Hand-out 3: Working with the Psyche

Psychoanalysis: Freudian and Lacanian

AKA
The Nosey Critics

AUTHOR --> WORK --> LANGUAGE --> READER --> CONTEXT

Psychoanalysis: from treating the crazies to analyzing literature

At the beginning was not meant to be a critical school;
Developed by Sigmund Freud in the early 20 th century as a form of treatment of
mentally ill patients;
Also called the talking cure (free association and the famous Freudian couch);
Different form either psychiatry or psychology;
Relationship with literature: Freud uses many references to and analyses of
literature;
Before Freud: human mind seen as being split between reason and feeling;
Freudian Titles
The Interpretation of Dreams, The Ego and the Id, The Psychopathology of Everyday
Life, Civilization and Its Discontents, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Freudian Big Concepts

The unconscious (dynamic and topographical classification): conscious,
preconscious, unconscious (qualities), id, ego, superego (regions of the psyche);
Defense mechanisms (repression, sublimation): also called ego defense
mechanisms; the egos way of protecting us from the forces of the id; Repression:
pushing things down in the unconscious; Sublimation: transferring the psychic
energy of the instinct onto a more acceptable activity (like reading, writing);
The Return of the Repressed: Freud says that nothing can be fully repressed so
that what we push into the unconscious may suddenly return (in the form of
symptoms) in amplified forms;
The Freudian Slip: saying one thing, but meaning your mother...oops, I meant
another. From his book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. There is an
unconscious reason for most things that seem to be purely accidental like losing
things, saying some words instead of others, misreading titles, etc.
Transference: the analysand (patient) projects authority figures (maternal or
paternal) onto the analyst and acts out feelings, sensations associated to those
figures; In simpler terms, we treat our therapist, unconsciously, as our mommy or
daddy.
Acting-out: reacting to a certain person unconsciously as if it were a maternal or
paternal figure as in acting-out the feelings attached to a father in a romantic
relationships;
Instincts: the Pleasure Principle (the id demands pleasure) and the Reality
Principle (the ego must check if that pleasure can be fulfilled in society);
Instincts: The Life Instinct (the sexual instinct, creation) and the Death Instinct
(longing to return to the pre-birth, inorganic state);
Trauma and the Compulsion to Repeat: developed in his later Beyond the
Pleasure Principle; human existence begins with the trauma of birth; traumas are
unconsciously repeated throughout life;

 The Oedipus Complex: from Sophocles tragedy Oedipus Rex. The unconscious
wish to posses the mother and take the fathers place;
Dream Theory: dreams are the gateway to the unconscious; Latent content vs.
manifest content; Displacement and condensation;
Applying Freudian Theory to Literature & Culture
Author analysis: analyzing an author as if he were a patient (psychobiographies). Marie
Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Risk: treating the work as nothing more then a
symptom.
Character Analysis: psychoanalyzing characters as if they were real people (character
pathology, this is what Freud does with Hamlet). Discussing the unconscious forces that makes
them act the way they do. Ex: Hemingway, Cat in the Rain. Problem: characters are not people;
(Esp. combined with deconstruction) Psychoanalyzing form: Analyzing a texts instabilities, the
way multiple forces in it (like instincts) compete for control. Ex: Poes murder tales or
detective fiction as competition between the need to tell (to express) and the need to conceal (to
repress) or Peter Brooks (in Reading for the Plot, Design and Intention in Narrative: Desire
analysis of the dynamic structures of narrative forms, plot compared to life a death instincts);
How is the form of the text similar to the forces of the psyche?
(Esp. combined with reader-response): Psychoanalyzing readers: Re-examining a critics
interpretation of a work and identifying the unconscious forces that he/she projects onto that
particular interpretation or psychoanalyzing ourselves as readers (Norman Holland);
For a superb combination of psychoanalytic, deconstructive and reader-response
criticism, see Shoshana Felmans Turning the Screw of Interpretation (Yale
French Studies, no. 55/56, 1977):
https://www.academia.edu/8558505/Turning_the_Screw_of_Interpretation_Shoshana_Fel
man

Jacques Lacan
Combines psychoanalysis with structuralism: the unconscious is structured like a
language. (Lacan) Its not just a disorganized and entangled mess, it has rules, a
logical structure.
Displacement (metonymy), condensation (metaphor).
Notorious for his hard to read writing style.
Lacanian Titles
Ecrits: the First Complete Edition in English, The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis
Lacanian Big Concepts
The Mirror Stage: 6-18 months children start to recognize their image in the
mirror; the beginning of subjectivity, of the I;
The Imaginary (pre-Oedipal, pre-linguistic): contains the mirror stage, the
infant or child does not perceive himself as being different from the others (mother,
father, siblings); Sense of completeness, unity, fullness.
The Law of the Father: basically the Oedipus complex in Freudian terms; disrupts
the stage of the Imaginary and marks the childs entrance into the Symbolic;
The Symbolic order (linguistic): corresponds to the childs entrance to the
linguistic stage, similar to Freuds idea of the supergo, living according to norms,
rules, patriarchy (Law of teh Father)

 The Real (outside linguistic): different from reality; nature from which we have
been severed and to which we can never return; We cannot experience the real
except through our own subjectivity and our own subjectivity is already immersed in
language;
The gaze: in the mirror stage the child discovers the gaze; the uncanny feeling of
being looked back at when we look at someone; we can never see the other as it is,
we only see him/her/it from our own subjectivity: you never look at me from the
place from which I see you (Lacan).
Need (mirror stage: for milk, etc. Can be fulfilled), demand (Symbolic order, love,
recognition, cannot be fully satisfied), desire (more abstract concept, the desire of
the unconscious, the analyst must seek out in search of this desire, transference is
essentially a dead desire that continues to live on);