Psychoanalytic Criticism

by Elizabeth Wright

This book examines the relationship of psychoanalytic theory to the theories of literature and the arts.

Genres: Psychology, Theory, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

Reviews

[samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

• Introduction
o Purpose of book is to give overview of rich field—relationship of psychoanalytic theory to the theories of literature and the arts
o Psychoanalysis addresses itself to the problems of language, starting from Freud's original insight concerning the determining force within utterance: he draws attention to the effects of desire in language and, indeed, in all forms of symbolic interaction. The language of desire is veiled and does not show itself openly
o Psychoanalysis explores what happens when primordial desire gets directed into social goals, when bodily needs become subject to the mould of culture
o Through language, desire becomes subject to rules, and yet this language cannot define the body's experience accurately.
o Psych is interested in the aspect of experience which has been ignored or prohibited by the rules of language.
o Only through its effects do we come to know the unconscious: through the logic of symptoms and dreams, through jokes and “Freudian slips,” through the pattern of children’s play, and most crucially in the mutually affective relationship which human beings develop as a consequence of their past total helplessness and dependence on another person. These emotions, regenerated in the analytic situation, may be taken as evidence that no experience the body has is ever totally erased from the mind.
o The neurotic and psychotic disorders which bring human beings to the consulting-room symptomatically speak of the mismatch between bodily desire and sexual-cum-social role.
o None of this as yet can be scientifically proved, despite the efforts of the founder. The emphasis must be on the interpretative force of the theory instead of on a simplistic true/false analysis of what are highly subjective phenomena.
o If there is a single key issue it is probably the question of the role of sexuality in the constitution of the self, and crucially, how this sexuality is to be defined.
o To concentrate on 'mechanisms' without taking account of the energies with which they are charged is to ignore Freud's most radical discoveries: it is precisely the shifts of energies brought about by unconscious desire that allow a new meaning to emerge. A desexualized application of psychoanalytic criticism, a confining of it solely to the mechanisms oflanguage -whether as an example of the plenitude of ambiguity (New Criticism and its offshoots: the 'work' of an author) or as a set of perpetually shifting ambivalences (deconstruction: the 'workings' oflanguage in a 'text') - does not engage the full explanatory force of psychoanalytic theory.
• 2. Classical Psychoanalysis: Freud
o Though the summary of Freudian theory given here cannot but be selective, it aims to indicate what sort of knowledge psychoanalysis has to contribute to the understanding of literature and the arts.
o Freud’s development of human mind as psychical apparatus. He regards such an explanation as providing a scientific basis for a theory of the unconscious, by which he relates it directly to the needs of the body.
o He looks at mind from three POVs: dynamic, economic, and topographical. These are not mutually exclusive interpetretations but emphasize different aspects of the whole.
 Dynamic: stresses interplay of forces within the mind, arising from the tensions that develop when instinctual drives meet the necessities of external reality. The mind comes into being out of the body. What is necessarily given at the start are the needs of the body itself: these are inseparably connected to feelings of pleasure and pain.
 Economic: pleasure results from decrease in the degree to which the body is disturbed by any stimulus. Unpleasure results from an increase in disturbance. Ego evolves to mediate the actions of the body so as to achieve the optimal satisfaction of its needs. Ego is concerned with self-preservation.
 Topographical: psychical apparatus is here conceived of in a spatial metaphor as divided into separate sub-systems, which together mediate the conflict of energies.
• First this was conscious (pc, sensing and ordering of external world), preconscious (can be called in cs at will), unconscious (instinctual representatives, ideas and images originally fixated in a moment of repression, these don’t remain in fixed state though. regulated by primary processes)
• Second scheme: id (instinctual drives that spring from constitutional needs of the body), ego (developed out of the id to be an agency which regulates and opposes the drives; superego (representative of parental and social influences upon the drives, a transformation of them rather than an external agency)
o With the appearance of these agencies, the picture of dynamic conflict becomes clearer. The id wants its wishes satisfied, whether or not they are compatible with external demands. The ego finds itself threatened by the pressure of the unacceptable wishes. Memories of these experiences, that is images and ideas associated with them, become charged with unpleasurable feeling, and are thus barred from consciousness. This is the operation known as repression: 'the essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance from the conscious'
• This isn’t simple. Relies on repression
o 1. Primal repression: initiates the formation of the unconscious and is ineradicable and permanen. Consists of denying the psychical representative entry into the conscious. This marks a prelinguistic entry into a symbolic world
o 2. Repression proper or “after-pressure”, keeps the guilt-laden wishes out of conscious experience. Symptoms, dreams, slips represent the “Return of the repressed,” a mechanism that marks the emergence of forbidden wish and resistance to it.
• His early work is on instinct psychology
• Later work is on ego-psychology (concentrates on that which ‘controls’ the wish)
• This work focuses on instinct psychology.
o Here, sexual instinct is opposed by another instinct always (here he cannot be accused of pan-sexualism, tracing all action to the sexual instinct).
