Week 4: Wednesday 25. Image & Theory, cont.
Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)
Abrams: psychological and psychoanalytic criticism (247-253), essay ( 82-83),
figurative language (96-100)
Recap: Why are we reading Freud in this class? 2 reasons:
I.. Freud is the founder of a systematic analysis of the “disunitary subject” (“I”) of post-structuralist theory.
II. Freud is a great writer of the literary genre of the essay [Abrams, 82-83]
In this text, Freud uses a literary mode of presenting an argument as a way of illustrating that psychoanalytic thinking IS literary thinking.
I. What ideas in Civilization and Its Discontents are important to this course?
A. The pleasure principle achieves its aims through producing symbolic objects, via the operation of sublimation: mastery of unconscious dynamics by displacement into higher symbolic forms [29-30]: art & science; &/OR via the operation of fantasy.
B. Freud is the founder of a systematic analysis of the “disunitary subject” (“I”) of post-structuralist theory. Three fundamentals of psychoanalytic theory:
1. Mental life is tripartite, consisting of :
Unconscious; id: the domain of instinctual passions and aims, which are “stronger than reasonable interests” [69][i] ; its energy is called “libido” (Latin, “desire,” “pleasure”)
Ego: the domain of “reasonableness”; the domain of mediation between the aims of libido to achieve pleasure and the aims of the super-ego to punish the desire for pleasure. The ego is also the objectified form of self-understanding, which believes itself to be whole, individual and unitary (the “I”). It is consequently the site of neurotic suffering: “acting out” unconscious wishes for both satisfaction and punishment. (“Neurotic symptoms are…substitutive satisfactions for unfulfilled sexual wishes”; and “conceal a quota of unconscious sense of guilt, which in its turn fortifies the symptoms by making use of them as a punishment” [103])
Super-ego: self-prohibiting register of consciousness, artefact of earliest socialization of instinctive impulses: the means by which human instinct of aggressivity is “introjected,” turned inward, and acts out on the self its aims of inflicting punishment on the Other
2. The human individual is the site of an lifelong contest, conducted in the unconscious, between Eros & Thanatos, the two aims of the pleasure-seeking libido: for sexual gratification and for expression of aggression. Neurotic suffering is the acting out of the conflicts generated by these opposing aims.
3. In the course of psychosexual development, libidinal aims are concealed from consciousness by repression; they are expressed indirectly via substitution and displacement into symbolic forms, including fanstasies, dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue and somatically-positioned neurotic symptoms
II. Freud is a great writer of the literary genre of the essay [Abrams, 82-83]
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud uses a literary mode of presenting an argument as a way of illustrating that psychoanalytic thinking IS literary thinking.
A. “Literary mode” of presenting an argument
1. Creation of a narrating persona [opening of essasy: “one” modulates into “I”]
2. Thinking in tropes-- cf Abrams: “figurative language”
Eros & Ananke : allusions to mythic personifications
“oceanIC” feeling : simile
psyche = Rome : analogy
Napoleon’s washbasin: synechdoche, “part for whole”
metaphor, “substitution”
metonymy, “displacement”
B. “Literary Thinking:
“Psychoanalysis” consists of examining expressivity for the traces of the systematic functioning of substitution & displacement in the mental life of the analysand; and by analogy, psychoanalysis offers an understanding of the functioning of figurative language in literary texts.
Examples in TSE: thinking in tropes about things that are wet vs things that are not
drown in water vs sail across water [control, connect]
in “Prufrock”:
“we drown”: fantasy as direct wish-fulfillment, interrupted by reality [streets & rooms in social world vs “chambers of the sea” in fantasy world]
in Waste Land: associational pathways of dry & wet, for example:
“feeding a little life with dried tubers” / “your arms full [of hyacinths] and your hair wet… I was neither living nor dead”
AND
“fear death by water” [l 55]
“you who turn the wheel and look to windward, / Consider Phelbas” [ll 312ff]
“DA / Damyata: The boat responded / Gaily, to the hand expert…” [ll. 418ff]
Week 4a1
[i] “Love with an inhibited aim was in fact originally fully sensuous love, and it is so still in man’s unconscious” p.58