Psychoanalytic Criticism E-Book

Elizabeth Wright

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 452

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

What is psychoanalytic criticism and how can it be justified as a type of criticism in its own right? In this new and thoroughly revised edition of her classic textbook, Elizabeth Wright provides a cogent answer to this question and a wide-ranging introduction to psychoanalytic criticism from Freud to the present day.

Since each school of psychoanalysis has its own theory of the aesthetic process, the field is complex. Adopting a critical perspective, Elizabeth Wright focuses on major figures and texts in psychoanalysis and in literary and art criticism: classical psychoanalysis; Jungian analytic psychology; objects-relations theory; French psychoanalysis; French anti-psychoanalysis; feminist psychoanalytic criticism. Across these divisions certain problems recur, problems which conceal themselves in a wide range of surprising places, from Shakespearean tragedy to performance theatre from magic realism to detective fiction, from the German Lied to Wagner. These areas are investigated with reference to rival psychoanalytic theories, while connections are traced between the aesthetic process and the psychoanalytic approach.

Already established as the leading introduction to the field, this new edition of Psychoanalytic Criticism will be essential reading for students of literature and literary theory, psychoanalysis, feminism and feminist theory, cultural studies and the humanities generally.

Leseprobe

Psychoanalytic Criticism

A Reappraisal

SECOND EDITION

Elizabeth Wright

Polity Press

Copyright © Elizabeth Wright 1998

The right of Elizabeth Wright to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1998 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd

Reprinted 2006

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Contents

Preface

Introduction

Part I

1Classical Psychoanalysis: Freud

1.1 Theoretical principles and basic concepts

1.2 The dream and the strategies of desire

1.3 Art and the strategies of desire

2Classical Freudian Criticism: Id-Psychology

2.1 Psychoanalysis of the author: Bonaparte on Poe

2.2 Psychoanalysis of the character: Freud and Jones on Hamlet

2.3 Psychoanalysis of culture: Lawrence on American literature

3Post-Freudian Criticism: Ego-Psychology

3.1 Aesthetic ambiguity: Kris

3.2 The dynamics of response: Lesser and Holland

4Archetypal Criticism: Jung and the Collective Unconscious

4.1 Archetypal symbols: theory

4.2 Magical archetypes: practice

Part II

5Object-Relations Theory: Self and Other

5.1 Fantasy and reality: Klein

5.2 Object-relations and aesthetics

5.3 Playing and reality: Winnicott

5.4 Potential space and the field of illusion

Part III

6Structural Psychoanalysis: Psyche as Text

6.1 Psychoanalysis and language: Lacan

6.2 Lacan, literature and the arts

6.3 The turn of the reader/writer

7Post-Structural Psychoanalysis: Text as Psyche

7.1 Derrida and the scene of writing

7.2 The return of Freud: jokes and the uncanny

7.3 Bloom and the return of the author

Part IV

8Psychoanalysis and Ideology I: Focus onSubversion

8.1 Psychoanalysis as a discourse: sexuality and power

8.2 Deleuze and Guattari: schizoanalysis and Kafka

8.3Gradiva rediviva: towards a way out

9Psychoanalysis and Ideology II: Focus on Dialectic

9.1 Psychoanalysis and the theatrical: the dance theatre of Pina Bausch

9.2 Psychoanalysis and music

9.3 Psychoanalysis and popular culture: Slavoj Žižek

Part V

10Feminist Psychoanalytic Criticism

10.1 The critique of the phallus

10.2 The problem of masquerade

10.3 The feminist critique of the cinema

10.4 Desiring woman: Mary Kelly’s Post-PartumDocument and Interim

Conclusion

References

Further Reading

Index

Preface

In preparing a new version of this book, I have had to make some difficult decisions: what to retain, what to revise and what to add. I posed myself certain questions and it might be useful to answer them in terms of guiding the reader of the first edition, who might wonder where to look for the updating. The question I first asked myself was whether I had dealt fairly with the key figures, psychoanalysts and critics, whom I took to represent this field.

I decided that my presentation of Freud was still useful as far as it went, since one can only revise Freud through the readings of others, this being where the changes are to be found. Looking at his distinguished followers and the apostates, I decided I had done less than justice to Jung, Klein and Winnicott, and more than justice to Deleuze and Guattari. I dealt with this both by adding new material and by shifting points of emphasis, in some cases making substantial revisions (Jung, for example). I have also revised the chapters on classical and post-Freudian criticism, where the old material was no longer sufficiently relevant and has been overtaken.

The second question for me was what to do about Lacan, since I had largely focused on Lacan up to the mid-sixties, where the main emphasis was on the determining force of language rather than on that which causes language to fracture. Since these two aspects of Lacan are in dialectical relation rather than one displacing the other, I decided not to change the Lacan of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, but instead to allow the Lacan of the Real to dominate some of the later additions to the book (in particular sections 9.2 and 9.3, but also parts of 10).