o He calls the total available energy of the sexual instinct ‘libido’ and it is essential to realize that it is not solely directed towards sexual aims per se.
o Sexuality DEF is to be understood as not specifically limited to the process of reproduction: 'Sexual life includes the function of obtaining pleasure from zones of the body - a function which is subsequently brought into the service of reproduction. The two functions often fail to coincide completely' Freud is showing that sexuality is not a mere matter of a biological urge but involves the production of fantasies under pressure of external circumstances.
o Infant development
 The libido is checked when it comes up against the environment and can only achieve partial satisfaction. In the course of an infant's development those instinctual drives which Freud came to designate sexual or 'libidinous' in nature are channel-led into zones. At each stage the infant has to give up a part of its bodily satisfaction: the breast, the faeces - its first product – and the unconditional possession of a penis. Its selfhood will depend on its assumption of a sexual identity, not merely anatomically determined, but psychically constructed. Until this is achieved the infant’s sexuality is ‘polymorphous’: it is at the mercy of ‘component instincts’ functioning independently and varying in their aim, their object, and their source. Only gradually and with difficulty do they become organized into what our culture considers to be adult sexuality. The match of biological sex with the sexual role determined by society is thus achieved, not given
 This matching is accomplished via the combined workings of the Oedipus complex and the castration complex
 Impossible here to account for his theory of gender evolved from three essays (1905) to Femininity (1933). Following is his later account
 Dependence on mother-> father as rival->fantasy killing father possessing mother. Castration complex is way out. Fear of that from father-> boy abandons love for mother and moves towards identification with father with understanding that he too can in time occupy such a position of power
• For girls, castration complex ushers in Oedipus complex. Lack of penis is failure in provision on the part of the mother->hostile to mother-> replaces wish for penis with wish to bear the father a child->rival of mother for father’s love
• Freud saw the fading of the Oedipus complex in the girl-child as a more uncertain process, because the identification with the father's law, facilitated for the boy-child by the anticipation of power, is not so secure. Nor has he an adequate explanation of how the girl overcomes her jealousy of the mother and attains identification with her
 REALLY HELPFUL BRIEF SUMMARY IF EVER TEACHING
 Oedipusis nucleas of desire, repression, and sexual identity. Its residue is a life-long ambivalence towards the keeping and breaking of taboos and laws.
 As the complex declines, the superego is formed and becomes part of the topography of the psyche. It is the cause of neurotic illness and raison d'etre of the psychoanalytic process, where the patient is offered a chance to emancipate himself anew, by dint of a better compromise with authority. The psychoanalytic encounter restages the old drama through 'transference'.
 Transference and countertransference might be regarded as the ‘reader theory of psychoanalysis.
 Transference DEF a mode of investing persons and objects with positive and negative qualities, according to our early memories of significant experience of familial figures and the expectations founded thereon
 Countertransference DEF manifests in the knots which result from the unending chain of mutual misreadings
• This is the analyst’s uncontrolled response to the patient’s transference
• Laplanche and Pontalis define it as “the whole of the analyst’s unconscious reactions to the individual analysand”
 Clinical situations aimed at helping this process where it has got stuck. Free association reveals that which determines you.
 Transference neurosis: the nearer the analyst gets to the repressed complex which induced the illness the more the patient’s behavior becomes pure repetition and divorced from present reality. Repetition compulsion, the uncontrolled return of the repressed.
 Transference and counter, applied to reading, tells us that: Readers do not only work on texts, but texts work on readers, and this involves a complex double dialectic of two bodies inscribed in language.
o The dream and the strategies of desire
 Dreams, par excellence, reveal themselves to be boundary phenomena, in that they occur where intentions are in opposition, where bodily desires have to come to terms with society
 In the condition of sleep the force of repression is relaxed bc there is no immediate likelihood of unconscious impulse being carried through into dangerous action. Constraint is still operative in that the incursions of what is repressed are deflected from action, that is, from awakening the sleeper
 The energizing force of dreams springs from unconscious impulse seeking fulfillment, a desire not fulfilled in waking life. Unable to find expression in action, the impulse gathers to itself material both from recent experience (Residues) and from distant memories involving infantile sexual wishes
 An unconscious wish meets up with a preconscious thought and strives for an illusory satisfaction.
 But the ‘censorship,’ the force of repression, at the frontier between the unconscious and preconscious will not allow these powerfully charged memories to reach representation in their original form
 Instead, under the influence of this censorship, the material is transformed into a series of images, that is the dream,
 TLDR
• a dream is a disguised fulfillment of a suppressed or repressed wish
• suppressed/repressed wish (unconscious material, often infantile) -> meets up with preconscious thought (residues) -> censorship, force of repression, wont allow them the former to appear in full even with that meeting, and so the flashes of images of dreams occurs
 Irrationality of dream is traceable to censorship and primary processes
 And censorship can continue its work as person tries to recount aloud in daytime (secondary revision)
