EWRT 1C Class 17

AGENDALecture/Discussion:

Sigmund Freud Psychoanalytic Theory Psychoanalytic Criticism

6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939 Sigmund Freud (Sigismund Schlomo

Freud), was an Austrian neurologist usually credited with creating psychoanalytic theory and, by extension, psychiatric therapy.

According to biographer Ernest Jones, "Freud's Jewishness contributed greatly to his work and his firm convictions about his findings. Freud often referred to his ability to stand alone, if need be, without wavering or surrendering his intellectual and scientific discoveries, and he attributed this ability to his irreligious but strong Jewish identity in an anti-Semitic society, whereby he was accustomed to a marginal status and being set aside as different.“

Sigmund Freud

Freud: Background continued…

In 1930, Freud was awarded the Goethe Prize in recognition of his contributions to psychology and to German literary culture.

In January 1933, the Nazis took control of Germany, and Freud's books were prominent among those they burned and destroyed. Freud quipped: “What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now, they are content with burning my books.”

In June 1938, Freud and his family left Vienna, Austria, eventually settling in London.

Today, some people argue that Freud’s work is outdated, unscientific, and sexist; nevertheless, all major subsequent theories have been based on his revolutionary, pioneering work:

Freud developed a language that described, a model that explained, and a theory that encompassed human psychology. His theories are directly and indirectly concerned with the nature of the unconscious mind.

Freud believed that unconscious sexual drives were the basis for all human behavior, and that dreams were an important indicator for understanding human behavior.

The DrivesFreud hypothesized two forms of drive

energy:Libido - sexual/eroticThanatos - aggressive/destructive

Freud assumes these are always fused but not necessarily in the same amounts

Cruelty may have an erotic component Acts of love may have an aggressive

component

Freudian Components of Personality The Conscious Mind includes that which we are aware of. This is the aspect of our mental processing that we can think and talk about rationally. The Preconscious Mind is the part of the mind that represents ordinary memory. While we are not consciously aware of this information at any given time, we can pull it into consciousness when needed.The Unconscious Mind is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that outside of our conscious awareness. Most of the contents of the unconscious are unacceptable or unpleasant, such as feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict. According to Freud, the unconscious continues to influence our behavior and experience, even though we are unaware of these underlying influences.

The ego Mediates between the id and reality; it maintains our “self – how we see our “self” and wish others to see it.

The SUPER-EGO is a lot like a conscience – it punishes misbehavior with feelings of guilt. Since the super-ego is concerned with societal norms, it stands in opposition to the id. The development of an individual’s super-ego replaces a parent’s discipline.

The Three Tiers of Self The ID seeks pleasure and

avoids pain; we normally associate inborn instincts (such as the behaviors of an infant or an animal) with the id.

The EGO seeks to placate the id, but in a way that will ensure long-term benefits (such as trying to get what the id wants without breaking laws or social standards).

Conflicts between the Id, Superego and Ego arise in unconscious mind

They come out in various ways– Slips of tongue (“Freudian slip”)– Dreams– Jokes– Anxiety– Defense Mechanisms

Conflicts of Personality Components

Freudian Slip

A slip of the tongue in which a word that the speaker was subconsciously thinking about is substituted for the one that he or she meant to say.

"For seven and a half years I've worked alongside President Reagan. We've had triumphs. Made some mistakes. We've had some sex... uh... setbacks." -A Freudian slip by President George H.W. Bush

According to Freud, dreams always have a manifest and latent content.  The manifest content is what the dream seems to be saying. It is often bizarre and nonsensical.  The latent content is what the dream is really trying to say. Dreams give us a look into our unconscious.

A young woman dreams that “She is going through the hall of her house and strikes her head against the low-hanging chandelier, so that her head bleeds.”

She has no reminiscence to contribute, nothing that really happened. The information she gives leads in quite another direction. “You know how badly my hair is falling out. Mother said to me yesterday, ‘My child, if it goes on like this, you will have a head like the cheek of a buttock.’” Thus the head here stands for the other part of the body. We can understand the chandelier symbolically without other help; all objects that can be lengthened are symbols of the male organ. Thus the dream deals with a bleeding at the lower end of the body, which results from its collision with the male organ. This might still be ambiguous; her further associations show that it has to do with her belief that menstrual bleeding results from sexual intercourse with a man, a bit of sexual theory believed by many immature girls.

Dreams

From: Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. 1920. Part Two: The Dream XII. Analysis of Sample Dreams

Freud and JokesJokes, like dreams and slips of the tongue, bear the traces of repressed desires. Sexual and aggressive thoughts, which are forbidden in polite society, can be shared as if they are not serious. Humour then becomes a way of rebelling against the demands of social order. As Freud wrote in a later essay, ‘humour is not resigned it is rebellious’ (1927/1990, p.429).

Ridicule: If we break social codes, then we fear that others might laugh at our infringements, mocking our inappropriate behaviour. Thus, fear of mockery may be the key means for maintaining social order. Humour, far from being principally rebellious, also fulfills a deeply conservative function

Hiding Hate: The anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger publically offered “a good technique for baptising Jews: aspiring converts to Christianity should be held under water for 10 minutes.” Jokes like this express extreme hostility, but those who enjoy such jokes can excuse them as ‘just jokes,’ not thinking of themselves as harbouring murderous intentions.

Asserting Power: [When the Nazi’s took over,] a majority of the Christian population celebrated. Jews were forced to scrub the streets with toothbrushes. The crowds gathered to laugh at respectable citizens so demeaned. [. . .] This was not humour as rebellion but the humour of power.

Meyers, C.S. “Freud and the Language of Humour”

Fear of intimacy—the chronic and overpowering feeling that emotional closeness will seriously hurt or destroy us and that we can remain emotionally safe only by remaining at an emotional distance from others at all times. [. . .] Fear of intimacy can also function as a defense. If this particular defense occurs frequently or continually, then fear of intimacy is probably a core issue.

