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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
This new book is a lively and original study of psychoanalysis and its relations to the arts.
Das E-Book Speaking Desires can be Dangerous wird angeboten von Polity und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
practice; psychoanalytic; although; criticism; aesthetic; perfunctory; unconscious; poetics; detail; work; innovative book; equally; critical potential; sides; part; fundamental; wright; emerging; psychoanalysis; clinical; uncannily; fantasies
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Seitenzahl: 335
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Copyright © Elizabeth Wright 1999
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 1999 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd
Editorial office: Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Marketing and production: Blackwell Publishers Ltd 108 Cowley Road Oxford OX4 1JF, UK
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All rights; reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBN: 978-0-7456-6919-9 (Multi-user ebook)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and has been applied for from the Library of Congress.
Typeset in 11 on 13 pt Berling by Ace Filmsetting Ltd, Frome, Somerset Printed in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
For Edmond
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I Psychoanalysis and Literature: Freud
1 What is a psychoanalytic reading?
2 The uncanny and its poetics
3 The vagaries of fantasy: Alfred Kubin’s The Other Side
4 Maladies of the soul: the poetics of Julia Kristeva
Part II Psychoanalysis and Language: Lacan
5 What is a discourse?
6 The indirections of desire: Hamlet
7 Inscribing the body politic: Robert Coover’s Spanking the Maid
8 What does Woman want?: The Double Life of Veronique
Part III Patients and Analysts: Readers and Texts
9 What is a clinical ‘case’?
10 The rhetoric of clinical discourse: Dialogue with Sammy
11 The rhetoric of clinical management: Bion and Minuchin
12 Out of tune: Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
My grateful thanks go to the following who have contributed in many ways to my clinical understanding of psychoanalysis: Bernard Barnett, Michael Kennedy Ian Simpson, Luis Roderiguez de la Sierra, Darian Leader, Vivien Bar and Katrin Stroh. I owe a considerable debt to Wayne Barron for generous time spent in detailed discussion and explication of Lacan. I would also like to thank Kenneth Reinhard, Juliet MacCannell, Danielle Bergeron, Renata Salecil, Slavoj Žižek, Russell Grigg, and my colleagues at Girton for their friendship and support. My greatest debt goes to Edmond Wright, who has participated closely in every stage of the book, from engaging with its structure and argument from a consistent philosophical position to every kind of essential practical help and assistance.
My thanks also go to the following: the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research for clinical and theoretical knowledge; the staff of Cambridge University Library and Girton College Library for their friendly help in my researches; and the Cambridge University Travel Fund and Girton College for generous financial assistance towards my research expenses.
John Thompson of Polity Press has encouraged the book at all stages from its conception to its final production. The team at Polity Press has given me every possible help, and I should particularly like to thank Julia Harsant for her unfailing friendliness and efficiency, the desk editor, Sue Leigh and the copy editor, Ruth Thackeray for their generous care and attention.
The publishers wish to thank Gillon Aitken Associates for permission to reprint material from Spanking the Maid by Robert Coover © 1982 Robert Coover. They would also like to thank The Grove Press Inc. for permission to reprint material from Spanking the Maid by Robert Coover.
One of Sigmund Freud’s abiding concerns when analysing literature and the arts was the question of who had priority in the discovery of the unconscious, the poet or the psychoanalyst, that is, Freud himself. To touch on a long-standing controversy between literature and psychoanalysis: who understands the unconscious best, the poet or the clinician? Or, to put it another way, do the aesthetic and the clinical have to speak in entirely different languages or does the poetic enter both?
Just as with the advent of modern literary theory it was found ‘that there are more things in literary texts than are dreamt of in Freudian philosophy’,1 so there are also many things in literary texts that the critic had not been conscious of before the advent of psychoanalysis. What is more, when some of Freud’s writings were themselves read literally, taken at their word, scanned for their slippages and gaps,2 it became apparent that psychoanalytic texts were no more immune from a literary reading than any other text. The assumption of the authority of psychoanalysis over literature was first properly challenged in an influential volume inaugurating a dialectical exchange between psychoanalysis and literature, where psychoanalysis points to the unconscious of literature and literature to the unconscious of psychoanalysis.3 If the unconscious has a poetics that invades texts of whatever kind, there can be no secure position inside or outside a text that sustains a reliable meaning.
