Week Six The Freudian Subject. The Freudian subject is above all a partitioned subject.... Its parts do not exist harmoniously; they speak different languages.

Week Six

The Freudian Subject

• The Freudian subject is above all a partitioned subject . . . .

• Its parts do not exist harmoniously; they speak different languages and operate on the basis of conflicting imperatives.

(Silverman 132)

The Tripartite Psyche• The id—the repository of the libido.

Demanding swift satisfaction and fulfillment of biological desires, it is lawless, asocial, amoral.

• The ego—making the id’s energies nondestructive by postponing them or diverting them into socially acceptable actions.

• The superego—similar to one’s conscience, operating according to the morality principle. (parents, institutions) (Dobie 51)

Freud’s Tripartite Model for the Psyche

http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/psychoanalysis/freud2modelofpsyche.html

Pcpt.-Cs. =

Perceptual Consciousness

“[T]he information flowlines have been left . . . implicit. Upon inspection, the role of the id turns out to be rather troublesome, because if we take at face value Freud's assertion that "the id has intercourse with the external world only through the ego" . . . we would have to show the information flow descending from the apex and returning upwards to it rather than the other way around!”

http://www.smithsrisca.demon.co.uk/PSYfreud1933.html

http://library.thinkquest.org/C004361/theoryfreud.html

http://library.thinkquest.org/C004361/theoryfreud.html

http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/freud.html

http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/psychoanalysis.html

http://www.mhhe.com/socscience/intro/ibank/ibank/0119.jpg

http://core.ecu.edu/soci/juskaa/SOCI2110/Lectures/socialization/sld015.htm

Erogenous Zone• The oral stage—associated with the drive to

incorporate objects• The anal stage---The anal stage is sadistic,

in that the child derives erotic pleasure from expulsion and destruction; but it is also connected with the desire for retention and possessive control, as the child learns a new form of mastery and a manipulation of the wishes of others through the ‘granting’ or withholding of the feces.

• The phallic stage---only the male organ is recognized. (Eagleton 153)

Fixation• When one’s desire is tied to an object of

desire connected to an earlier phase in one’s psychosexual development.

• Example: a fixation on oral pleasure, which Freud would see as “stuck” at the oral phase, even though other aspects of one’s development may have proceeded normally. (Felluga)

Regression• When normally functioning

desire meets with powerful external obstacles, which prevent satisfaction of those desires, the subject sometimes regresses to an earlier phase in normal psychosexual development. (Felluga)

The Oedipus Complex

• The boy’s close involvement with his mother’s body leads him to an unconscious desire for sexual union with her.

• What persuades the boy-child to abandon his incestuous desire for the mother is the father’s threat of castration.

The Oedipus Complex• This threat need not necessarily be spoken;

but the boy, in perceiving that the girl is herself ‘castrated’, begins to imagine this as a punishment which might be visited upon himself.

• He thus represses his incestuous desire in anxious resignation, adjusts himself to the ‘reality principle’ . . . . The boy makes peace with his father, identifies with him, and is thus introduce into the symbolic role of manhood.

The Oedipus Complex

• The little girl, perceiving that she is inferior because ‘castrated’, turns in disillusionment from her similarly ‘castrated’ mother to the project of seducing her father but since this project is doomed, she must finally turn back reluctantly to the mother, effect an identification with her, assume her feminine gender role, and unconsciously substitute for the penis which she envies but can never possess a baby, which she desires to receive from the father. (Eagleton 155-156)

The Oedipus Complex• It is the point at which we are produced and

constituted as subjects.• It signals the transition from the pleasure

principle to the reality principle, form the enclosure of the family to society at large, since we turn from incest to extra-familial relations; and from Nature to Culture, since we can see the infant’s relation to the mother as somehow “natural”, and the post-Oedipal child as one who is in the process of assuming a position within the cultural order as a whole. (Eagleton 156).

The Oedipus Complex• The Oedipus complex is for Freud the

beginnings of morality, conscience, law and all forms of social and religious authority. The father’s real or imagined prohibition of incest is symbolic of all the higher authority to be later encountered; and in ‘introjecting’ (making its own) this patriarchal law, the child begins to form . . . its ‘superego’ . . . (Eagleton 156).

The Oedipus Complex

• The human subject who emerges from the Oedipal process is a split subject, torn precariously between conscious and unconscious; and the unconscious can always return to plague it (Eagleton 156).

A "hydraulic" model

• Freud imagined that the libido was a finite amount of energy that powers our internal battles. If the energy is blocked here, it must find release there.

• As psychologist John Sabini put it: "Undischarged drives contribute their energy to the id, the reservoir of sexual and aggressive instincts. When the level has reached a critical point, overt aggression results.“

• http://www.enotalone.com/article/5548.html

cauldron

Primary/Secondary Proceses

• In the primary process, the energy is said to be free or mobile inasmuch as it flows towards discharge in the speediest and most direct fashion possible; in the secondary process, on the other hand, it is bound in that its movement towards discharge is checked and controlled.

(Laplanche and Pontalis, 171))

A Note upon the “Mystic Writing Pad” (1925)

Picture: http://yahooligans.yahoo.com/content/movies/movie.html?id=1800026443&template=pd&photoindx=11

Text taken from http://www.cybergrain.com/remediality/freud.pdf

Dreams

• The “royal road” to the unconscious is dreams.

• Dreams allow us one of our privileged glimpses of the unconscious at work (Eagleton, 157).

Dreams• Dreams = symbolic fulfilment of

unconscious wishes

• In order that we should get some sleep, the unconscious charitably conceals, softens and distorts its meaning, so that our dreams become symbolic texts which need to be deciphered (Eagleton 157).

