00308--JACQUES-MARIE EMILE LACAN and his works

JACQUES-MARIE EMILE LACAN

1.Ecrits I & II 2.Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment 3.‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’ 4.‘La famille’ 5.De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité 6,Écrits: A Selection

00197--Psychoanalytical (literary) Criticism [Freud-sexuality-the id-the ego-the super ego-parapraxis-repression-Freudian slips-libido-Oedipus complex-taboo-dream work-latent dream content-manifest dream content]]

"The dream-thoughts which we first come across as we proceed with our analysis often strike us by the unusual form in which they are expressed; they are not clothed in the prosaic language usually employed by our thoughts, but are on the contrary represented symbolically by means of similes and metaphors, in images resembling those of poetic speech" [Freud]

Freud employed the method of “reading” to understand the unconscious or the hidden psyche of the patients who visited his clinic.  It was mainly done by making the patient speak.  By interpreting his/her words the diagnosis was carried out.  So words were the key to the psyche of a person.  Psychoanalytic criticism adopts this method to interpret a text. Psychoanalytic criticism argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the author.   Here a literary work is seen as a manifestation of the author's own neuroses. One may psychoanalyze a particular character created by the author within a literary work , but it is usually assumed that all such characters are projections of the author's psyche.  Lacan is another important figure in Psychoanalytic criticism who said “Unconscious is structured like language”.  Here we will see only the theories of Freud that paved the path for the Psychoanalytical Criticism.  Lacan started from where Freud stopped.

                                                ONE

Language is the medium through which unconscious expresses its desires.

Freud emphasized that language concealed, revealed or modified hidden desires, anxieties and fears.  LANGUAGE IS THE MEDIUM THROUGH WHICH UNCONSCIOUS EXPRESSES ITS DESIRES.

Freud’s point was that desire does not express easily because culture does not allow or facilitate it, and we need to pay attention to language and other forms of symbolic expressions—gestures, sounds, facial expressions, writing—to discover it. 

This way Freud was exploring the link between the language and the unconscious; a move that was to become the core of both Psychoanalytic practice and criticism.  FREUD EXPLORED THE LINK BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND THE UNCONSCIOUS.

            Literary texts allow the unconscious to express itself.  This was Freud’s insight.  THE MECHANISMS OF UNCONSCIOUS, OF DESIRES AND FEARS ALSO REQUIRED AND ACQUIRED A LANGUAGE OF THEIR OWN.

                                                TWO

                             SEXUALITY

Since society is the drive that is most subject to the social and cultural norms of control, classical Freudian theory emphasizes the role of the individual’s sexuality in making of an unconscious.

Sexuality is most controlled by the society.  Individual’s sexuality builds the unconscious, and it unconscious builds the subjectivity, and subjectivity builds the human psyche.

                        The structure of the human psyche  

a.    The Super-Ego;

Is what can be called our conscience.  It is drawn from social settings and cultural codes.  It does influence the way the conscious works. 

b.    The Ego [conscious mind]

Is the conscious mind, which we work with, use and most aware of.  It mediates between ID and SUPER-EGO.

c.     The Id;

This is an area of instincts, dreams, desires and all that does not come to the fore in our consciousness.  This is the unconscious. 

                                         

                                       

                                    THREE

         PARAPRAXIS [Freudian slips]

                                          Freud proposed that the human psyche has an area into which go all those desires and fantasies that cannot be expressed.  The area is UNCONSCIOUS; because we are not aware of its existence. 

Repression = is the process through which certain desires, especially sexual, are pushed into the unconscious so that they do not influence our daily lives and our conscious mind.  [The concept of repression according to Freud is the CORNERSTONE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS.] 

However, what is repressed does not always stay repressed.  The unconscious emerges in particular moments as images, dreams, jokes and even art.  These jokes are known as Freudian slips or Parapraxis.    

  For literary criticism this  (the emergence of the unconscious in the form of art, dreams, jokes, images) is an important insight.  Freud was proposing that ART DRAWS UPON THE UNCONSCIOUS for its themes and images.

 

FOUR

                    TWO PRINCIPLES

All human life, for Freud, is caught in the tensions generated by two principles.  They are:

1.      THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE, and,

2.      THE REALITY PRINCIPLE.

The Pleasure Principle is one where all our acts are governed by the need to attain pleasure and avoid ‘un-pleasure’.  All acts are for pleasure.

The Reality Principle enables us to understand that our pleasure cannot all be fulfilled the way we want them, and, therefore, inspire us to seek other routes of attaining pleasure.   

Five

 Libido

Sexuality is the primary ‘drive’ in our subjectivity according to Freud.  He termed this the libido. What gets repressed primarily is the sex drive.

An individual’s sexual identity is, hence, partly the result of expression of desires and partly the condition caused by a repression of the same.