Some thirty years ago an innovative critic, Wayne C. Booth, did much to enliven and reform a literary criticism that was somewhat moribund even though it had called itself ‘New’.4 In his The Rhetoric of Fiction5 he set out to demonstrate that there was more to rhetoric than rules and regulations and more to literature than canon-formation. Focusing on the conscious and unconscious communicative strategies available to the author – what ‘he’ (in those days) does to persuade the reader to accept his proffered fictional world – Booth favours the textual illusion of a writer who reliably transmits his norms and values through the creation of an ‘implied author’: although the real author, like a mother, may come and go, he projects a reliable double into the text (a father?), who, free from any quirkiness, upholds the norms and values the author would like to believe in. If this now sounds a little quaint, it still has considerable practical use in making a first acquaintance with a text, since it has an eye for stable ironic structures.
However, theoretically, Booth’s idea of a rhetoric of fiction implies that the dubious distinction between literary/poetic language and scientific/ordinary language can be upheld. But literary theory is really a theory about how all language works and is itself subject to the laws of language: to investigate literature is always, in one way or another, to investigate language. And language is inescapably figural, as the title of this book, Speaking Desires can be Dangerous, illustrates. It has the same grammatical ambiguity as Noam Chomsky’s notorious sentence, ‘Flying planes can be dangerous’, with which he was showing how the same sequence of words can have different deep structures. The subject of the sentence, ‘Flying planes’, can be either a gerund (verbal noun) phrase or a noun modified by a gerundive (verbal adjective). He was thereby demonstrating that surface features are no guide to structure.6 The ambiguity is nicely illustrated by the title of Ian McEwan’s novel Enduring Love (1997). Two meanings are similarly derivable from my title: meaning 1 (the gerund), to speak our desires is dangerous (since our words do not arrive at the desires we thought we had); meaning 2 (the gerundive), the desires that are speaking are dangerous (since they speak of what we do not want to know anything about). My title thus performs what it says, that desire works in the very structure of language. Hence rhetoric has a Active element. Its effects are enigmatic and incalculable because of the very contingency of what human action has to operate upon in the world. Rhetoric represents a continuing attempt to adjust the order of language to an ever-recalcitrant matter.
Psychoanalytic literary theory has a distinctive contribution to make in this area. From the beginning Freud moved between the discourse of the scientist and that of the artist, the novelist and the poet, availing himself freely of their themes and poetic figures. Both he and his followers paid attention to literature and the arts, taking them to employ the same processes that psychoanalysis uncovered in the workings of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis has a particular theory about why language is literary all the time, a particular way of accounting for the irrepressible figurality of language as it betrays the operations of desire and fantasy: the fact that language is inescapably figural makes equally for the stuff of literature, criticism and psychoanalysis. The issue of poetics is therefore much wider than that of psychoanalysis itself and is reachable without its clinical offices, something that Freud acknowledged in his homage to the poets. Hence this book does not want to suggest that the paradigms of psychoanalysis render all other discourses secondary. Nor that the psychoanalysts treated here are to be seen as self-proclaimed prophets but rather as implicit collaborators free to cancel out one another’s excesses.
By the same token, criticism likes to parade itself as a species of meta-language, more knowing than, if poetically inferior to, the language of the writer. This ignores the fact that all language is rhetoric in that it is an act of persuasion, an attempt to shift desires. Rhetoric invariably works on the presupposition of an innocent transference of meaning, that meanings can be transferred without undergoing any change. When talking about ‘the rhetoric of fiction’ this presupposition is not recognized: if, on the other hand, we were to invert the title into ‘the fiction of rhetoric’, we recognize that the transference is by no means innocent. What is at stake here is a reading, a work of interpretation, in which there is no agreement among subjects as to how this work might be done. The term ‘subject’ is used throughout this book precisely to acknowledge that to maintain oneself in language brooks of no division between conscious and unconscious. Writer/reader, analyst/analysand are all readers and have to struggle with the failure of language to deliver what it seems to promise. It is the aim of this book to detect the operations of desire by engaging simultaneously with the literary and the clinical, to read the literary with a clinical eye and also the clinical with a literary one.
