Chapter 5
Psychoanalysis
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Sigmund Freud invented psychoanalysis with
the publication of The Interpretation of
Dreams in 1901.
The book was revolutionary because it broke
with the tradition in psychology that assumed
that what goes on in the mind is limited to
what happens in consciousness.
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Fiction, like dreams, are fantasies, and they
can be expected to contain a large amount of
unconscious material.
The unconscious material that Freud found in
dreams had over-whelmingly to do with the
most powerful feeling we as humans
experience.
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Children can either learn to accept the
curtailment of those natural urges or hang on
to the urges in some other form.
The mind, according to Freud, often finds
alternate ways of expressing urges, desires,
and yearning that are deemed unacceptable by
society or that for some other more local
reason have to be repressed.
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Shakespeare in Macbeth, for example, depicts
feeling of guilt as hand-washing, a symbolic
substitute form of expression that represents
the guilty feelings through their opposite, a
cleansing of guilt.
Freud divided the mind initially into the
conscious part and the unconscious.
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These taxonomies often coincided with different
forms of neurosis or mental illness, such as
compulsive obsessive disorder and paranoia.
An important concept in this regard is compromise
formation.
Nevertheless, the man is trapped in a repetition
compulsion; he repeatedly replays the same personal
scenario because he has failed to come to terms
through therapy with the core conflict in his
personality.
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Freud found that the conscious mind often
performed significant transformations on
unconscious material that meant that its final
expressed form little resembled the
unconscious urge or conflict that inspired.
Literature is full of examples of such hypocrisy,
especially in religious characters.
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Other defenses include intellectualization,
projection, rationalization, reaction formation,
regression, sublimation, and suppression.
In suppression, we deny access to expression
of unacceptable unconscious material.
Freud did not limit his study of mental
processes to the dynamic of desire and
repression.
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Feelings of lack of control were thus turned into their
opposite.
Later theorists such as Melanie Klein, Margaret
Mahler, and Bernard Winnicott took these ideas much
further.
If the care-giver provides the child with a sense that
his or her object world is constant and stable, the
child will mature successfully as a separate person
with a strong sense of its own independent identity.
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A crucial issue in this process is boundaries and how
they are formed.
And this usually means that there is neither too much
yearning for fusion with the parent nor too much of a
sense of dangerous, anxiety-provoking separation.
Interestingly for the study of literature and culture, an
important component of this process has to do with
representation, with the ability to make images of the
world.
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Such mental representations can either be complex
and differentiated, or simple and undifferentiated.
Separation is fraught with anxiety, and it can inspire
neurotic behavior.
People can also experience yearnings for the
reparation of wounds or for the restoration of lost
objects by constantly seeking out romantic partners
who resemble parents or who perform reparative
function that heal very old wounds.
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Melanie Klein focused on the dynamic of
introjection and projection.
Fearing disintegration, we split our objects,
project inner impulses onto them, and treat
others as part-objects.
One of the more influential psychoanalytic
approaches was developed by Jacques Lacan
in France in the mid –twentieth century.
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It provides us with an imaginary sense of being fully
identified with our conscious self.
Using Saussure, Lacan constructed a linguistic
account of the mind.
All language is metaphoric in that it substitutes a
word for a thing, but all languages also metonymic in
that it involves a displacement from one word to the
next in an endless chain of difference.
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Lacan could be justifiably accused of absorbing the
sexist assumptions of his era.
It makes our identities in as much as we are members
of societies that impose restritions on our desires, and
assigns us identities as members of families, classes,
nations, and the like.
A tather different concept of the place of the mother
in psychic development and in civilization was
developed by Julia Kristeva.
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By distancing or abjecting matter, the power of
the mother over male children that is a
prerequisite of all human development is
undone and reversed.
Klaus Theweleit develops a similar argument
in his psychoanalytic study of the fantasies
associated with radical rightwing thinking,
Male Fantasies.
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A failure of initial care created yearning that later in
life were satisfied by violent fantasies directed against
women and communists, and feeling of strong
attachment to rigid authority figures such as the
Fuhrer.
Developments in feminist object relations psychology
have also attracted the attention of literary scholars in
recent decades, and the work of Nancy Chodorow has
been especially influential.
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Because boundary fluidity is associated with
contact with their mother, their tendency is to
seek more rigid boundaries in constructing
their identities.
Literary scholars have also taken note of work
being done on the theory of trauma in recent
years.
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They can engage in revictimization because a
diminished sense of shame allows them to
abuse others.
