise.

As infants we emerge out of an intense and ambivalent relation with the mother, where our self and other are not distinctively differentiated. This original fluidity remains with us.

Kristeva’s abjection, is the opposite of Freud’s melancholic incorporation. It is the projection of unacceptable parts of the self onto others, who function as scapegoats, phobic objects, objects of horror.

Of course the process of abjection is never fully complete as it remains discernible to the self that the distinction between subject/object cannot be maintained.

(The abject is an impossible object.)

Question 16

What is Kristeva’s feminist argument and what does it say about the role of literature?

Answer 16

In society, the exemplary abject in most societies is women and mothers.

The “unsettled separation” between men and women and the fear of women disguise men’s projections onto women of their own horrifying mortality, incompleteness, and dependency.

Implicitly, Kristeva assumes there’s no difference between men and women and that gender difference is a tool in the ongoing attempt to abject women.

As to literature and psychoanalysis, their roles are similar and highly important in Kristeva’s view; to disclose the process of abjection and horrors underlying it.

Literature is an “unveiling of the abject…an undoer of narcissism and of all imaginary identity as well, sexual included”. Language makes distinctions and separates, but the writer is to be not only the one who separates but the one who touches even taking place of the feminine. LIterature is rooted on the fragile border where identities (subject/object) do not exist or barely so.

Question 17

Describe the evolution of Freud’s concepts of sexuality pre 1920s and post 1920s.

Answer 17

Pre 1920s:

In Pre-Oedipal, genders are the same, but in Oedipal, girls have penis envy. Boys have castration anxiety (because they see girls have no penis and assume it’s father’s retaliation for loving the mother and wanting to kill the father)

Post 1920s:

After case study of Dora, and responding to the 1920s psychoanalytic debate on gender, Freud’s Female Sexuality conveys his new understanding of female sexuality as overflowing on all sides.

Now he posits the great intensity and ambivalence of women’s early love for their mother and the life-long importance of the pre-Oedipal phase for women.

Question 18

What is Klein’s concept of the distinction between pre-Oedipal and Oedipal?

Answer 18

She calls it a paranoid schizoid position and the depressive position.

Fear and terror dominate subjective experience and the predominant defense is splitting into good and bad “part-objects”.

Klein posits the infant’s envy of the mother’s breast, a mother-centered vision rather than penis-centered.

Good breast / Bad breast : While the infant’s love for the mother is projected onto the good breast (endless flow of milk), the infant’s destructive impulses twards the mother give rise to terrifying fantasies in relation to the mother, who is conceived as a bad breast, omnipotent, persecuting, and life-threatening.

For Klein the infant’s inner world is conflicted, consumed with loving and hating, anxiety, loss, guilt, and reparation - both good breast and bad breast - in relation to the mother.

In the depressive position, it is now perceived that the good breast and bad breast are both aspects of one’s relation to the same person, the mother, who emerges as a complete person, separate from the infant.

Question 19

What is the relation between psychoanalysis and literature?

Answer 19

Psychoanalyzing authors and characters is considered disreputable, instead

psychoanalytic criticism turns to the TEXTUALITY of LITERATURE, as well as the textuality of PSYCHOANALYSIS itself.

It attempts to divest itself of authoritarian claims to definitive readings and modestly assumes the INCOMPLETENESS of INTERPRETATION.

Question 20

Maud Ellman’s landmark anthology, Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism (1994) describes the relation between psychoanalysis and literature as ________

Answer 20

one of mutual, never completed elucidation.

Language and interpretation are essential to pscyhoanalysis, but are

understood and dependent within a post-structuralist and post-Lacanian framework

(one of endless substitution and tropes - metaphor, metonymy, synechdoche, etc)

Question 21

What is referred to by the Post-Structuralist / Post-Lacanian frame?

Answer 21

It represents one of the significant shifts in contemporary psychoanalytic criticism:

Argues against the assumption that the signifier and signified have a fixed relation.

Support for the sliding of the signified (the deferral of meaning and interpretation)

Language is essentially figurative or tropic and psychoanalysis is a “science of tropes” (Trilling)

Question 22

What is Lacan’s understanding of science (and pscyhoanalysis)?

Answer 22

Science neither possesses the Truth nor is opposed to literature and myth.

In other words, there is a potentially large overlap between science and literature, between truth and myth.

Lacan privileges literature over psychoanalytic investigation and argues to treat pyschoanalysis as literature :

“we can talk adequately about the libido ONLY in a mythic manner”

Question 23

According to Shoshana Felman, how do literature and psychoanalysis relate?

Answer 23

Felman argues that literature TRANSMUTES REPRESSED DESIRES and ASPECTS OF REALITY into NARRATIVE SYMBOLIZATION into the metonymic chain of symbolic substitutions.