In Part I, I focus on Freudian psychoanalysis and try to demonstrate the necessity of the clinical/aesthetic interchange. With the example of a well-known nonsense poem by Edward Lear I show how the fundamental fantasies recognized by psychoanalysis are woven into its themes, rhythms and figures. I argue for the presence of sexuality in the text in that what is inscribed is the violation and reinstatement of the Law, uncannily repeated in the form of transgressive fantasies that are induced through the confrontation of author and reader.
This leads me into a discussion of Freud’s essay on ‘The uncanny’, written in 1919, which has become a key epistemological and aesthetic concept in contemporary thought. The uncanny emerges both in the clinical and literary encounter and also in the fragile reality of life. It is precisely when our complacent identities are challenged by the unexpected that the uncanny is experienced: the most familiar and therefore the most reassuring is transformed into the strange. An acknowledgement of the permanent presence of radical otherness thus becomes the central recommendation of psychoanalysis and literature alike, for both their narratives have precisely this feature, that an easy assumption is exposed to subversion by the incalculable. The uncanny (unheimlich) can here be linked to Surrealism since both point to the unreliability of sense perception: the familiar world of common objects is rendered ‘unhomely’ through the invasion of the unconscious. The visual uncanny of Surrealism provides me with a domain that is more rhetorically immediate, a kind of visual aid that enables me to delineate the effects that reappear in literature. I use Freud’s example of the ‘Wolf Man’ in order to provide a clinical demonstration of the uncanny’s effects in the life of a patient. In all these examples, those from Surrealism, Freud’s own essay and Freud’s clinical case, the uncanny breaks through the work of fantasy as it endeavours to hide from the subject both the subject’s own inadequacy within the symbolic and the symbolic’s inadequacy in mapping the subject and the world.
Alfred Kubin’s novel The Other Side (1909), shows what happens when there is an attempt to build up a fantasy of an omnipotent creator who will guarantee the perfect fulfilment of all desires in a dream kingdom. Like the uncanny, fantasy arises at the point where both the object and the symbolic which sustains it fail us, but at the same point the uncanny breaks through. It is only through inquiring into our fantasies that, paradoxically, we can discover what we are trying to hide, the failure of the symbolic to render us complete: the fantasy arises where the subject deludes itself that the symbolic knows what it is supposed to be. The subject is thus trying to install the Law without the price that the Law exacts, as if desire and drive were of one mind. Kubin’s text ‘knows’ that the reductio ad absurdum of this delusion is chaos, and it invites the reader into a literary psychosis.
Julia Kristeva’s investigations into those ‘maladies of the soul’ that are peculiar to contemporary life, the so-called ‘borderline’ disorders, bring together clinical and aesthetic counterparts of suffering. Within a general theoretical discourse on depression and melancholia she provides both clinical case material and literary and artistic examples that testily to a struggle with mourning. In her clinical material she shows her patients to be wavering between neurosis and psychosis in their attempts to avoid dialogue with the world as it is represented by their analyst and significant figures of their past: to avoid the dialogic nature of speech is to persist in an unconscious commitment to suffering as a way of refusing to mourn. The monologic and lifeless language of the depressive subject, which includes both speech and silence, keeps the other at bay so as not to disturb an indwelling on its own grievance rather than to find the way to grief. In the course of the treatment the patient’s monologue is uncannily disturbed by the repeated breaking through of the fantasy, as was the case in the example from Kubin’s The Other Side. In both the clinical and aesthetic domains the poetics of the unconscious finds its way of elaborating the dynamics of ‘mourning and melancholia’ (Freud) in figurative terms. The refusal to give up the lost object provides the energy which keeps the depression going; the drive refuses to divest itself of the maternal encumbrance and to invest in the substitutions of the symbolic. In the work of James Joyce and Fyodor Dostoevsky, Kristeva detects two different poetic resolutions of this common pathology, resulting from two different clinical structures, psychosis and neurosis. In the case of Joyce, a disturbance in language exploits and holds off an incipient psychosis by simultaneously absorbing in his text the combination of maternal power and paternal identification that was eluding him in life. In the case of Dostoevsky, a neurotic suffering which incessantly dwells on self-punishment is finally resolved through the trope of forgiveness, whereby the harshness of the Law is reinscribed and transformed through regaining faith in an originary benevolent parent figure.
