Freud’s Experiments
with hypnosis
The unconscious
mind reveals itself in
actions, words and mental images, the meaning of which is barred from conscious
knowledge because of repression, the process of psychic censorship which
consists in simply turning away and keeping something at a distance from
consciousness.
The contents of the
unconscious mind derive from the sexual body and are driven by a dynamic energy
which strives to bring them into consciousness.
The force of
repression demands that any release of unconscious material assume a disguised
character.
It is in physical
symptoms, dreams, jokes, parapraxes (“Freudian
slips”), and accidental gestures that the unconscious reveals itself,
disguised, in everyday life.
The artist, by
virtue of his openness to the power of fantasy in the production of his work,
has always had a privileged relation to the unconscious.
Freud defined
three major models of the psychic apparatus:
The dynamic describes the conflict within the mind
between unconscious drives, which strive for release, and the equally powerful
forces of repression, which strive to keep unconscious urges from surfacing.
From this struggle emerge derivatives of the repressed material which satisfy
both forces: it is these clusters of mental images, actions, and words which
reveal themselves as symptoms.
The economic model considers what Freud called “cathexis”: the distribution and circulation of the psychic
energy or excitation which is attached to certain ideas, objects, bodily parts,
and so on. Within the human subject, there is a certain quantifiable amount of
instinctual energy which must be variously distributed among objects, the body
and mental content in order to maintain psychic equilibrium—leading to Freud’s
notions of “displacement” (the intensity of affect once connected with a
certain idea or image is detached from it and passed onto other ideas or images
which hold only an associative connection to the original idea) and “condensation”
(which, on the other hand, occurs when one idea comes to represent a
cluster of associated affects.
The topographical
theory divides the psychical
apparatus into various subsystems according to a spatial metaphor. Freud first
divided the mind into three systems: the conscious (the realm of
perceptions, sensory apprehension of the external world), the preconscious
(the realm which can be called up by consciousness, usually associated with
memory and that which can be accessed through language), and the unconscious
(the realm of the censored which is barred from conscious and preconscious
knowledge). The second topology, also called the structural model, divides the
mind into three agencies: the id (the center of instinctual drives), the
ego (the agency which represents the subject’s identifications and
mediations with external reality), and the superego (which represents
internalized parental and social injunctions—also known as the “conscience”).
Psychosexuality
Freud’s conception
of psychosexuality depends on his understanding of “libido” or the
available sexual energy which directs both human development and human action.
His notion of sexuality, however, must be understood to encompass the entire
range of human experiences directed by the drive to achieve bodily and mental
satisfaction—also known as the “pleasure principle.”
Three major
stages of psychosexual development:
The oral stage, in which the infant derives most pleasure
from the mouth’s sucking and biting.
The anal stage, in which the infant is preoccupied with the
anus and its productions.
The phallic stage, in which genital primacy throws the child
into the Oedipus complex. The positive Oedipus complex identifies the child’s
desire for the parent of the opposite sex and a consequent rivalry with the
parent of the same sex. In its negative form, the parent of the same sex is
loved, while the parent of the opposite sex is identified as the rival.
The child’s movement
away from purely narcissistic investment in his or her own body to the family
cluster is the central crisis in human development and that which
remains the center of neurotic conflict.
Through “transference,”
the conflict is relived and the analysis becomes the opportunity to
“re-work” the original crisis, this time with clinical insight.
The analyst comes to
understand the patient’s “Free-associations,” or uncensored repetition
in a patient’s speech of whatever is in his or her mind, as the revelation of
the unconscious in fantasies, spontaneous associations and dreams.
Early applications
of psychoanalysis to the literary arts tend to the biographical, whereby
the text and its creator fall on the side of the patient being analyzed and the
critic on the side of the analyst. Freud extended this to suggest “compromise formations,” by which an unacceptable wish
becomes, through the construction of an acceptable form, not only conscious but
a highly pleasing work of art.
The work of art
reveals a pattern of unconscious figures which represent memories and parental
personas. As with the dream, the surface or manifest content of the work
contains within it a latent meaning which can be deciphered through
interpretation.
Whereas Freud’s theory
of symbolic meaning centered on the individual within his cultural context,
Carl Jung developed a theory of “universal symbols.” The individual unconscious
participates in its images and fantasies in a “collective unconscious” which
cuts across all time and culture to contain the inheritance of the entire human
race. Certain primordial images issue from this collective unconscious to the
individual’s psyche, which Jung called “archetypes.”
Jung postulated that
creative energy in the artistic process follows an autonomous course through
the individual consciousness but ultimately derives from the collective
unconscious. This process makes the true artist a vehicle for a universal
language.
“The unconscious is
structured like a language.” The text itself as a linguistic structure has
its own psyche. Lacan posits the existence of what he
calls three “orders” in human experience: the imaginary, the symbolic, and
the real.
In Lacan’s theory of the “mirror stage,” the human
infant experiences an imaginary state of narcissistic mastery and bodily unity.
The child recognizes its own physical unity in the mirror: the infant makes an
imaginary identification with its reflection and takes this as a model for its
interaction with the external world and especially the mother. The child then
misidentifies the “other” in the mirror as the object of desire, further
contributing to the split in the subject’s psyche.