 Yet Freud is nowhere engaged in tracking down the repressed infantile wish. He’s interested in the forms taken by the language of desire, that which he calls the dream-work
 Dream-work transforms “latent” content of dream, those forbidden dream-thoughts, into ‘manifest’ dream stories (what is remembered)
 The analyst traverses the reverse process, following chain of associations upwards to decode.
 The operations of the dream-work, its subversions and distortions, take four forms: condensation (Verdichtung), displacement (Vershiebung), considerations of representability (Rucksicht auf Darstellbarkeit), and secondary revision (sekundiire Bearbeitung).
o Art and the strategies of desire
 Art is related to dream and most of all to the fulfilment of infantile wish
 “In the exercising of an art it [psychoanalysis] sees once again an activity intended to allay ungratified wishes—in the first place in the creative artist himself and subsequently in his audience or spectators”
 The key question: 'from what sources that strange being, the creative writer, draws his material, and how he manages to make such an impression on us and arouse in us emotions of which, perhaps, we had not even thought ourselves capable'
 He admits that psychoanalysis cannot say how the artist achieves his ‘innermost secret.’
 Ricoeur runs with this and argues that Freud’s writing on art are fragmentary in a highly systematic way. Ric is reading for a Freudian aesthetic.
• Freud uses analogies
• Distinguishes daydream from artistic creation by including role of play in the latter
• Freud has something to say about how the pleasure the artist gives us is connected with the dynamics of the work of art.
 Freud was fully aware of the difference between treating art as biographical evidence and treating it as an aesthetic object.
 Okay so Freud’s study of Gradiva
• 1. Analogies between archaeology and psychoanalytic investigation
• 2. Emphasis on the return of the repressed
• 3. Dreams have a meaning and can be interpreted
• 4. Emphasizes overlap of psychoanalytic and artistic ambiguity
 In his essay “Psychopathic characters on the stage,” Freud is concerned with how the audience’s understanding of the repressed material will affect their response.
• If too much gets through, resistance will come into force and the spectator will not allow himself to be drawn in. The dramatist will fail to purge the spectator of his emotion and thus, according to Freud, not open up a possible source o pleasure. It is once again a question of strategy.
 'Psychopathic characters' has something of the richness of Freud's essay 'The uncanny,' where he also stresses the power of the writer to control the return of the repressed and demonstrates, albeit unconsciously, how it is done: in foregrounding the uncanny effects
• 3. Classical Freudian criticism: id-psychology (aka instinct psychology)
o Id-psychology sum: centers on the role of the sexual instincts as the determining force of an individual’s life
o The ucs is lcose to the bodily sources of the pressure of need, from which libido derives.
o The aesthetics of id psychology are grounded in the notion that the work of art is the secret embodiment of its creator’s unconscious desire.
o Analysis of ‘typical symbols’ (vulgar Freudianism)
o Illuminating for the way it works with figures of repetition
o Three examples of classical applied psychoanalytic criticism
 Pre-Freudian psych already made various attempts to study artist’s life to explain his works, or study his works to explain his mind.
 Pathography: a study of the artist not for the sake of the work or even the man, but for the purpose of classifying a particular pathology.
• Freud was ambivalent in his attitude to pathographical studies, even though he designated his Leonardo essay as such
 Marie Bonaparte’s full-length study of Poe (1933) is the classic example of what has become known as psychobiography, although she called it etude pschoanalaytique.
• Freud prefaced it! His friend and pupil
• She opens with life-story, then goes to work on the stories. Relating events and figures in Poe’s life to events and figures of the text.
• Her basic contention is that Poe was a necrophilist, someone for whom corpses have an erotic attraction (necrophilia being a pathological extension of the part played by normal mourning, when the mourner for a time refuses to accept the event)
• Poe, through a fixation on his mother, was condemned to an eternal fidelity. He remains physically faithful to her, his first love, by marrying an ailing cousin and thus sparing himself the need to consummate the marriage.
• She takes them as father-, mother- and sister-figures which have made their way from Poe's unconscious into his tales. The women particularly, consumptive and ethereal figures, she sees as prototypes, and hence she labels the second section of her book 'Tales of the mother'.
• In her analyses of his narratives she wishes to show how the repressed feeling is transferred, via displacement, onto fictional figures and objects. Thus a building can do duty too. This is what is implied by Freud’s notion of symbolism
• The whole world can be absorbed narcissistically, the sexual drives can attach themselves to anything the senses perceive.
• In each tale, according to Bonaparte, Poe is reliving Elizabeth Poe’s last agony and death.
• Third section of her book is “tales of the father’ in which male figures become the return of the repressed, the father who comes back to avenge Poe’s imaginary parricide and incest.
• Example par excellence of the compulsion to repeat
• Bonaparte avails herself of Freud’s theory of dream-interpretation. Poe’s tales are the manifest.
• The problem is not so much in what she does but what she claims: “that this is where the true meaning is to be found”
• Freud reminds us that the essence of dreams is not the latent content but the mix!
• he rigour of her approach, its very reductiveness, makes her analysis of the tales into a compelling fantasy, rather like a strange poem in its own right, as much her own as Edgar Allan Poe's.
 Example 2
• Although the id-psychoanalysis model, with its emphasis on the sexual instincts trying to find representation in image and symbols, has been abandoned, other models, based on Freud’s second topography and focusing on pre-oedipal conflic