In Part II the emphasis shifts from Freud to Jacques Lacan. Although for Freud language was clearly at the centre of analysis, he was unable to make use of the findings of modern linguistics. In applying linguistics Lacan was able to move decisively to a position in which language was seen as crucial to the constitution of the subject. He was thus able to shift the emphasis from the dialogic nature of language to its structure as a discourse of desire. This involves a series of unstable positions for all subjects and requires a continual engagement with Lacan’s three orders, the symbolic, the real and the imaginary, his theoretical apparatus for mapping the operations of desire in language. The symbolic, a word-hoard that is available for every subject that enters it, is at the same time the occasion for the subject’s alienation from its own substantial being. Its effort to maintain a social bond under such pressure is charted in Lacan’s discourse ‘mathemes’. These are formulaic models for what happens when the dominant position in the discourse is occupied by different aspects of the speech situation, according to whether the status quo is maintained or challenged. Literature and the arts are the place where this struggle is vicariously fought out: for Lacan art is something that analyses the subject (for instance, his reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s The purloined letter’), rather than, as for Freud, something to be analysed (his reading of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘The sandman’). In order to explicate the analytic effect of subjecting oneself to the uncanny I make use of an elegy by William Wordsworth.
A discussion of Lacan’s seminar on Hamlet enables me to elaborate further what Lacan makes of literary and artistic works in the context of his theory of language and of the constitution of the subject in the dialectic of desire and drive. For Lacan, Hamlet is the tragedy of one who has not found the way of his desire and is thus at the mercy of undirected drive. Since the play is all about the subject’s flawed entry into the symbolic, a fate common to all, an analytic effect is produced because we are forced to confront the painful engagement of drive with the Other’s desire. For Lacan it is Hamlet’s refusal to mourn which is central to the dynamics of the play, since absence of mourning, as we have already seen with Kristeva, is an inability to make the sacrifice demanded by the symbolic. Rather than see Hamlet’s relation to his mother purely in Oedipal terms, as Freud does, Lacan shifts the focus to the (m) Other’s desire as a crucial factor in blocking Hamlet’s investiture as a subject of desire. That is why Ophelia ceases to be an object of desire, inertly caught in Hamlet’s perverse fantasy, no longer representing life.
The endless effort to become inscribed in the symbolic is the driving force of Robert Coover’s Spanking the Maid (1982), in which two characters, cast in the role of master and maid, repetitiously perform a ritual of domination and submission. Through its figures, its chronic and playful slippages of language, its rhythms, and the constant struggle of its characters to find words to legitimate their perverse practices, the text performs and enacts the illusory literalness of language in a series of spectacular puns. The text paradoxically demonstrates what the man and woman fail to do in their respectively obsessive and hysterical concentration on a puritan discourse. Their literal attempt to inscribe the Law upon the body results in an extravagant upholding of the Law and an extravagant stimulation of desire, implicating the reader in an analysis of the perverse.