Fear of abandonment—the unshakable belief that our friends and loved ones are going to desert us (physical abandonment) or don’t really care about us (emotional abandonment).

Fear of betrayal—the nagging feeling that our friends and loved ones can’t be trusted, for example, can’t be trusted not to lie to us, not to laugh at us behind our backs, or in the case of romantic partners, not to cheat on us by dating others.

Core Anxieties1

Low self-esteem—the belief that we are less worthy than other people and, therefore, don’t deserve attention, love, or any other of life’s rewards. Indeed, we often believe that we deserve to be punished by life in some way. Insecure or unstable sense of self—the inability to sustain a feeling of personal identity, to sustain a sense of knowing ourselves.

Insecure or unstable sense of self—the inability to sustain a feeling of personal identity, to sustain a sense of knowing ourselves. This core issue makes us very vulnerable to the influence of other people, and we may find ourselves continually changing the way we look or behave as we become involved with different individuals or groups.

Oedipal fixation (or oedipal complex)—a dysfunctional bond with a parent of the opposite sex that we don’t outgrow in adulthood and that doesn’t allow us to develop mature relationships with our peers. (Tyson 26–27)

Core Issues2

Defense MechanismsDefense Mechanisms

McLeod, S. A. (2009). Defense Mechanisms. Retrieved from http://www.simplypsychology.org/defense-mechanisms.html

Other Influential Psychoanalytic Theorists

Carl Jung: Jungian criticism attempts to explore the connection between literature and what Carl Jung (a student of Freud) called the “collective unconscious” of the human race: "...racial memory, through which the spirit of the whole human species manifests itself" (Richter 504). Jungian criticism, closely related to Freudian theory because of its connection to psychoanalysis, assumes that all stories and symbols are based on mythic models from mankind’s past.

Jacques Lacan: a post-Freudian psychoanalytic theorist, focused on language and language-related issues. Lacan treats the unconscious as a language; consequently, he views the dream not as Freud did (that is, as a form and symptom of repression) but rather as a form of discourse.

Julie Kristeva: Her interest in psychoanalysis was also inspired by Jacques Lacan's re-interpretation of Freud, although Kristeva has also carefully distinguished her own ideas from those of Lacan. Kristeva was particularly critical of what she saw as an inherent misogyny in Lacan's and Freud's theories; her own system of thinking therefore attempts to rethink sexual development in such a way as to value the importance of the feminine. For this reason, she has been especially influential on theories of gender and sex.

PSYCHOANALYTICAL CRITICISM aims to show that a literary or cultural work is always structured by complex and often contradictory human desires.

What does Tyson Tell us about Psychoanalytical Theory

Psychoanalytic concepts have become part of our everyday lives, and therefore psychoanalytic thinking should have the advantage of familiarity.

Most of us have acquired a very simplistic idea of what these concepts mean, and in their clichéd form they seem rather superficial if not altogether meaningless.

We fear that psychoanalysis wants to invade our most private being and reveal us to ourselves and to the world as somehow inadequate, even sick, and the result is very often a deep-seated mistrust of “psychobabble.”

If we take the time to understand some key concepts about human experience offered by psychoanalysis, we can begin to see the ways in which these concepts operate in our daily lives in profound rather than superficial ways, and we’ll begin to understand human behaviors that until now may have seemed utterly baffling. And, of course, if psychoanalysis can help us better understand human behavior, then it must certainly be able to help us understand literary texts, which are about human behavior.

Tyson on Psychoanalytic Criticism

Adopts the methods of "reading" employed by Freud and later theorists to interpret texts. It argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the author, that a literary work is a manifestation of the author's own neuroses. It approaches an author’s work as a kind of textual “talk therapy.”

One may psychoanalyze a particular character within a literary work, but it is usually assumed that all such characters are projections of the author's psyche.

Like psychoanalysis itself, this critical endeavor seeks evidence of unresolved emotions, psychological conflicts, guilt, ambivalences, and so forth within the author’s literary work. The author's own childhood traumas, family life, sexual conflicts, fixations, and such will be traceable within the behavior of the characters in the literary work.

Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism

the author: the theory is used to analyze the author and his/her life, and the literary work is seen to supply evidence for this analysis. This is often called "psychobiography."

the characters: the theory is used to analyze one or more of the characters; the psychological theory becomes a tool that to explain the characters’ behavior and motivations. The more closely the theory seems to apply to the characters, the more realistic the work appears.

the audience: the theory is used to explain the appeal of the work for those who read it; the work is seen to embody universal human psychological processes and motivations, to which the readers respond more or less unconsciously.

the text: the theory is used to analyze the role of language and symbolism in the work.

Psychoanalytic literary criticism is often extended to one or more of the following:

Discussion Questions Post #11: What is the

purpose of psychoanalytical criticism?

My question is, then, is Psychoanalytic an intrinsic or extrinsic theory? (I could see an argument for either position)

QHQ’s Q: If characters in a work of literature are an

unconscious extension of the author, to what extent can we judge what is unconsciously an extension of the author and what the author developed purposely or consciously?

For a deeper understanding of the psyche of oneself and characters within a text, how does Psychoanalytic Criticism lend a thorough insight into the understanding of human experience?

Q: Does uncovering repressed painful memories and emotions ultimately strengthen or impair the ways we perceive literature?

Homework Read: Bishop’s “The Fish” Read: Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish”: A Psychoanalytic

Reading Post #12: Identify and discuss qualities of

psychoanalytic criticism as it is applied in this essay. Provide specific examples from the essay, the poem, or the definition/description of Psychoanalytic Criticism.