Chapter 33

1. Chapter 33 The Freudian Revolution

3. Psychoanalysis = the talking cure

4. The Tripartite Psyche • The id—the repository of the libido. Demanding 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)

6. Erogenous 性感 Zone • The oral stage—associated 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 faeces. • The phallic stage---only the male organ is recognized. (Eagleton 153)

7. 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)

8. 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)

9. Regression • Example 1: a normally functioning woman is dumped by her boyfriend and starts over-eating (thus regressing to the oral phase).

10. Regression • Example 2: the neurotic begins over-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)

11. 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.

12. 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)

13. 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)

14. 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).

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

17. 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.

18. Neurosis • The patient begins to develop symptoms which. . . 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)

19. 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.

20. Art & Literature • Literature and the other arts, like dreams 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)

21. Art & Literature

22. Art & Literature • What distinguishes artists from the patently neurotic personality is sublimation昇華.

23. Art & Literature • 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 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.

24. 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)

25. 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

26. Impact of New Psychology

27. Literature • Proust • Kafka • Joyce

28. Visual Arts • Expressionism • Metaphysical art and fantasy • Dadaism • Surrealism

29. Expressionism • Munch • Kirchner

30. Munch, The Scream, 1893

31. Munch, Madonna, 1895

32. Munch, Puberty, 1895

33. Munch <Self Portrait in Hell> 1893

34. Kirchner, Berlin Street Scene, 1913

37. Metaphysical Art and Fantasy • De Chirico • Chagall

38. De Chirico, Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, 1914

39. De Chirico, The Enigma of the Hour, 1912

40. 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 . . . .”

41. Chagall, Green Violinist, 1923-24

42. Chagall, I and the Village, 1911

43. 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

44. “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

45. Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1913/1964

46. Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q, (She’s hot in the tail.) 1918

47. Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

48. Surrealism • “psychic automatism, in its pure state” André Breton

49. Surrealism: Two Trends • Abstract Surrealism (Automatism) • Picasso, Miro, and Klee • Visionary Surrealism • Magritte, Dali

50. 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