For Lacan the problematic of femininity is central to the constitution of the subject. In Krzysztof Kieslowski’s film The Double Life of Véronique the question of woman’s subjectivity is intimately explored through posing the question of woman’s existence, thereby illustrating Lacan’s claim that she is more subject than man, in that she is aware that her self-representation is not a mask concealing her ‘inner’ person, but a ‘masquerade’ where her life is lived. The significant differences in the experiences of two women, apparently identical, are examined by making the voice the central structural feature of the film. In the libidinal economy of the subject the voice represents an invocatory fantasy, originating in the (m)Other’s voice (at the beginning of the film), from which point onwards the subject strives to be heard and recognized by the Other. Whereas in the first case the woman’s sexuality is directed towards the male version of the symbolic, in the second case the woman demonstrates a capacity not to be duped by the apparent substantiality of the symbolic, which spares her the illusion that she is wholly encompassed by it. The trope of twinship is here used to raise the question of what a woman wants.
In Part III the focus is on the rhetoric of the clinical session and the further poetic effects of the transmission of this case material to others. I first discuss the findings of a forum which set out to compare different responses to a single clinical case. The variety of theoretical orientations adopted revealed different commitments, and hence different clinical strategies and different interpretations were proposed. As a consequence various therapeutic effects were claimed to be feasible. The greater the awareness of a range of possible meanings on the part of the therapist, the greater the choice of what is and is not to be imparted to the patient. But this raises the problem of why one choice might be regarded as better than another and thus in what direction the treatment is to go. Crucially there is the question of what is to be taken as evidence to support such a choice when that which is regarded as relevant is governed by the particular theory being applied. I take up the question of what sort of criteria have to be adduced in order to establish psychoanalysis as a science. Unlike the so-called exact sciences psychoanalysis does not operate with the assumption of an impartial observer faced with a set of countable entities, but inquires into the very construction of the subject/object dichotomy. The analyst is essentially not an impartial observer for she or he is as much subject to the poetics of the clinical discourse as is the analysand.
Whatever the resonance of the analyst’s fantasies with those of the patient – the essential factor in unconscious speaking to unconscious, the training of the analyst and her or his own analysis should ensure that this resonance does not contaminate the treatment. Using a Freudo-Lacanian orientation I now discuss extracts from the verbatim analysis, carried out in France, of a psychotic nine-year-old boy, in order to show an analytic couple at work. The analyst, Joyce McDougall, works by identifying the primitive conflicts of her patient while at the same time allowing him to dictate the pace at which he can move through his fantasies without falling into terror. She does this by an astute handling of the poetics of the unconscious in that she enters into the unconscious figures and rhythms her patient produces and reinserts them patiently into narratives of his own devising. Although her orientation as a Freudo-Kleinian is clear, she does not use it to foreclose her patient’s thoughts and fantasies, nor does she intrude her own. The analyst pays tribute to her supervisor who co-published the book with her and whose insights she incorporates in her account of the treatment.
I then look at what is more generally involved in clinical management by first considering the rhetoric of supervision as it appears in a series of seminars conducted for analysts by Wilfred Bion, and second by discussing an example of the special kind of family therapy carried out by Salvador Minuchin in the USA. In the example of Bion, the instances he uses to recommend that the analyst challenge the patient’s concepts become the rhetorical means whereby he persuades his supervisees to adopt the necessary technique: he conveys to them the patient’s self-engrossed picture of the world in a mode that gives them clues to how it can be shaken. He thus shows his supervisees how to enable the patient to digest what she or he would otherwise be prone to reject. In a not dissimilar technique, though through a more dramatic mode of intervention, Minuchin endeavours to develop material implicit in the family’s dynamics in a direction more favourable to the autonomy of its members but without entering into open contradiction. He realigns existing loyalties to get a fairer balance of interests, often protecting those whose rhetorical position is weak in the family hierarchy. He manages to elicit from those who are unconsciously colluding with the pathology of the sufferer evidence of their own complicity and uses it to shift their power relations.