She understands pscyhoanalysis itself through this model of literature: erring and self-expropriation without end, and not as a body of knowledge possessing the Truth.

Lacanian psychoanalytic criticism thus joins the 19th century theorists of becoming : Pater, Nietzsche and Wilde.

Question 24

In Felman’s account, Lacan claims what as the correspondence between literature and reality?

In Barbara Johnson’s “The Frame of Reference”, what does Johnson say about this interpretive framework?

Answer 24

Acc. to Felman, Lacan favors MYTH or NARRATIVE as METAPHORICAL APPROXIMATION, rather than claiming for his theorizing a relation of correspondence (and adequation) with reality.

However, is the assumption of an interpretive position of mastery and the closing of meaning ever fully avoided, even by those programmatically announcing the openness of their interpretations and the relation of equality - in mutual and open-ended elucidation - between psychoanalysis and literature?

Barbara Johnson’s “The Frame of Reference” raises this question in relation to Lacan’s reading of EA Poe’s short story The Purloined Letter. Johnson argues that in making an accusation of reducing an interpretation to a single meaning - the accuser does the same:

“To cut out a text’s frame of reference as thought it did not exist….are serious blots indeed…therefore it is all the more noticeable that Derrida’s own reading of Lacan’s text repeats precisely the crimes he accuses it”

Johnson concludes that the “author of any critique is himself framed by his own frame of the other…”

(however, she does not reject the moment of critique and teh assumptin of mastery and closing of meaning that it involves – rather she inserts it within a wider movement of the

“ETERNAL OSCILLATION between unequivocal undecidability and ambiguous certainty”

Question 25

What does Lacan mean by “fictional direction” of the self, within psychoanalysis?

What is the challenge of psychoanalysis in uncovering psychic truth and what has been repressed?

Answer 25

In Wolf Man, childhood scenes uncovered by analysis are FANTASIES and NOT REPRODUCTIONS of REAL occurrences but rather products of the imagination and serve as SYMBOLIC representations of REAL WISHES and INTERESTS.

The reality of a traumatic event might well be a psychic reality only, a FICTION rather than a MEMORY of fact.

The “PRIMAL SCENE” is primarily a representation of the analysand’s desire. Psychoanalysis offers the promise of finally hearing the psychic truth long repressed,

but the representation of psychic reality has to voice what is repressed, while also evading the forces of repression.

Question 26

In Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams”, how does Freud describe the nature of representation in dreams?

Answer 26

Freud describes it as essentially substitutive, tropic, metaphoric, transferential.

Starts with a medieval model of signs, distinguishing between dreams’

• manifest content

and

• latent content

(shell and kernel, or depth model)

He then develops a modern model:

DISPLACEMENT, CONDENSATION, and OVERDETERMINATION

Associative paths lead from one element of the dream to several dream-thoughts and from one dream-though to several elements of the dream.

(the one-to-one relation between signifier and signified is broken in favor of open-ended substitution and continuing slippage
or SLIDING

Question 27

How does Lacan develop Freud’s thought further regarding the Unconscious?

What are Lacan’s three orders?

Answer 27

Lacan moves Freud’s thought further along in a direction where it questions the idea of unconscious material pre-existing its representation, and therefore problematizes the very idea of truth, understood as correspondence with a pre-existing reality.

For Lacan, the UNCONSCIOUS is already REPRESENTATION.

The unconscious is not a content, but the very processes of displacement, condensation, and overdetermination described by Freud.

Lacan’s comment on the “fictional direction” of the self quoted above is made in the context of his essay on the imaginary, as a distinction between three orders:

• THE IMAGINARY
• THE SYMBOLIC
• THE REAL

Question 28

In Lacan’s essay “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Pscyhoanalytic Experience”, what does he point out about the concept of the unity of the self?

Answer 28

Lacan’s starting point is a rereading of Freud that stresses the irremediable fragmentation and aggression of the self: Lacan outlines the DEHISCENCE at the heart of the organism and lays bare the aggressivity.

More importantly, we set out to overcome it and to aim for an IMAGINARY coherence, unity and autonomy, but with REAL and “FORMATIVE” effects

In particular, the agency of the ego transforms the self “in a fictional direction” of fixity and oneness which is just as “irreducible” as the primary fragmentation.

In the “mirror stage” which we never leave behind through identification of teh subject, assumes an IMAGO (image, representation, likeness, statue) of permanence, the subject projects himself onto a statue which is nothing but the defensive “armour of an alienating identity”

This imago might be one’s reflection in the mirror or the figure of the mother or any significant figure.

In this sense, the self is an other, our identitiy is based on MISRECOGNITION (meconnaissance) and psychic alienation.