Psychoanalysis (4): The Return of the Repressed

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Psychoanalysis (4) The Return of the Repressed

1. Structure of the Mind, Child Development Love
2. Dream and Sexual Symbols
3. Lacan Desire Split Identity
4. Sublimation Psychological Disorders Jean Rhys

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Outline

• Q A on Freud and Lacan
• Art and psychoanalysis
• Kinds of Psychological Reactions and Disorder
• Example Psycho
• Possible Approaches A Summary
• Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea Another Example of
  Displaced Identity

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Q A on Freud and Lacan

• Why is dream the royal road to our unconscious?
  
• Why is the unconscious structured like language?
  Whats the significance of this view?
• What is Symbolic Order for Lacan? Is it all
  powerful?
• How do we analyze a lit. text from a
  psychoanalytic point of view?

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1. Repression and Civilization

• Repression of our libido (sexual energies) is
  inevitable otherwise, we can be destructive and
  society, chaotic.
• Repression itself is a defense mechanism.
• Repression Displacement (alternative paths to
  satisfy instinctual desires) ?
• Civilization The result of our
  transformation/sublimation of unconscious
  desires.
• Symptoms the return of the repressed ? Behaviors
  or bodily abnormalities. Psychological
  reactions and disorders

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Psychoanalysis and Literature

• For Freud, dream is like art because both
• Fulfill wishes
• Use strategies to overcome the resistance of
  consciousness.
• Interpretation of Dream//Art
• detect conflicts of meanings (where wish is
  confronted by resistance the textual
  unconscious)
• Ask the patient to make free association
  (decoding figurative language and symbol through
  contextual reading)
• Is literature, then, to be treated as merely
  patients to be analyzed?

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Sublimation Leonardo da Vinci

• An illegitimate son of a notary, Ser Piero, and a
  peasant girl, Caterina.  Leonardo lived with
  Caterina . 
• Lived with Caterina for approximately five years
  before entering the house of his father, who had
  in the meantime married Donna Albiera.  (p. 15)

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Sublimation Examples (1)

• E.g. Mona Lisa two images of Ls first mother
  one tender and reserved, and the other sensual
  and seductive.

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Sublimation Examples (2)

• Saint John the Baptist, Musee du Louvre, Paris

• St. John's androgenous image with a mysterious
  smile of having found the secret of love
• Freud--"It is possible," Freud concluded this
  section, "that  . . . Leonardo has denied the
  unhappiness of his erotic life and has triumphed
  over it in his art., by representing the wishes
  of the boy, infatuated with his mother, as
  fulfilled in this blissful union of the male and
  female natures."  (23)

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Psychological reactions disorders

• Reactions
• Fixation ? Regression
• Compulsion to Repeat
• Sexual deviance Perversion
• Disorders
• Neurosis
• Psychosis

The line between these two is quite thin!!! e.g.
depression
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Fixation and regression

• Fixation obsession with a person, an erotogenous
  zone or an inanimate object. (e.g. oral fixation
  compulsive smoker, alcoholism, etc.)
• Regression The psychic reversion to childhood
  desires. When normally functioning desire meets
  with powerful external obstacles, which prevent
  satisfaction of those desires, the subject
  sometimes regresses to an earlier phase (e.g. the
  mouth, the anus) in normal psychosexual
  development. (source) (e.g. infantilization of
  women in sexually reppresive society)

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Compulsion to Repeat

• A lot of symptoms are repetitive in nature
• Freud sees it as the most general character of
  our instinct
• fulfilling both our life instinct and death
  instinct Whats repeated is not just desire or
  the desirable sometimes it is fear or unpleasant
  experience (of trauma).
• e.g. (1) sense of security gained in routine and
  repeated stories? sense of control
• e.g. (2) compulsive and negative recurrent
  nightmares pattern of self-destructive behavior.
  (e.g. vicious circle)

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Perversion 5 forms

• Freud The pursuit of "abnormal" sexual objects
  (or non-sexual organs) without repression.
• five forms of perversion crossing five types of
  barriers
• disregarding the barrier of species (the gulf
  between men and animals),
• secondly, by overstepping the barrier against
  disgust ? e.g. voyeur and exhibitionist
• against incest (the prohibition against seeking
  sexual satisfaction from near blood-relations),

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Perversion 5 forms

• 4. That against members of one's own sex
• 5. the transferring of the part played by the
  genitals to other organs and areas of the body"
  (Introductory Lectures 15.208)
• (Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the
  Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.
  Trans. James Strachey. 24 vols. London Hogarth,
  1953-74. )