Finally I consider the poetic strategies of the writer when she is tempted to engage with an experience that bears all the hallmarks of a clinical case. Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher participates in the ‘borderline’ pathology of its main character, so that here the clinical and the aesthetic combine in one text, as in the analyst Julia Kristeva’s work. In investigating the poetic strategies of the text I reveal a clinical substratum which enriches it, whereby what transpires in the life of the characters repeats itself in the text as a whole. This points to the hazards that equally attend the clinical and aesthetic ventures, since the unconscious is a force that is not easily reckoned with, whether in the case of patients and analysts or readers and texts.
Psychoanalysis can explain why language is literary all the time, why it is irrepressibly figural. Although Freud always ceded the discovery of the unconscious to the poet, even if at times somewhat anxiously, before psychoanalysis came on the scene, the critic was not conscious of what the literary text might harbour. Deconstruction, for instance, whose practitioners often make themselves independent of psychoanalytic theory, could hardly have got off the ground without a theory of the unconscious. In seeing that meaning was at once always too much and never enough, both supplementary and lacking, deconstruction battened on Freud’s repeated linguistic discovery throughout his work, namely, that desire cannot name itself except by substitution.
What, then, is there to be gained from a psychoanalytic reading? Furthermore, a much debated question, what is a psychoanalytic reading? I would like to begin with a practical example, a nonsense poem by Edward Lear:
The Owl and the Pussy-Cat
The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea In a beautiful pea-green boat. They took some honey, and plenty of money, Wrapped up in a five-pound note. The Owl looked up to the Stars above And sang to a small guitar, ‘Oh lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love, What a beautiful Pussy you are, You are, You are! What a beautiful Pussy you are!’ Pussy said to the Owl, ‘You elegant fowl! How charmingly sweet you sing! O let us be married! Too long we have tarried: But what shall we do for a ring?’ They sailed away for a year and a day, To the land where the Bong-tree grows, And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood With a ring at the end of his nose, His nose, His nose, With a ring at the end of his nose. ‘Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling Your ring?’ Said the Piggy, ‘I will.’ So they took it away, and were married next day By the turkey who lives on the hill. They dined on mince, and slices of quince, Which they ate with a runcible spoon; And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, They danced by the light of the moon, The moon, The moon, They danced by the light of the moon.
Going back to Freud’s underlying concern with the question of who had got to the unconscious first, the poet or the psychoanalyst, we might say that the literary critic is here not sure whether she is an analyst-owl among the analysand-cats, who have much to learn from her, or, vice versa, whether she is an analysand-cat, who has much to learn from the analystowls, the clinicians. Or, as some might argue, are the two discourses critically incompatible?
Of course, ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’ can be enjoyably read as ‘just a nonsense poem’. Composers have chosen to set it to music for its strong rhythmic qualities, including its repetitions, internal rhymes and refrain. It is also a story because it poses and resolves a problem through a transformation (nosering into wedding ring, making two into one), and its setting is a romantic scene – with a courtship, a sea journey, a far-away hill, a song to a guitar, the stars, the moon, a marriage and a celebratory feast. In addition, the poem follows the topos of a fairy tale in having animal characters, one of whom is a helping figure (‘said the Piggy, “I will”’). What could psychoanalysis possibly add to this account which might explain the lasting popularity of this apparently naively childlike poem?
Lear’s poem might also be read as a bold transgressive fantasy about two creatures from genera with two different reproductive systems (read also ‘generations’– the root of both words comes from the Indo-European root gen, meaning ‘to beget, to generate, produce’). Hence the two creatures require superior assistance, and, because it is a kind of fairy tale, they get it: they take their liquids and their solids – their honey and their money— first to the libidinal pig in the wood and then to the phallic turkey, residing on a hill, in order to gain access to the Bong-tree. For their wedding feast they dine on a hitherto impossible plenitude of food (a menu of mince instead of mice). And finally they couple in that liminal space, the seashore.
The implement the couple use for their feast is a ‘runcible spoon’. This is a nonsense term invented by Lear for a three-pronged fork hollowed out like a spoon, which has one prong with a cutting edge: hence it is an object which defies categories, wanting to be fork, knife, and spoon all at once. So it cannot fit into one genus – except in fantasy, like the union of the Owl and the Pussy-Cat. It happens that Lear’s nonsense work is particularly characterized by its confusion of categories, both in its writing and its drawing.
