Week%20Six

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Week Six

• The Freudian Subject

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• 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)

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The Tripartite Psyche

• The idthe repository of the libido. Demanding
  swift satisfaction and fulfillment of biological
  desires, it is lawless, asocial, amoral.
• The egomaking the ids energies nondestructive
  by postponing them or diverting them into
  socially acceptable actions.
• The superegosimilar to ones conscience,
  operating according to the morality principle.
  (parents, institutions) (Dobie 51)

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Freuds Tripartite Model for the Psyche
Pcpt.-Cs. Perceptual Consciousness
http//www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/psy
choanalysis/freud2modelofpsyche.html
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• The 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/PSYfreud193
  3.html

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http//library.thinkquest.org/C004361/theoryfreud.
html
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http//library.thinkquest.org/C004361/theoryfreud.
html
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http//www.ship.edu/cgboeree/freud.html
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http//www.ship.edu/cgboeree/psychoanalysis.html
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http//www.mhhe.com/socscience/intro/ibank/ibank/0
119.jpg
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http//core.ecu.edu/soci/juskaa/SOCI2110/Lectures/
socialization/sld015.htm
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Erogenous Zone

• The oral stageassociated 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)

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Fixation

• When ones desire is tied to an object of desire
  connected to an earlier phase in ones
  psychosexual development.
• Example a fixation on oral pleasure, which Freud
  would see as stuck at the oral phase, even
  though other aspects of ones development may
  have proceeded normally. (Felluga)

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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)

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The Oedipus Complex

• The boys close involvement with his mothers
  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 fathers
  threat of castration.

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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.

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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)

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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 infants 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).

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The Oedipus Complex

• The Oedipus complex is for Freud the beginnings
  of morality, conscience, law and all forms of
  social and religious authority. The fathers 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).

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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).

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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

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cauldron
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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))

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A Note upon the Mystic Writing Pad (1925)
Picture http//yahooligans.yahoo.com/content/movi
es/movie.html?id1800026443templatepdphotoindx
11 Text taken from http//www.cybergrain.com/reme
diality/freud.pdf
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Dreams

• The royal road to the unconscious is dreams.
• Dreams allow us one of our privileged glimpses of
  the unconscious at work (Eagleton, 157).

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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).

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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.

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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

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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 )

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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• ???(Phobic Neurosis)
• ???(Anxiety Neurosis)
• ???(Obsessive Compulsive Disorder)

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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.

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• ?????(Schizophrenia)
• ???,???(Paranoia)
• ??(Mania)??(Depression)????????(Bipolar
  Affective Disorder)

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Psychosis

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

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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).

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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.

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Transference

• This poses a problem for the analyst, since such
  repetition or ritual re-enactment of the
  original conflict is one of the patients
  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.

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Transference

• But transference also provides the analyst with a
  peculiarly privileged insight into the patients
  psychical life, in a controlled situation in
  which he or she can intervene. (Eagleton 159-160)

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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)

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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
  artists mind, but are permitted by the censor to
  achieve a fantasied satisfaction in distorted
  forms . . .

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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
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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.

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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)

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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

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• Recommended Websites
• http//www.pbs.org/youngdrfreud/index.htm
• http//www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/psy
  choanalysis/freud.html
• http//www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Kl
  ages/freud.html
• http//psych.eiu.edu/spencer/Freud.html
• http//www.english.bham.ac.uk/staff/tom/teaching/t
  heories/theorieslectures/freud/freudlecture.htm