Dream Work

• The process that the repressed undergoes, before it surfaces in the remembered dream

• The transformation of the repressed, forbidden or taboo thoughts or desires, into the manifest.

Dream Work• Condensation: condenses many different ideas into

one.• Displacement: replaces a latent element by a well-

concealed allusion to it, so the psychical emphasis is shifted from an important element to a relatively trivial one.

• Considerations of representability (or “figurability”): transforms thoughts into visual elements (“I was in a tower above the audience” might mean “I towered above the audience intellectually”).

•  Secondary Revision: makes something whole and more or less coherent out of the distorted product of the dream work

http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/dreamwork.htm

Displacement• There was a blacksmith in a village who

had committed a capital offence. The court decided that the crime must be punished; but as the blacksmith was the only one in the village and was indispensable, and as on the other hand there were three tailors living there, one of them was hanged instead.

(Freud, Introductory Lectures http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/dreamwork.htm )

Displacement• Supposing at an early age someone had witnessed

the primal scene, which in Freudian terms means observing his parents in the act of sex. Supposing this young boy was completely freaked out by this--Freud speculated that the boy would think the father was in the act of murdering the mother--that he might misinterpret her pleasure as pain--and so he repressed it. But suppose on the bedside there was a red alarm clock, and later in life the young man dreams, with very considerable and totally inappropriate affect, of red alarm clocks. This, Freud would say, is because he has displaced the affect from the primal scene onto the alarm clock.

Dream Work• Symbolization is when the image in the

dream has some direct physical resemblance to the thing it represents in the unconscious. So, as all the world knows, anything that's longer than it is wide can be a penis. Anything that's even remotely concave can be a vagina.

Neurosis• We may have certain unconscious

desires which will not be denied, but which dare not find practical outlet either; in this situation, the desire forces its way in from the unconscious, the ego blocks it off defensively, and the result of this internal conflict is what we call neurosis.

Neurosis• The patient begins to develop symptoms

which, in compromising fashion, at once protect against the unconscious desire and covertly express it.

• Such neuroses may be obsessional (having to touch every lamp-post on the street), hysterical (developing a paralyzed arm for no good organic reason), or phobic (being unreasonably afraid of open spaces or certain animals). (Eagleton 158)

• 畏懼症 (Phobic Neurosis)

• 焦慮症 (Anxiety Neurosis)

• 強迫症 (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder)

Psychosis• The link between the ego and the

external world is ruptured, and the unconscious begins to build up an alternative, delusional reality. The psychotic, in other words, has lost contact with reality at key points, as in paranoia and schizophrenia.

• 精神分裂症 (Schizophrenia)

• 偏執狂，妄想狂 (Paranoia)

• 躁症 (Mania)鬱病 (Depression)雙極型情感精神病 (Bipolar Affective Disorder)

Psychosis

• ‘Paranoia’ refers to a more or less systematized state of delusion . . . not only delusions of persecution but delusional jealousy and delusions of grandeur.

Psychosis• ‘Schizophrenia’ involves a

detachment from reality and a turning in on the self, with an excessive but loosely systematized production of fantasies. Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry (Eagleton 159).

Transference• In the course of treatment, the

analysand (or patient) may begin unconsciously to ‘transfer’ on to the figure of the analyst the psychical conflicts from which he or she suffers. If he has had difficulties with his father, for example, he may unconsciously cast the analyst in that role.

Transference• This poses a problem for the analyst,

since such ‘repetition’ or ritual re-enactment of the original conflict is one of the patient’s unconscious ways of avoiding having to come to terms with it. We repeat, sometimes compulsively, what we cannot properly remember, and we cannot remember it because it is unpleasant.

Transference• But transference also provides

the analyst with a peculiarly privileged insight into the patient’s psychical life, in a controlled situation in which he or she can intervene. (Eagleton 159-160)

Art & Literature• Art, myth, literature → a kind of dream

or neurotic symptoms

• They consist of the imagined, or fantasied, fulfillment of wishes that are either denied by reality or are prohibited by the social standards of morality and propriety. (Abrams 248)

Art & Literature• The forbidden, mainly sexual (‘libidinal’)

wishes come into conflict with, and are repressed by, the ‘censor’ (the internalized representative within each individual of the standards of society) into the unconscious realm of the artist’s mind, but are permitted by the censor to achieve a fantasied satisfaction in distorted forms . . .

Art & Literature• The chief mechanisms that effect these

disguises of unconscious wishes are (1) ‘condensation’ . . . (2) ‘displacement’ . . . (3) ‘symbolism’.

Manifest content The disguised fantasies that are evident to consciousness

Latent content The unconscious wishes

Art & Literature• What distinguishes artists from the patently

neurotic personality is sublimation.• The artists possess an ability to shift the

instinctual drive from their original sexual goals to nonsexual ‘higher’ goals. They could elaborate fantasied wish-fulfillments intot he manifest features of a work of art in a way that conceals or deletes their merely personal elements, and so makes them capable of satisfying the unconscious desires of other people.

Psychoanalyst• The chief enterprise of the

psychoanalyst as a therapist, is to reveal the true content, and thereby to explain the effect on the reader, of a literary work by translating its manifest elements into the latent, unconscious determinants that constitute their suppressed meanings. (Abrams 249)

References

• Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th ed. Harcourt Brace, 1999.

• Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. U of Minnesota, 1983.

• Felluga, Dino. http://www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/psychoanalysis

• Recommended Websites:• http://www.pbs.org/youngdrfreud/index.htm • http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/th

eory/psychoanalysis/freud.html

• http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/freud.html

• http://psych.eiu.edu/spencer/Freud.html• http://www.english.bham.ac.uk/staff/tom/

teaching/theories/theorieslectures/freud/freudlecture.htm