As a consequence, the greater part of the new material is in the second half of the book, where I have turned to those psychoanalytic critics who have cast a suspicious eye on artistic productions high and low. Here psychoanalytic criticism moves into the realms of dance, music and popular culture. For example, the remarkable work of Slavoj Žižek is only just beginning to be placed in a psychoanalytic context, psychoanalysis having been slow to incorporate his findings into its domain. Finally, I have now included a part specifically assigned to feminist psychoanalytic criticism in order to give due place to its pioneering endeavours and complex trajectories. The feminist critique of the cinema, for instance, documents the particular struggles of women inside the constraints of representation.

I hope that in making these revisions and additions I have extended the range of my explorations in a way which includes the whole book. For it seems to me now that all psychoanalytic theories, from whatever ideological direction they come, are about the symbolic appropriation of that which is heterogeneous, inexpressible, unrepresentable, radically other. Even more than before, it is important to suspect the functions that art is performing within the culture, including popular culture. In this respect the notion of aesthetic ambiguity, confined to a humanist perspective in some portions of the book, can become a new dialectic constantly wary of rigid colonization from any quarter, thus calling for an aesthetics of suspicion.

Introduction

The purpose of this book is to give a critical overview of what has become an ever-wider field: the relation of psychoanalytic theory to the theories of literature and the arts and the changes in critical practice that developments in both domains have produced. This practice now takes place in an end-of-century milieu in which attitudes to psychoanalysis have sharpened into oppositional stances: on the one hand, over the last ten years there has been a spate of virulent and visible attacks on psychoanalysis, and Freud in particular; on the other hand, paradoxically, studies informed by psychoanalysis have burgeoned and thrived in the academic institutions. The political status of psychoanalysis is thus a controversial issue with broad implications. This new edition endeavours to include the insights of psychoanalysis itself that would contribute to the understanding of these shifts in ideology.

Psychoanalysis addresses itself to the problems of language, starting from Freud’s original insight regarding the determining force within all utterance: he draws attention to the effects of desire in language and in all forms of symbolic interaction. The language of desire is veiled, does not show itself openly: to read its indirections, to account for its effects, is no simple matter. Political life is no exception: it does not all take place at the level of the newspaper headline. What is at issue?

Psychoanalysis explores what happens when primordial impulse is directed into social goals, when bodily needs become subject to the demands of culture. Through language, desire is constituted and ‘subjects’ come into being, yet this language cannot define the body’s experience accurately. What is of peculiar interest to psychoanalysis – some would say peculiar in both senses, ‘special’ and ‘bizarre’ – is that aspect of being which is ignored or prohibited by the laws of language. Words fail to catch it but it is real none the less. The energies of this desire become directed outside conscious awareness, attaching themselves to particular ideas and images which represent unconscious wishes; Wunsch in Freud’s terminology has this special sense, as desire associated specifically with particular images, memory traces which take on the form of indestructible fantasies.

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 structures of children’s play, and, most crucially, in the mutually affective relationship which human beings develop as a result of their past total helplessness and dependence on another person. These feelings, revived in the analytic situation, may be taken as evidence that no experience the body has is ever totally obliterated from the mind. In the unconscious the body does not take the social mould, and yet the conscious mind thinks it has. On the basis of clinical experience psychoanalysis has built up a theory of how this divergence comes about. It hypothesizes that there are certain recurrent stages of socialization each of which has its own problems of invasions from the unconscious. The joint re-creation on the part of patient and analyst of the patient’s life-development graphically reveals that no phase is ever totally outlived, no early satisfaction wholly surrendered. The distress and suffering which bring human beings to the consulting room symptomatically speak of the mismatch between bodily desire and sexual-cum-social role.

None of this can be scientifically proved, despite the efforts of the founder. If science is given a positivist definition, psychoanalysis cannot count as one of the physical sciences. What psychoanalysis has to offer therefore cannot be assessed without raising the problem of what a science is or can do. It is through its implicit questioning of traditional philosophical theories of knowledge that psychoanalysis makes its most distinctive contribution. Attacks on its scientific status continue to take for granted that it must situate itself in relation to other modes of knowledge and to ‘common’ sense, and that therapy alone is the yardstick by which the theory has to be measured. On the contrary, psychoanalysis is a theory of interpretation which calls into question the commonsense facts of consciousness, which it maintains can only be grasped after the event. To this degree psychoanalysis is itself a theory of knowledge in which the notion of a plain objectivity susceptible to a true–false analysis is open to question. Science may continue to be reliable without our necessarily accepting that labelling and measuring can do justice to what they are applied to. Its progress has been marked by revolutionary changes in the understanding of concepts, leading to definitions that are incompatible with those they replace, not merely falsifications of them. At the most fundamental level of science, quantum physics, the problem of interpretation emerges irrepressibly. Science itself is a highly interpretative activity, and it is as a science of interpretation – that is, in part as a science of science – that psychoanalysis is to be regarded. Which is not to say that the theory must be accepted uncritically.