Non-sense poetry is a (joking) refusal to accept the boundaries of language. Psychoanalysis has a theory about such a refusal, as will be seen. A psychoanalytic reading might thus take up this confusion of boundaries and read the poem as a set of fundamental fantasies, a denial of castration in its wish to transgress familial boundaries and an attempt to answer a series of questions about the riddles of procreation and sexual difference. But are they Lear’s fantasies? There is no way we can know. What the above reading testifies to is the power of the poem to arouse such fantasies in a reader. If such a reading is rhetorically convincing to others, then one could argue that the poem’s popularity with readers of all ages testifies to its capacity to provoke primal fantasies, defined as ‘typical phantasy structures’;1 these include intra-uterine existence (the sea), seduction (the serenade in the boat), primal scene (the coupling) and (denial of) castration (confusion of categories).
But is it after all nothing but an endearing transgressive fantasy? Some time ago I heard the poem sung as a cabaret item by a hired group at a party where there was a majority of men. The singer, a woman, put a particular emphasis on the refrain, ‘what a beautiful Pussy you are’, thereby alluding to a woman’s sexual organs. The poetic effect was that of castration, for, first, the woman was alluded to as metaphorically reduced to a cat, and, second, as metonymically further reduced to being merely a part of a cat, since her sexual organs were represented by nothing more than the cat’s fur. The ‘harmlessly’ amusing salacious emphasis unconsciously indicated the horror that lurked beneath the wish-fulfilment.
So what can be said about the nature of a psychoanalytic reading on the basis of this brief discussion? If we set aside the main literary element in ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’, ignoring the facts that its genre is that of a fable where fantastic elements are normal and that everyone reads it as a nonsense poem, then we can see the uncanniness of two animals, enemies by nature, libidinally incompatible, courting each other. Psychoanalytic theory rests on the assumption that sexuality is the crucial factor in the constitution of the subject. In its clinical practice it relies on finding structural images in the mind, pointing to the way the present is determined by the past in terms of a subject’s sexual history. The beginning, the pre-genital, is seen as the loss experienced by the subject upon its separation from the mother’s body, the genital being the provisional endpoint, never totally achieved. In Freud’s terms sexuality is ‘polymorphously perverse’, since there is always a nostalgic longing for the infantile variability of sexual satisfaction.2 A psychoanalytic reading therefore primarily involves being alert to the presence of sexuality in the text. Since we are sexually identified by means of language and since we can be altered by language, we suffer the imprint of the desires of others: every statement is a redirection of someone’s desire. Thus the relation of desire and language crucially ties together the psychoanalytic and the literary.
In order to argue for the measure of Freud’s contribution, I would like to examine the Freudian inspiration, particularly in its impact on our understanding of the relation between desire and language, which is later more fully articulated in Lacan’s formulations. A good place to begin is Freud’s elaboration of the concept of ‘the uncanny’, a key example of the irrepressibility of the unconscious. Freud’s definition of the uncanny is to be found in his celebrated essay of that name.1 According to Freud, the uncanny is ‘undoubtedly related to what is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror’.2 He defines what characterizes the uncanny by examining the German word for it, unheimlich. He writes: ‘Unheimlich is in some way or other a species of heimlich’, and ‘heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence.’3 For heimlich means not only homely and familiar, but also hidden and secret. The un- of the unheimlich marks the return of the repressed material: the word or thing threatens us in some way by no longer fitting the desired context. Hence the uncanny has the effect of destabilizing language. Modern critical theory has moved on from the structuralist perception that words refer to each other rather than to things to the further recognition that this perception ignores the uncanny effect upon language of that to which it seeks to refer.