In order to explain the sexual identity or libido of a person Freud developed the idea of the OEDIPUS COMPLEX.

            Six

 The Oedipus Complex

Step 1.  The problem with sexual desires begins with the (male) child’s dependency on the mother.  Love for the mother is a dominant theme in child’s psyche.

Step 2.  Soon the child sees his father as a rival for the mother’s love.  The father restricts the child’s expression of love through a threat (a threat that the child imagines) of castration. 

Step 3.   The child therefore begins to develop fantasies of killing his father so that he (the child) will have no rivals for his mother’s love.  This fantasy is what Freud famously called the Oedipus Complex.

Step 4.  Soon the child sees the father as possessing the greater authority in the relationship (child-mother-father).  This marks the shift in affiliation; the child now seeing the father as the source of all power and desire, shifts his focus to the father.

Step 5.  The desire for the mother is shut away in the unconscious when the child accepts the law that “you shall not make love to your mother”.  This law becomes the threshold of the conscious-unconscious. 

Seven

 Taboo

For Freud the Oedipus complex is the source of all repressed desire, the emblem of all that is repressed because even love is antagonistic in nature.  The Oedipus complex enabled Freud to argue that all desire, repression and anxiety are based on the CONDITION OF PROHIBITION or what he termed Taboo.

The child never really overcomes the complex, but merely shuts it away.

Eight

 Dreams and Unconscious

Freud described dreams as the royal road to the unconscious, arguing that dreams provide us with the best understanding of the repressed desires in us.  Dreams are codes, presenting themselves as complex images so that the repressing force is bypassed.

For Freud [this is the link to psychoanalytic criticism] dreams are a language, the language of the unconscious and of repressed desires.  This language is termed DREAM WORK.

Nine

 Dream Work

Dream work has two central dimensions:

a.     LATENT DREAM CONTENT : IS THE ACTUAL CONTENT OF THE UNCONSCIOUS THAT SEEKS EXPRESSION

b.     MANIFEST DREAM CONTENT: IS THE EXPRESSION OF THE CONTENT IN THE FORM OF IMAGES OR EVENT IN ONE’S DREAM

Freud argued that the latent dream content undergoes four process or stages—the dream work—before it expresses itself in the manifest dream. They are:

1.      Condensation: the latent content is condensed in the manifest dream.

2.      Displacement: here the latent dream content works as association, and then is expressed in complex images.

3.      Representation and Representability: the language of the dream often uses complex images that have no apparent basis in reality.

4.      Secondary Revision: the dreamer himself/herself interprets the dream, but revises it in the process.

Ten

 Conclusion

To conclude, at this point it becomes clear that  for Freud;

a.     Art and dreams are both means of expressing desires.

b.    Art and dreams are mechanisms of avoiding the censorship that prohibits desire or its expression.

c.      Art and dreams bypass consciousness when they express the repressed desires.

end

00151--What Lacanian critics do?

1)        Like Freudian critics they pay close attention to unconscious motives and feelings, but instead of excavating for those of the author or characters, they search out those of the text itself, uncovering contradictory under currents of meaning, which lie like a subconscious beneath the 'conscious' of the text.  This is another way of defining the process of 'deconstruction'.

2)        They demonstrate the presence in the literary work of Lacanian psychoanalytic symptoms or phases, such as the mirror-stage or the sovereignty of the unconscious. 

3)        They see the literary text as an enactment or demonstration of Lacanian views about language and unconscious, particularly the endemic elusiveness of the signified, and the centrality of the unconscious.  In practice, this results in favaouring the anti-realist test which challenges the conventions literary representation.

4)        They treat the literary text in terms of a series of broader Lacanian orientations, towards such concepts as lack or desire, for instance.

00150--What Freudian psychoanalytic critics do?

a)         They give central importance, in literary interpretation, to the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious mind.  They associate the literary work's 'overt' content with the former, and the 'covert' content with the latter, previleging the latter as being what the work is 'really' about, and aiming to disentangle the two.

b)        Hence they pay close attention to unconscious motives and feelings, whether there by 1) those of the author, or 2) those of the characters depicted in the work.

c)         They demonstrate the presence in the literary work of classic psychoanalytic symptoms, conditions, or phrases, such as the oral, anala, and phallic stages of emotional and sexual development in infants.

d)        They make large-scale applications of psychoanalytic concepts to literary history in general, for example, Harold Bloom's book.  The Anxiety of Influence (1973) sees the struggle for identity by each generation of poets, under the 'threat' of the greatness of its predecessors, as an enactment of the Oedipus complex.

e)         They identify a 'psychic' context for the literary work, at the expense of social of historical context, privileging the individual 'psycho-drama' above the 'social drama of class conflict.  The conflict between generations or siblings, or between competing desires within the same individual looms much larger than conflict between social classes, for instance.