This book tries to show in what way Freudian theory has been and still is part of an ongoing debate, although it is taking a much less decorous form than hitherto. Aside from the foregoing attacks on it as a theory and clinical practice, there is also considerable controversy within the psychoanalytic institution about certain endemic issues, which the book treats in historical sequence. Should psychoanalysis concentrate on uncovering the energies of the drive in its pursuit of its aim (instinct- or id-psychology)? Should it strengthen that part of the self capable of social integration (ego-psychology and its off-shoot, object-relations theory)? Should it focus on the division of the subject in language (structural psychoanalysis)? Should it openly serve a revolutionary purpose by opposing and accusing social institutions (anti-psychiatry)? All these positions are traceable in the changing scene of modern critical theory. Finally, and this was absent from the first edition of this book, what can psychoanalysis reveal about collective fantasies and their historical determinants, as evidenced in literature, the arts and popular culture? In particular, feminists have looked to psychoanalysis – even if not necessarily with an approving eye – for a theory of the subject that would release them from the constriction of patriarchal representations. This crucially involves an intensifying of the suspicion of that view of art which wants to regard it as entirely separate from other social practices, having a privileged language of its own.

If there is a single key issue it is probably the question of the role of sexuality in the constitution of the subject and, crucially, how this sexuality is to be defined. This raises the question why we should still concern ourselves with psychoanalytic theories of sexuality in the context of the arts. Critics from Kenneth Burke and Lionel Trilling onwards have warned against linking art and neurosis while at the same time hallowing the ingenious mechanisms of the unconscious within the creative process. This kind of attitude usually betokens the wish to protect the arts from the intrepid psychoanalytic critic who would ineptly perpetrate psychobiography and all manner of vulgar Freudianisms on the innocent art-object. But this does not take into account that author and reader are both subject to the laws of the unconscious and the fantasies it encodes. 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 new meanings to emerge. A desexualized application of psychoanalytic criticism, an attempt to confine it solely to the mechanisms of language – whether as an example of the plenitude of ambiguity (New Criticism and its off-shoots, the ‘work’ of an author) or as a set of shifting ambivalences (deconstruction, the ‘workings’ of language in a text) – does not engage the full explanatory force of psychoanalytic theory.

Psychoanalysis brings out the unconscious aspect of language through its concentration on the relationship between sexuality and social role. Clinical practice has borne out to what extent sexuality in its wider Freudian sense is the component of intention, how all utterance is concerned with the demands of bodies which have been socialized. The literary text, the art-object, the works of popular culture are forms of persuasion whereby bodies are speaking to bodies, not merely minds to minds. The plays of Samuel Beckett graphically present us with images of bodies or parts of bodies, comically and desperately struggling to channel their desire through speech. Conversely, the theatre of Antonin Artaud assaults us with the images of the body’s violent refusal to become entrapped in language.

This emphasis upon the bodily aspect of art poses a problem for psychoanalytic criticism because the public and the social are thereby neglected. Psychoanalytic aesthetics intermittently battles with this problem on two fronts: first, how the work of artistic merit is to be distinguished from the ‘work’ involved in the construction of dreams or fantasy; second, how the work as text is to be regarded, now it is no longer the property of a single author but produced in a network of social relations. Each of these questions is concerned with the part consciousness (whether true or false) plays in the creative process, and the way ideology situates the reading and writing of texts. The language of desire has both a private and a public aspect and that is why the literary and artistic work is a ‘text’, the proper reading of which is no simple matter.

Although in the past psychoanalytic criticism has been irresistibly drawn to those texts that are classified as literature and art, it has not come up with an adequate theory of aesthetic value, but then neither has any other approach. It contributes rather to an understanding of the creative process at the point of intersection between language and being, and this has implications for aesthetics. Beginning with Freud, this account deals with those psychoanalysts and critics who have been the main contributors to the criticism of literature, the arts and popular culture. Included also are theorists (Derrida, Foucault) who have made an impact on psychoanalytic criticism.

The outline follows a historical course, though like Freud’s sequence of sexual maturation, no stage totally supersedes another. On the contrary, in recent times French psychoanalysts (for example, Kristeva) have tried to merge an id-centred approach focusing on the affect attached to the sexual drives, with a linguistic one taking off from structural psychoanalysis. Tracing out a sequence of development in chronological order does not therefore imply that there is a necessary logical order. Such a method merely enables me to give as clear as possible an exposition of the field while still leaving room for critical appraisal. The aim will be to show how psychoanalytic theory and practice, not always working in concert with each other, have infiltrated the theory and practice of criticism. There are four variables here, which makes for a complex set of interactions. At the same time I shall be suspicious of the ideological assumptions that underlie successive developments in both theory and practice.

My criteria derive from a three-fold scheme: first, I see psychoanalytic criticism as investigating the text for the workings of a rhetoric seen as analogous to the mechanisms of the psyche; second, I argue that any such criticism must be grounded in a theory which takes into account the relations between author and text, and between reader and text; and third, I argue that these relations should be seen as part of a more general problem to do with the constitution of the subject in the social as history proceeds.

PART I

1

Classical Psychoanalysis: Freud

1.1 Theoretical principles and basic concepts

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. The same mechanisms which Freud shows as determining in normal and abnormal behaviour come significantly into play when we are engaged in aesthetic activities of any kind. The theories which follow offer various explanations of how the unconscious functions in the production and consumption of the arts. This section will introduce the main concepts of psychoanalytic theory: the models of the psyche, the concept of repression, the role of the sexual instincts – their nature and place in Freud’s theory of the unconscious, and the phenomena of transference.