There are thus two different strands of thinking
regarding human psychology.
Both extremes are types of psychopathology.
Several reading strategies emerge from these
psychoanalytic theories.
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Finally, language itself can be studied as a
means of instantiating unconscious processes.
Exercise 5.1
William Shakespeare, King Lear(1)
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If Lear is a psychologically symbolic story,
then it is noteworthy that it begins with a
discussion of male children in relation to a
mother who is characterized in sexual terms.
Notice how the mother of Edmund is described.
How might she be seen as a male fantasy?
Exercise 5.1
William Shakespeare, King Lear(2)
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If the implicit maternal fantasy in the play is of
a sexually available body that evokes the
possibility of incest, then one might expect the
play to breach cultural restrictions on sexuality
in other ways.
Is he a version of the role of the father in
culture?
Exercise 5.1
William Shakespeare, King Lear(3)
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Children who fear separation from the mother
and who as a result yearn for fusion with her
suffer from an inability to regulate their own
emotions and to monitor and control their self
boundaries.
Let’s now consider the relation of language to
psychic and physical processes.
Exercise 5.1
William Shakespeare, King Lear(4)
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Anxiety over engulfment of ne’s boundaries by
a mother perceived to be overly proximate
might take the form of images of her body as
something that resists symbolization.
Now, consider the end of Act1, scene1. what
kind of language forms are associated with
Cordelia?
Exercise 5.1
William Shakespeare, King Lear(5)
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How does Cordelia link literality- a use of language
that has no symbolic or metaphoric distance between
word and thing with her sisters?
Throughout, Goneril and Regan will be associated
with an almost frightening image of the female body,
one that evokes violent fantasies from Lear as well as
provoking strong anxiety about disintegration and
loss of self-identity.
Exercise 5.1
William Shakespeare, King Lear(6)
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Lear’s language is initially filled with
symbolic allusions but notice how it breaks
down as the play progresses and as he loses
power.
The fool’s taunts are full of sexual innuendo.
A powerful bad mother would be one who
would overwhelm the child.
Exercise 5.1
William Shakespeare, King Lear(7)
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The fool ends the first act with a rather
obvious allusion to castration.
Which interpretation seems more justified?
How would you interpret the rest of the play
using these ideas?
The mad scene on the heath is especially
important in this regard.
Exercise 5.2
Elizabeth Bishop, Sestina and In the Village(1)
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In reading in the village which can be found as
an appendix to this book, you realize rather
quickly that Bishop is describing events that
might justifiably be called traumatic.
A central question for this exercise, then,
would be: how does Bishop deal with trauma
in the poem and in the prose piece?
Exercise 5.2
Elizabeth Bishop, Sestina and In the Village(2)
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And how at the end of the paragraph does she arrive
at an image of gaining control over the trauma?
The unpacking of her mother’s boxes exposes objects
that inspire fanciful thoughts in the child.
A postcard is like a mental representation, and it is
interesting that she seems to test them against the real
world of objects.
How do you interpret the child’s theft of the sharp
ivory stick?
Exercise 5.2
Elizabeth Bishop, Sestina and In the Village(3)
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If the prose piece itself is a symbolic process
designed to deal with and distance traumatic
experience, then its layout or narrative
structure should be significant.
How might this mental ability be associated
with Nate, the blacksmith?
How might such confusion be at once a
symptom and a source of empowerment?
Exercise 5.2
Elizabeth Bishop, Sestina and In the Village(4)
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The next section juxtaposes the grandmother
and the mother and links them both to Nelly,
the cow.
We can expect Nelly to be a displacement as
well as a protective substitute.
Why is she fascinated with the cow flops?
Exercise 5.2
Elizabeth Bishop, Sestina and In the Village(5)
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The fire would seem to be an ordinary
recollection, but how does it become linked to
the trauma and to the child’s attempts to deal
with it?
How might the final two sections of the piece
be read with these ideas in mind?
Why is the poem called Sestina?
Exercise 5.2
Elizabeth Bishop, Sestina and In the Village(6)
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Study the poem and note the transformations
that the key repeated words undergo.
How does the poem record disturbances in that
boundary?
How does the child’s art to repair the wound
caused by trauma?
Stanza 6 has an interesting image in it that is
like an act of imternalization.
Exercise 5.2
Elizabeth Bishop, Sestina and In the Village(7)
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What is their relation to the child’s suffering?
How might they be connected to the
therapeutic action of art?