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Perversion examples

• Desire satisfied through being looked at or
  looking ? 2. Exhibitionist seeks a perfect
  confirmation of his desire in the desire of the
  other the voyeur finds all of his desire in his
  looking.
• a young child will not recognize any of these
  five points as abnormaland only does so through
  the process of education. For this reason, he
  calls children "polymorphously perverse"
  (Introductory Lectures15.209). (Freud, Sigmund.
  The Standard Edition of the Complete
  Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans.
  James Strachey. 24 vols. London Hogarth,
  1953-74. )

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Neurosis

• Definition the symbolic expression of a
  psychical conflict whose origin lies in the
  subjects childhood memory (Laplanche 266) ?
  quite common among us!
• symptoms an exaggeration of normal patterns of
  behavior.
• e.g. constantly checking the time or that doors
  are locked. Or other obsession rituals
• e.g. anxiety disorder ? phobia hysteria (now
  called conversion disorder)
• e.g. over-eating (bulimia) stopping eating
  (anorexia)
• For reference http//www.sla.purdue.edu/academic/
  engl/theory/psychoanalysis/freud4.html

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Psychosis

• Definition The inability of a person to
  distinguish between what is real and what is
  imaginary. (Primary distance of the libidinal
  relation to reality.)
• Symptoms hallucination, self-delusions
• e.g. schizophrenia and manic depression (???).
• Freud in neurosis the ego suppresses part of
  the id out of allegiance to reality, whereas in
  psychosis it lets itself be carried away by the
  id and detached from a part of reality (5.202).

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Fetishism

• falls between neurosis and psychosis.
• An erotic attachment to an inanimate object or an
  ordinarily asexual part of the human body.
• "The fetishist is the adult who, because of his
  attachment to the fetish, is 'saved from
  psychosis (which is the more typical consequence
  of disavowal in adults). . . . (Elizabeth Grosz
  Jacque Lacan A Feminist Introduction p. 118)
• Freud the fetish is able to become the vehicle
  both of denying and of asseverating (???? ) the
  fact of castration (5.203).

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Example Psycho (???)

• Characters
• Marion, in love with Sam. To solve the problem of
  not having money for a wedding, she steals some
  money from her boss and escapes only to get to
  the Bates hotel.
• Norman Bates--a schizophrenic young man who is so
  obsessed with his Mother that he impersonates her
  to kill Marion, a possible seduction for him.

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Example Psycho (???) A Glimpse at the
Unconscious

• Elements to analyze (Ref)
• Transgression easily made from moral control to
  law-breaking and forbidden self-satisfaction.
• Incapability of law and psychiatry to control or
  fully understand human psyche, while many
  characters in the film are suspect. Psychiatrist
  projection of his own desire onto the mother, so
  the mother is jealous and murderous.

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Example Psycho (???) A Glimpse at the
Unconscious

• 3. Norman Fixation on the mother ? internalized
  as both object of love and super ego. ?
  Unresolved Oedipus complex? fourfold split
  personalities.
• 4. The use of symbols The voyeuristic camera eye
  the image of eye and the other holes (bathtub
  drainage and swamp)
• e.g. Beginning and ending

Norman the desiring boy (predator) Mother the old and innocent old woman
Norman the innocent boy Mother the jealous and controlling hag
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Possible Approaches A Summary

• I. Psychobiography (e.g. D.H. Lawrence, 
  Leonardo, E. Bishop and Jean Rhys)
• II. theme
• 1.  child psychology and parent-children
  relationship  "Araby" "Eyeline" "A Rose for
  Emily", Sons and Lovers Peter Pan, The Piano,
  Wide Sargasso Sea American Beauty
• 2.  dream-- in Wide Sargasso Sea Spellbound
  Rouseau's Dream
• 3.  neurosis and psychosis-- Psycho stories by
  Poe Blue Velvet
• 4.  journey to the unconscious Diving into the
  Wrecks (A. Rich) Heart of Darkness lt??gt???
• 5. Split Identity Wide Sargasso Sea
• 6. Different forms of love as explained by Freud
  or Lacan American Beauty
• 7. Exchange of Power (Phallic) Positions

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Possible Approaches A Summary

• III. Sexual Symbols (symbols of castration and
  phallus) and Symbols re. to Psyche
• --"Sick Rose (worm, howling night, crimson bed)
  by William Blake
• -- American Beauty The Piano
• -- Psycho The Blind Man
• -- paintings by Dali and Magritte

The Rape 1934
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Reference

• Laurie Schneider Adams. Art and Psychoanalysis
• Psychoanalytic Criticism A Reappraisal.
  Elizabeth Wright. Polity,1998.
• Types of Psychological Disorder
  http//www.health.nsysu.edu.tw/drpan/bookmark/out_
  dx.htm
• John E. Reilly, "The Lesser Death-Watch and 'The
  Tell-Tale Heart'," revised from The American
  Transcendental Quarterly, II (2nd Quarter), 1969,
  pp. 3-9. http//www.eapoe.org/papers/misc1990/jer1
  9691.htmn01