Sigmund Freud (1886–1939) gives a genetic explanation of the evolutionary development of the human mind as a ‘psychical apparatus’. He regarded 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. He looks at the mind from three points of view: the ‘dynamic’, the ‘economic’ and the ‘topographical’ (see Freud, XX, pp. 265–6 for a brief summary). These are not mutually exclusive interpretations but emphasize different aspects of the whole. All three are evidence of Freud’s attempt to derive the mind from the body.

The ‘dynamic’ point of view stresses the interplay of forces within the mind, arising from the tensions that develop when instinctual drives meet the necessities of external reality. (The German word for these drives is Triebe, translated as ‘instincts’ in the Standard Edition, but because, as will be seen, they are to be distinguished from instinct in animals, it is now more usual to translate Triebe as ‘drives’, particularly when the notion of pressure is at stake. Owing to this rivalry of translations I have had to make use of both terms.) The mind comes into being out of the body. What is necessarily given at the start is the needs of the body itself: these are inseparably connected to feelings of pleasure and pain.

From the ‘economic’ point of view pleasure results from a decrease in the degree to which the body is disturbed by any stimulus. Unpleasure results from an increase in disturbance. In the interaction of the body with the external environment a part of the mind Freud calls the ‘ego’ evolves to mediate the actions of the body so as to achieve the optimal satisfaction of its needs. In particular the ego is concerned with self-preservation. This of its nature implies that there has to be control of these basic instincts if there is to be an adjustment to reality. Under the economic model this is viewed as a struggle between the ‘reality principle’ and the ‘pleasure principle’, in which the body has to learn to postpone pleasure and accept a degree of unpleasure in order to comply with social demands.

The third point of view is the ‘topographical’ of which there are two versions. The psychical apparatus is here conceived of in a spatial metaphor as divided into separate sub-systems, which together mediate the conflict of energies. In the first of the two versions Freud sees the mind as having a three-fold division, conscious, preconscious and unconscious. Consciousness he equates with the perception system, the sensing and ordering of the external world; the preconscious covers those elements of experience which can be called into consciousness at will; the unconscious is made up of all that has been kept out of the preconscious–conscious system. The unconscious is dynamic, consisting of instinctual representatives, ideas and images originally fixated in a moment of repression. But these do not remain in a fixed state; they undergo a dynamic interplay in which associations between them facilitate the shift of feeling from one image or idea to another. In Freud’s terminology they are regulated by the ‘primary process’, a type of mental functioning where energy flows freely by means of certain mechanisms. These mechanisms, of crucial interest for psychoanalytic criticism, will be explained later in this chapter in the sections on dreams and art, where their function as strategies of desire will be discussed. The second version of the topographical scheme was introduced by Freud in 1923, when he came to view the mind as having three distinct agencies: the ‘id’, a term applied retrospectively to the instinctual drives that spring from the constitutional needs of the body; the ego as having developed out of the id to be an agency which regulates and opposes the drives; and the ‘superego’, as representative of parental and social influences upon the drives, a transformation of them rather than an external agency. This model of the psyche is often called the ‘structural’ model and is the one drawn on by ego-psychologists.

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’ (XIV, p. 147).

Unfortunately this theory, what there is of it, is far from simple. If the notion of there being unconscious mental processes is to be seen as the key concept of psychoanalysis, it has of necessity to be linked with the theory of repression, ‘the corner stone on which the whole structure of psycho-analysis rests’ (XIV, p. 16). Freud makes a distinction between two senses of the term. ‘Primal repression’ initiates the formation of the unconscious and is ineradicable and permanent. Although the forces of instincts are experienced before socialization, such experience is neither conscious nor unconscious. Freud cannot account for how such forces find representation in the mind. He has to hypothesize that these instincts have become bound to thoughts and images in the course of early (pleasure/pain) experience. Primal repression consists of denying a ‘psychical representative’ (that is an idea attached to an instinct) entry to the conscious: a fixation is thereby established, splitting conscious from unconscious. Without these initial imprintings the later entrance into language that establishes personhood could not be achieved. For Freud primal repression marks a prelinguistic entry into a symbolic world. Lacan, on the other hand, reserves the term for the second stage of symbolization, the entry into language (for further discussion of this problem see Weber 1982 on Freud, pp. 39–48; see also Laplanche and Leclaire 1972, on Freud versus Lacan, pp. 155–63).