[The Awdude · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elizabeth Wright all but achieves, in a thousand less pages than a Norton anthology, a comprehensive mapping of 20th century literary theory. She recognizes the advent of psychoanalysis as the structuring moment that allows, paradoxically, for the possibility of deconstruction. From Freud to Deleuze, she traces the evolution of literary theory as the modern reader's guide to self, society, and culture. The goal here is to illuminate the theoretical goal of contesting common sense. Wright does this beautifully, and her conclusion will leave it up to readers to decide for themselves which side of the ultimate argument they feel the need to pursue: whether to consciously produce and consume simulacra as a means to affect change, or to dig through the sediments of representation in search of a totalizing worldview. Either way, Wright suggests, the worst possible outcome for the well-being of individuals and of society would inevitably be a situation wherein we gave up and resorted to the wholesale abandonment of theory, because we probably need it now more than ever.

[Cynthia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A comprehensive illustration of psychoanalysis, from its very beginning to the developing trend till then. EW not only locks her eyes on the well-known psychoanalysts and their connections with literature and art but also covers all the relevant theorists who have exerted their influence on psychoanalytic criticism.

[Cep Subhan KM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Introduksi bagus dan lengkap untuk kritik sastra psikoanalisis yang cakupannya sangat luas. Kekurangannya bisa jadi hanya satu: belum diupdate dengan penjelasan mencakup psikoanalisisnya Slavoj Zizek.