chapter 33 the freudian revolution. psychoanalysis = the talking cure
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The Tripartite Psyche The id—the repository of the libido. Demandin
g swift satisfaction and fulfillment of biological desires, it is lawless, asocial, amoral.
The ego—making the id’s energies nondestructive by postponing them or diverting them into socially acceptable actions.
The superego—similar to one’s conscience, operating according to the morality principle. (parents, institutions) (Dobie 51)
Erogenous 性感 Zone The oral stage—associated with the drive to inc
orporate objects The anal stage---The anal stage is sadistic, in t
hat 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 faeces.
The phallic stage---only the male organ is recognized. (Eagleton 153)
Fixation 固戀 When one’s desire is tied to an object of
desire connected to an earlier phase in one’s psychosexual development.
Example: a fixation on oral pleasure, which Freud would see as “stuck” at the oral phase, even though other aspects of one’s development may have proceeded normally. (Felluga)
RegressionWhen 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)
RegressionExample 1: a normally
functioning woman is dumped by her boyfriend and starts over-eating (thus regressing to the oral phase).
RegressionExample 2: the neurotic begins o
ver-eating; the pervert gives up men and becomes a lesbian (a sexual identity that Freud saw as perversion, though many have since critiqued him on this point). (Felluga)
The Oedipus Complex
The boy’s close involvement with his mother’s 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 father’s threat of castration.
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. (Eagleton 155-156)
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. (Eagleton 156)
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).
Dreams The “royal road” to the unconscious is d
reams. Dreams allow us one of our privileged gl
impses of the unconscious at work (Eagleton, 157).
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.
Neurosis The patient begins to develop symptoms whic
h. . . 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)
PsychosisThe 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.
Art & Literature Literature and the other arts, like dream
s and neurotic symptoms, 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)
Art & Literature
Manifest content The disguised fantasies that are evident to consciousness
Latent content The unconscious wishes
Art & Literature
What distinguishes artists from the patently neurotic personality is sublimation昇華 .
Art & Literature The artists possess an ability to shift the insti
nctual drive from their original sexual goals to nonsexual ‘higher’ goals. They could elaborate fantasied wish-fulfillments into the 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.
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)
References Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Te
rms. 7th ed. Harcourt Brace, 1999. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. U of Mi
nnesota, 1983. Felluga, Dino. http://www.purdue.edu/guidetothe
ory/psychoanalysis
De Chirico, The Nostalgia of the Infinite, 1913-14
“We experience the most unforgettable moments when certain aspects of the world . . . suddenly confront us with the revelation of mysteries lying all the time within our reach, which we cannot see . . . .”
Dada
"Dada had no unified formal characteristics as have other styles“. . .it is characterized only by its "destruction of all artistic forms . . . a raging anti, anti, anti" (Richter).
Duchamp
“I wanted to get away from the physical aspect of painting, I was much more interested in re-creating ideas in painting. For me the title was very important. . . . I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind.”
Marcel Duchamp
Surrealism: Two Trends
Abstract Surrealism (Automatism)–Picasso, Miro, and Klee
Visionary Surrealism–Magritte, Dali
Automatism the automatic way in which the images
of the subconscious reach the consciousness. These images should not be burdened with "meaning.“
believe that lack of form was a way to rebel against them
Miro, Pollock, de Kooning
http://www.bway.net/~monique/history.htm
Visionary Surrealism saw academic discipline and form as th
e means to represent the images of the subconscious with veracity
hoped to find a way to follow the images of the subconscious until the consciousness could understand their meaning.
De Chirico, Dali, Magritte
http://www.bway.net/~monique/history.htm
O’Keeffe, Cow’s Skull: with Calico Roses, 1931
I painted my cow's head because I liked it and in its way it was a symbol of the best part of America I had found.