The term ‘repression’ in its second and more generally known sense is used by Freud to designate repression proper or ‘after-pressure’ (XIV, p. 148): it serves to keep guilt-laden wishes out of conscious experience. The symptoms, dreams and parapraxes (‘Freudian slips’) that turn up in the course of this process represent the ‘return of the repressed’, a mechanism that marks both the emergence of the forbidden wish and the resistance to it. Within the unconscious, the flow of energy becomes bound up with certain memory-traces, developing the character of unconscious wishes that strive continually to break through against the counterforce exerted by the ego. Where the primary process allows the psychical energy to flow freely, the ‘secondary process’ transforms it into ‘bound energy’, in that its movement is checked and controlled by the rational operations of the ego. The censorship of the ego can be subverted, however, precisely because of the free shifting of energy in the primary process. The drives or wishes can get through in disguise, as the so-called ‘compromise formations’ of the return of the repressed. It is the nature of these disguises that has occupied classical psychoanalytic criticism. Where the earlier ‘instinct-psychology’ emphasizes that which gets through the disguise, that is the content of the wish, the later ‘ego-psychology’ concentrates on that which ‘controls’ the wish, the work’s formal devices.

Freud’s theory of the instinctual drives was dualistic throughout his work; he always opposes one drive with another. It is with the earlier theory that we are concerned for the moment; the opposition of the sexual instincts to the instincts of self-preservation. The sexual instinct plays a major role in psychical conflict precisely because it is always opposed by another instinct. This is invariably forgotten when Freud is accused of ‘pan-sexualism’, tracing all action to the sexual instinct; his radical notion of sexuality is confused with the popular understanding of the term. 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. Sexuality 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’ (XXIII, p. 152). The prime example is the infant, who gets the pleasurable stimulation of the region or ‘zone’ around the mouth, hence called an ‘erotogenic’ (eros ‘love’; -gen- ‘create’) zone. The infant later, in sucking its thumb, is fantasizing the repetition of that sensual pleasure in the absence of nutritional need:

The baby’s obstinate persistence in sucking gives evidence at an early stage of a need for satisfaction which, though it originates from and is instigated by the taking of nourishment, nevertheless strives to obtain pleasure independently of nourishment and for that reason may and should be termed sexual (p. 154).

The concept of what is sexual is thus greatly extended and complicated. 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. There is then a disjunction between mere physical need and mental satisfaction. In Freud’s view human sexuality is to be understood as what in 1910 he came to call ‘psycho-sexuality’ (XI, p. 222).

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 channelled 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 the ‘component instincts’, functioning independently and varying in their aim, their object and their source (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in VII, pp. 191 and 167ff.). 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.

For Freud this matching is accomplished via the combined workings of the Oedipus complex and the castration complex. It is impossible in this short introduction to give an account of how Freud’s theory of gender evolved from the Three Essays (1905) through to his lecture ‘Femininity’ (1933) (XXII, pp. 112–35). The development of his theory has been of particular import to women (see Chasseguet-Smirgel 1981; Mitchell and Rose 1982), since it started out with the notion that until puberty the little girl sees herself as a little man. The account that follows can be no more than a summary of Freud’s later position, given on the most general lines.

Freud sees the child’s relationship with its parents as critical for the achievement of its proper sexual identity. The difficulties begin with the child’s dependence on the nurturing mother. Not only are there problems specific to the very formation of a self-concept in the initial separation from the mother’s body, but the love of the mother remains dominant in the early formative years. Inevitably, according to Freud, a perception of the father as rival in this love becomes insistent for the boy-child to the point where he is drawn into fantasies of the killing of this rival and of possessing the mother. This is the Oedipus complex. The way out of it is provided by the fears of the castration complex. The father is experienced as the source of all authority, all direction of desire, and thus as capable of castrating the boy-child, who unconsciously believes this to be the reason for the absence of the penis in the girl. The boy thus abandons his love for the mother and moves towards identification with the father, with the understanding that he too can in time occupy such a position of power.

The trajectory for the girl-child is not so straightforward. In her case the complexes work in reverse, and the castration complex ushers in the Oedipus complex. She interprets the absence of a penis as a failure in provision on the part of the mother. Under the influence of this disappointment she turns away in hostility from her mother, but in the unconscious the wish for a penis is not abandoned: it is replaced by the wish to bear the father a child. Hence the girl becomes the rival of the mother for the 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.

The Oedipus complex is for Freud the nucleus 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. The struggle to overcome the complex is never quite resolved. It is the cause of neurotic illness and raison d’être 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. In the non-clinical sense these phenomena are present to some degree in all our relationships: transference is 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’ defined in this mundane sense manifests itself in the ‘knots’ which result from the unending chain of mutual misreadings:

Since Jack is afraid

that Jill will think that

Jack is afraid

Jack pretends that Jack is not afraid of Jill

so that Jill will be more afraid of Jack.

(Laing 1974)

This process is unconscious: at its worst it leads to a futile reaction and counterreaction, but at its best it may lead to the shifting of old agreements and the making of new ones that better satisfy desire.

