Psychoanalysis

Question 1

What did it attack?

Answer 1

The ‘cogito’ central to western thought since the 17th century - assurance of the description of the human mind as a unified whole that can achieve whole awareness of itself.

Question 2

The unconscious

Answer 2

repository of repressed desires, feelings, memories and instinctual drives

Question 3

The content of your dreams originates from:

Answer 3

1. Recent real life events
2. Childhood Memories
3. Bodily Stimuli

Question 4

Chapter 5 Interpretation of Dreams (Oedipus)

Answer 4

It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so”

Question 5

Slips and displacement quote

Answer 5

‘words spoken in the dream are derived from spoken words remembered in the dream-material. The text of the speech is either retained unaltered or expressed with some slight displacement’

Question 6

Slips in dreams

Answer 6

‘the verbal malformations in dreams greatly resemble those which are familiar in paranoia but which are also present in hysteria and obsessions’

Question 7

Objects as language

Answer 7

‘The linguistics tricks performed by children who sometimes actually treat words as though they were objects and moreover invent new languages and artificial syntactic forms, are the common source of these things in dreams and psych-neuroses alike’

Question 8

How is language important to psychoanalysis?

Answer 8

1. W/ respect to therapeutic process; free association; dream analysis; transference
2. Linked to linguistic phenomena such as parapraxes and jokes

Question 9

According to Freud the essential difference between modes of thought characterised by primary…

Answer 9

and the secondary thought processes is one of preverbal vs verbal ways of conceptualising the world

Question 10

The function of speech in Freud

Answer 10

“…the function of speech…brings material in the ego into a firm connection with the residues of visual, but more particularly of auditory, perceptions”

Question 11

In ‘On Aphasia’ 1891 he distinguishes between….

Answer 11

‘word-presentations’ and ‘thing-presentations’

Question 12

‘word-presentations’

Answer 12

mental images of words; involve the linking of an idea to a verbal stimulus; secondary; orientated towards reality

Question 13

Primary

Answer 13

irrational, governed by the id

Question 14

Secondary

Answer 14

logical, governed by the ego and external reality

Question 15

‘thing-presentations’

Answer 15

representations of actual objects; primary; pre-verbal / non verbal;

Question 16

Condensation

Answer 16

one of the means by which the repressed returns in hidden ways; multiple dream-thoughts condense into composite figures or symbols

Question 17

Displacement

Answer 17

emotions are displaced so that trivial elements seem to cause distress

Question 18

The Mirror Stage

Answer 18

the moment in which the child forms an identity or Ego as distinct from the id or the imago. Characterized by the recognition of his own image in the mirror.

Question 19

Recognising his own image in the mirror….

Answer 19

‘an essential stage of the act of intelligence’

Question 20

Mirror Play exemplifies… quote

Answer 20

‘the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores it, in the universal, its function as subject’

Question 21

The mirror stage is the moment in which we…

Answer 21

acquire language

Question 22

For Lacan, the mind is structured…

Answer 22

like a language; identity is expressed through difference

Question 23

Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies (Object Relation theory)

Answer 23

locates the origins of Nazism in a particular psychological formation that perceived women, communists, and Jews as external equivalents of internal boundary-threatening urges that had to be violently expelled

Question 24

Jacques Lacan developed a structuralist theory of psychoanalysis…

Answer 24

based on the linguistic theory of Saussure in the 1950s and 60s

Question 25

Before language assigns us an ‘I’…

Answer 25

we possess no sense of self - it is language that gives us identity

Question 26

the Real

Answer 26

impossible wholeness of self, plenitude of desire satisfaction (joissance) and continuity of signified and signifier of word and object

Question 27

Our being is not founded on the mythic identity of the ego…

Answer 27

it is founded on our initial lack-of-being (manqué-à-être) - initial fissure or béance from the mother

Question 28

The bar forbidding access to the mother is akin to…

Answer 28

the bar that separates signifier from signified or word from thing.

Question 29

The Symbolic Order

Answer 29

symbolic language which assigns social roles and dictate behaviour in society; it is like a language.

Question 30

Most influential work of Structuralist psychoanalysis

Answer 30

Lacan’s Ecrits (1966)