The uncanny and Surrealism
The concept of the uncanny has become important in postmodern aesthetics because it acts as a challenge to representation. It makes us see the world not as ready-made for description, depiction or portrayal (common terms applied to what an artist or writer does), but as in a constant process of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction. Freud could not understand why the Surrealists were so interested in psychoanalysis. In 1932 he wrote a letter to André Breton, who had accused Freud of not analysing his own dreams sufficiently, and in it he says that he is far from sure what Surrealism is about.4 Freud felt that one could not analyse the productions of the Surrealists because the analytic process cannot take place in public: psychoanalysis has a theory which gives an account of how and why repressed material suddenly disrupts our familiar ways of perceiving the world, but it sees this theory as grounded in clinical practice. The psychoanalytic process of so-called ‘free association’ is not to be equated with automatic writing, for instance, because, unlike what the Surrealists hoped, there is no pure truth which can emerge undisguised and uncensored from the unconscious. The freedom of free association is not to be understood as an absence of determination, but rather as overruling the voluntary selection of thoughts. What one overrules thereby is the censorship between the conscious and pre-conscious (that which is not present to consciousness). The unconscious defences reveal themselves in the material that the analysand produces in the course of analysis. This material is not a direct expression of the impulses of drive, but consists of ideas or images that have attached themselves to these impulses, what Freud calls ‘ideational representatives’. Consequently, the return of the repressed is not the return of such an impulse but the return of whatever idea or image has attached itself to it. It is only when the analyst and analysand ‘work through’ – as Freud calls it – the repeated emergence of these images and thoughts that the unconscious fantasy can be pieced together.
The popular account of Surrealism, including Breton’s own, relates it to the dream and argues that the unconscious emerges in a dreamlike manner in the techniques of collage and automatic writing. But Theodor Adorno, in an essay entitled ‘Looking back on Surrealism’,5 questions whether we should necessarily accept the Surrealists’ own understanding of what they are doing, since this is tantamount to explaining the strange by the familiar, by what we already understand. Adorno argues that, if Surrealism is taken to be no more than a literary and graphic illustration of Freudian or Jungian theory, it becomes just a harmless reduplication of what the theory tells us – hardly the kind of scandal that is the very life-blood of Surrealism; if we view Surrealism simply in terms of Freudian theory, we miss the peculiar power of this movement. According to Adorno, no one dreams in the Surrealist mode: to equate Surrealism with dreaming is at best a crude analogy. The images in Surrealist art split into parts, and then these parts are treated with odd respect, as if they were autonomous forms, wholes in their own right. In Surrealist art, objects are most carefully chosen and placed, in just this space, next to another object just this size. To understand what is going on one has to look at this art’s strategies, its use of collage and montage, which enables images – whether in poetry or in painting – to be juxtaposed in patterns of discontinuity. It is this which gives Surrealism its shock value, provoking that sense of ‘where have I seen this before?’, the heimlich (homely and familiar) combined with the unheimlich (hidden and secret). Adorno maintains that the affinity of Surrealism and psychoanalysis depends not on their common interest in the symbols utilized by a truth-speaking unconscious, but rather on the way in which they both focus on the images of our childhood, a past crystallized within us. The giant egg, for instance, from which a monster threatens to emerge at any moment, is big because we were so very small when we first gazed at an egg in extreme trepidation. The uncanny effect is brought about because we are confronted with a subjectivity now alien to us, having had to move on. What produces shock, in his view, is that twilight state between a schizophrenic sense of the world split into parts, either chopped up or threatening to merge, and the apparent autonomy and self-sufficiency that these parts assume. The apparent freedom from normal representation becomes threatening, leading to a kind of death, either because objects become rigid and unchanging, or because they melt, flow and dissolve. These images, Adorno argues, are fetishes, objects once invested with emotion but now estranged, left over from the past, dead substitutes for what is no longer.
It is useful, then, to discuss the uncanny effects in the visual arts from the psychoanalytic point of view. Rene Magritte’s pictures of severed breasts, legs in silk stockings, shoes with human toes, the nose, eyes and lips floating in space, are reminders of what Freud calls ‘Objekte der Partialtriebe’,