The managing of these phenomena in the clinical situation is directed towards helping this process where it has got stuck. The ‘free association’ of the patient, her saying whatever comes to mind (see the beginnings of this technique in Freud, II, p. 63), gradually reveals that which determines her. Freud distinguishes between two kinds of transference (for a detailed account see Laplanche and Pontalis 1973, on whom this discussion in part relies; see also Wollheim 1971, pp. 152–4). In the first instance transference was for Freud the displacement of feelings from one idea to another (see the section on dreams below). In the analytic situation intense feeling, or ‘affect’, is transferred to the analyst (the dreams the patient brings may have been dreamt ‘for’ him), and becomes organized around a group of hostile and loving wishes. The patient’s wishes and demands are devices of resistance, the attempt to win the analyst by undermining his authority, so that the repressed wish may at last be granted. The interpretation of the resistance – the words and actions which block off access to the unconscious – is thus the key technique of psychoanalysis. The mechanism of transferring past experience onto the figure of the analyst is set in motion just when the repressed wish is in danger of emerging. Psychoanalytic reader-theory, as will be seen, looks for such points of resistance in both readers and texts, as manifestations of the compulsion to repeat.

The second kind of transference develops in the course of the treatment. Freud calls it the ‘transference neurosis’. The nearer the analyst gets to the repressed complex which induced the illness the more the patient’s behaviour becomes pure repetition and divorced from present reality. He is in the grip of the ‘repetition compulsion’, the uncontrolled return of the repressed. Freud’s fascination with art is partly due to his admiration of the artist for the ability to control the return of the repressed, as his discussions of art show (see particularly his essay on ‘The uncanny’ in Part III).

Freud’s view of countertransference was cautious: he saw it as the analyst’s uncontrolled response to the patient’s transference, an inappropriate reaction to be taken care of in the training-analysis. Laplanche and Pontalis define it as ‘the whole of the analyst’s unconscious reactions to the individual analysand – especially to the analyst’s own transference’ (1973, p. 92). For some analysts the psychoanalytic encounter becomes the mutual playing out of the subjectivities of analyst and analysand: there is transference and countertransference on both sides (see André Green in Part II, who works out a parallel relationship for writer and reader). For others, such as Jacques Lacan, transference and counter-transference can only be negotiated via the spoken word: resistance that is played out between two bodies will only close up the unconscious. Speech, on the other hand, will open it up, for here resistance is directed against the father’s law, the order of language, which implicates both analyst and analysand in something beyond a dual relation (Lacan 1977b, pp. 123–34). It is the narration of the analysand, rather than his behaviour, which will therefore enact the reality of the unconscious, which for Lacan is in the very structure of language (for a literary demonstration of narration as transference, see Shoshana Felman in Part III).

The most general implication of all this for a theory of reading is as follows: if the patient’s ‘text’, his presentation of experience, can cause a disturbance in the analyst which allows for a new interpretation, this turns upside down the notion that the reader is the analyst and the text the patient, which has so infuriated opponents of psychoanalytic criticism. 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.

The value of Freud’s opening up of the ‘royal road’ to the unconscious is that it led to the realization of the universality of this endless conflict and adjustment that bodies must perforce engage in if they are to effect any kind of social compromise, if they are to speak at all.

1.2 The dream and the strategies of desire

Dreams have a privileged place in Freud’s metapsychology: ‘the interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of unconscious activities of the mind’ (V, p. 608). As a result of investigating them, in himself and his patients, he found himself more and more engaged with conflict and the overlapping of interpretations. 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.

Whichever of the three models of the psyche is drawn upon, what takes place at the frontiers of the divisions is of prime importance. For the ‘dynamic’ model one can ask how the primary process affects the secondary process; for the ‘economic’, how the reality and pleasure principles are evidenced in psychic conflict; for the two ‘topographical’ models, how the unconscious interacts with the preconscious and conscious, or how id and superego each invade the realm of the ego. Undecidability at the boundaries is likely whenever the restraining power is at its weakest, not only under times of unusual stress, but at the most normal ones, that of sleep.

In the condition of sleep the force of repression, according to Freud, is relaxed, because 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. This is why Freud calls dreams ‘the GUARDIANS of sleep and not its disturbers’ (IV, p. 233). This view has since been challenged as an empirical hypothesis by the fact that dreams have been shown to be regularly occurring events during a distinct state of sleep, with the implication that dreaming is something given which may be capitalized upon by unconscious impulses, not something which is causally dependent on being a dual creation of impulse and repressing force (for a thorough review see Jones 1978). However, the duality, and moreover the ambiguity, of dreams remains. It is Freud’s vigorous exploration of the workings of these ambiguities that is of special relevance for the language of the arts, and for the activities of reading, writing and criticism. All the arts deal in illusion and Freud’s exploration of the ruses and stratagems of the psyche is of immediate relevance to aesthetic experience, at the level of both the medium (the sounds and colours of the dream) and its interpretation.

A summary of Freud’s account of the genesis and nature of dreams must precede a description of these workings, because they cannot be adequately assessed without acknowledging their causes in desire. According to Freud, the energizing force of dreams springs from an unconscious impulse seeking fulfilment, a desire not fulfilled in waking life. Unable to find expression in action, the impulse gathers to itself material both from recent experience, such as the effects of present bodily need plus the recollections of the previous day (the ‘day’s 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 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. Hence Freud’s dictum: ‘A dream is a (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish’ (IV, p. 160). The disguise may be total as regards the judgement of the dreamer, or it may be insufficient. In either case, the repressed material has both reacted to and evaded censorship by this encoding into a not immediately recognizable form. Hence Freud calls the dream a ‘compromise’ between the demands of impulse and the intensity of the repressing force. The more intense the force of repression, the more obscure the encodings: the distortions of the material present in the dream are thus traceable to the power of the censorship.

