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 20th 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 ego’s 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 egomust 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 father’s 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 text’s instabilities, the way multiple forces in it
(like instincts) compete for control. Ex: Poe’s “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 critic’s 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
Felman’s “Turning the Screw of Interpretation” (Yale French Studies, no. 55/56, 1977):
https://www.academia.edu/8558505/Turning_the_Screw_of_Interpretation_Shoshana_Felman

Jacques Lacan

 Combines psychoanalysis with structuralism: “the unconscious is structured like a language.” (Lacan) It’s 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 child’s entrance into the Symbolic;
 The Symbolic order (linguistic): corresponds to the child’s entrance to the linguistic stage, similar to Freud’s 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);