The apparent irrationality of the dream is not only traceable to the resistance to censorship of the unconscious material. That material is already in a form to which the word ‘rational’ cannot be applied. It is subject to the flow of the primary process, that activity of unconscious desire, whereby an impulse seeks the repetition of achieved satisfaction by finding again the perception that accompanied it: more is included in the perception than the conscious mind can recognize. Hence this perceptual sorting is not some pre-given recognition but a perceptual ‘identifying’ of sensory patterns, complexes of colour, shape and sound across time, that do not necessarily correspond to what the repressing force, involved in the secondary process, takes as identical. Linkages made in the (unconscious) primary process are already absurd from the point of view of the conscious mind, and these have a profound effect upon the dream. It is therefore difficult to understand precisely the distinction, if it is indeed viable, between the irrational connections pre-existing in the primary process and the ‘distortions’ insisted on by the censorship. The mechanisms involved seem to serve at one and the same time a subversive purpose (primary process functioning) and a defensive purpose (the censorship of the dream-work). As Freud said, ‘in any case the censorship profits from it’ (XV, p. 173; quoted by Laplanche and Pontalis 1973, p. 83). When a patient reports a dream later, the rationality of daytime experiences gives the censoring force another opportunity, in that it can impose on the apparent absurdity of the dream-sequence a narrative sense and coherence, what Freud calls ‘secondary revision’. This further distortion-towards-coherence represents another clue from the mode of the actual censoring as to what is being repressed. It would be a mistake, however, to view the question as being an exclusive distinction between the subversions of the primary process (its determination to have its wishes fulfilled) and the distortions of the secondary process (its determination to prevent those wishes from being realized). It is much more a matter of the two forces in some way interacting simultaneously, though Freud himself did not reach this theoretical position, in that he kept primary process and secondary process separate. It is precisely this lacuna in Freud which led to the polarization between id-psychology and ego-psychology and the consequent opposing literary-critical positions.

Nevertheless, Freud’s discussion of the individual mechanisms of the dream-work show him to be operating with a concept of ambiguity. It is significant, and has been remarked upon before (see for instance, Lacan 1988b, p. 268, and Jones 1978, pp. 11–13, who make this point for and against Freud respectively), that in The Interpretation of Dreams Freud is nowhere engaged in tracking down the repressed infantile wish. What Freud is interested in is not the same old primal wish, but the forms taken by the language of desire, that which he calls the ‘dream-work’.

The dream-work transforms the ‘latent’ content of the dream, the ‘forbidden’ dream-thoughts, into the ‘manifest’ dream-stories – what the dreamer remembers. Latent content goes piece by piece into the dream-stories via a string of associations. It is the reverse process from that traversed by the analyst, who requires the patient to retrace the chain of associations in order to decode the dream. The operations of the dream-work, its subversions and distortions, take four forms: condensation (Verdichtung), displacement (Verschiebung), considerations of represent-ability (Rücksicht auf Darstellbarkeit), and secondary revision (sekundäre Bearbeitung). These mechanisms are of crucial interest to literary critics of all persuasions, though, as has been indicated already and as will become increasingly apparent throughout this book, the ideological perspective brought to bear upon these workings will vary considerably; a detailed description is therefore called for.

According to Freud, ‘the first achievement of the dream-work is condensation. By that we understand the fact that the manifest dream has a smaller content than the latent one, and is thus an abbreviated translation of it’ (XV, p. 18). But this is far from being a simple process of the mere omission of elements. Composite figures and structures are formed so that as little as possible is left out. Hence the concept of ‘overdetermination’, whereby several latent wishes converge on one manifest item, or the reverse, where one wish is represented a number of times in the same dream-sequence. The result in each case is a superimposition of elements. This ambiguity is most clearly demonstrable in the way condensation treats words or names. A thing with one name may be associated in a dream with an event with a similar name, even though neither word occurred in the dream. Freud relates a case, where someone dreamt that ‘his uncle gave him a kiss in an automobile. He went on at once to give me the interpretation, which I myself would never have guessed: namely that it meant ‘auto-erotism’ (V, pp. 408–9). The co-presence of the car and the kiss matches the linking of the two parts of the term ‘auto-erotism’ (inducing sexual pleasure in one’s own body). Condensation is also one of the essential features of the joke since, as the above example shows, it produces an ambiguous word in which two thoughts come together. In his book on jokes Freud quotes a saying that old people tend to fall into their ‘anecdot-age’ (VIII, pp. 21–2). Here condensation creates a neologism: the phonetic sequence /dout/ is the element where two meanings coincide – anecdote and dotage. Instead of saying that old people bore us with their endless stories in their old age, the two ideas are condensed into one sound-unit.

Rational associations with words can be disrupted even more markedly. It is in the nature of the primary process that the distinction between word-as-symbol and word-as-actual-sound can sometimes be wholly ignored. Words, which as sounds have an auditory form, are things in their own right, and associations can be made between the word-as-thing and the thing for which it stands. This is what happens in the case of the schizophrenic, where something in his experience has attracted a chain of associations onto a noise, and the actual word/thing distinction disappears altogether; the world gets sorted out according to private symbols instead of public ones. It is because absurdities of this kind occur in the dreams of normal persons that Freud was able to demonstrate that the unconscious has its own mode of operation.

The second activity of the dream-work is displacement, which, according to Freud, ‘might equally be described [in Nietzsche’s phrase] as “a transvaluation of psychical values”’ (V, p. 655). This transvaluation is achieved by the elements in the manifest dream replacing elements in the latent dream-thoughts via a chain of associations for the purpose of disguise; this results in the intensity of an idea becoming detached from it and passing to other ideas, which in themselves are of little value. There is also the consequence that the manifest dream has a different centre from the dream-thoughts and does not reflect their relative importance: indeed they need not appear in the dream at all. Freud regards displacement as ‘the most powerful instrument of the dream-censorship’ (XV, p. 233). Displacement too has an affinity with the mechanisms of the joke in that a switch of context affords a play on words whereby the dream-work achieves its forced and often far-fetched linkages. One such example is cited by Freud and concerns a patient caught up in a series of dreams, in which her father, whom she recently lost, reappears. In this particular dream the father said: ‘It’s a quarter past eleven, it’s half past eleven, it’s quarter to twelve.’ To this she made associations that her father set great store on punctuality, but this did not explain the source of the dream. Another chain of associations, apparently unconnected with the dream, led to a remark which occurred in a conversation she had heard the previous day: ‘The Urmensch [primal man] survives in all of us.’ This had provided her with the pretext to bring her dead father back to life, for she had turned him into an Uhrmensch [clockman] by making him proclaim the regular passing of the quarter hours (XV, pp. 234–5). The displacement here consists of a shift of association between the authoritarian father who insisted on punctuality and the clock to which he repeatedly made reference. What was associated with the father is shifted onto the telling of the quarters, in itself a trivial event. This example also illustrates the occurrence of condensation and displacement together, for not only is there a displacement from father to the recurrence of the quarters, but there is a pun between Ur- (primal) and Uhr- (clock). A number of displacements onto one element of itself produces condensation and facilitates overdetermination. Displacement and condensation are thus not exclusive and there is no limit to the modes of their occurrence.

Freud’s examples in his explanations of condensation and displacement make no distinction between the associative links that depend on likeness (similarity) and those that depend on proximity (contiguity). When a professor’s name, ‘Gärtner’ (gardener) reminds Freud of a botanical monograph, word-likeness is involved; when a laboratory reminds him of a colleague who works there, the association is of A being found with B, one of contiguity. Both these associations come into his discussion of condensation. Under displacement similar linkages operate: climbing stairs is metaphorically linked with ‘going up in the world’ socially; a girl born in May and married in May associates herself with may-beetles, a plague which once appeared in that month. It is only after Freud that similarity and contiguity have been singled out as the two fundamental poles of language (Jakobson and Halle 1956, pp. 76–82) and subsequently equated to the rhetorical figures of metaphor and metonymy, by confining condensation to metaphoric shifts of association (based on similarity) and displacement to metonymic ones (based on contiguity). All these tropes are based on one thing being a reminder of another, on one’s memories. No limits can be laid down beforehand to dictate to the memory whether it should provide similarities or contiguities or both: that two entities are found together is no bar to their being in some way significantly alike and that two are alike is no bar to their being significant in their proximity. Freud realized the inextricability in practice of similarity and contiguity; Jakobson’s theoretical distinction helps to clarify what happens when memories produce tropes. It implies no contradiction of Freud, being merely an analysis of the varieties of troping.

Both condensation and displacement can produce visual and auditory images for abstract thoughts, thus contributing to the actual process of representation in dreams. Considerations of representability, the way the dream-thoughts achieve representation in the dream via images, is the third activity of the dream-work. Freud stressed the affinity of this process to what already obtains in language. Just as words are created by appeal to sensory items, so latent material becomes imaged by them. The German for ‘adultery’ is Ehebruch, literally ‘breach of marriage’: ‘you will forgive the dream-work for replacing an element so hard to put into pictures ... by another breach – a broken leg [Beinbruch] (XV, p. 176). The representation is a strange language, however, in that it is divested of logical and syntactical relations. It is nearer to a rebus, a series of ideograms or pictographs, in which the syntactical connections are left to be made by the dreamer (IV, pp. 227–8). The dream has its own order of relations, which can be deduced from the visual elements that actually appear. Contradictions can coexist in an image, for one image can stand for the opposite poles of conflict. Freud cites the phenomenon found by philologists that there are a number of words which are used equally for opposite meanings (Latin sacer meaning both ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’). One thing that is the cause of another might appear in a close temporal sequence but without the causal relation being demonstrated. A chronological succession of events might be turned into an image containing them all in spatial proximity. All these transformations of rational linkages are accompanied by regression to infantile modes of thought and feeling.