Exercise 5.3
Alice Munro, Meneseteung(1)
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Stories with frames would seem to invite reflections
on psychological interiority, the way the mind harbors
within it unconscious feelings, thoughts, and urges.
How might this story, which begins with a narrative
frame and then tells the story of a woman poet’s life
in a small Ontario town in the late nineteenth century,
be read as a reflection on both kinds of interiority?
Exercise 5.3
Alice Munro, Meneseteung(2)
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What is unusual about Almeda?
Is there any significance to the fact that the
narrator sees her as resembling a young
nobleman of another century?
The description of Almeda’s house is
suggestive of the them of interiority.
How was the world of the late nineteenth
century different, more shaded?
Exercise 5.3
Alice Munro, Meneseteung(3)
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In a culture such as the one she is describing,
great stress was placed on respectability and
propriety.
How in town, as Munro describes it, are
propriety and all that in represses and that
threaten it juxtaposed?
What about the children’s treatment of Queen
Aggie, the drunken old woman?
Exercise 5.3
Alice Munro, Meneseteung(4)
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Notice that heat bring on accidents, one of which is
the outbreak of what might be insanity.
The area of respectability in which Almeda lives is
juxtaposed to the Pearl Street Swamp in which the
unrespectable and undeserving poor live, including
Queen Aggie.
About her relation to what the swamp symbolizes in a
psychological sense?
Exercise 5.3
Alice Munro, Meneseteung(5)
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Section III of the story opens with a direct evocation
of a connection between the river for which the story
is named and the inland sea.
But first we must contend with the figure of Jarvis
Poulter.
The Vidette and the references to respectability
associate the town culture with repression.
Why does she think of him in relation to her father?
Exercise 5.3
Alice Munro, Meneseteung(6)
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We are clearly meant to see him as very different
from Almeda.
Why does she do that here?
Almeda thinks that it takes a good deal of labor to see
the land properly while she is out riding with Jarvis.
What might Pegasus hanging over the swamp
represent?
The section has at its heart a quotation from Freud- A
child is being beaten.
Exercise 5.3
Alice Munro, Meneseteung(7)
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How might the woman being beaten be
Almeda?
The fracas outside that wakes her up could be
construed as a figure for the eruption into
consciousness of unconscious material.
Notice for one thing that what the people are
doing is something they feel powerless to stop.
Exercise 5.3
Alice Munro, Meneseteung(8)
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Why does Almeda associate the words she hears with
danger and depravity and foul smells and disgusting
sights?
Such a move away from socially sanctioned
repression toward the release of unconscious feelings,
memories, and urges would be associated with a
move away from the mind and toward the body, away
from the instrument of censorship and toward the
source of those uncontrolled urges.
Exercise 5.3
Alice Munro, Meneseteung(9)
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Going downstairs in a house, according to Freud, is
like descending into the body or into the unconscious
from the conscious mind.
She has been thinking of her father, and Jarvis is
certainly a father like figure.
How might it be seen as being, in Kristeva’s sense of
the term, abject?
Almeda summons Jarvis, whose behavior toward the
drunken woman is less than kind: Gwan home, where
you belong.
Exercise 5.3
Alice Munro, Meneseteung(10)
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Is there any way in which Almeda is identified with
the drunken woman?
How might the drunken woman’s body be Almeda’s?
Notice that immediately she wants Jarvis to depart so
that she can attend to her bodily urges.
What does it signify for him to take her to church?
Exercise 5.3
Alice Munro, Meneseteung(11)
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The poem with which the final section begins
situates Almeda at the bottom of the ocean.
How is Jarvis’ world associated now with
death?
Almeda’s experience is carefully characterized
as an ambivalent mixture of sanity and insanty.
Exercise 5.3
Alice Munro, Meneseteung(12)
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How is Munro using the metaphor of sanity here to
characterize a world that seems to do routine violence
to women and to assume the subordination of women
as part of its normal operations?
Notice that Jarvis’ economic rationalism is
characterized negatively here, while Almeda’s act of
looking deep into the river of mind is given a much
more positive resonance.
Exercise 5.3
Alice Munro, Meneseteung(13)
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And given the juxtaposition of a realist,
practical epistemology with Jarvis and a very
different kind of seeing and knowing with
Almeda, why is it also appropriate that Munro
should end on a note of doubt regarding the
status of her own discourse, her own
knowledge?
Exercise 5.4 Blue Velvet(1)
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Family Trouble might be a good title for a book about
the films of David Lynch.
It is as if a young boy were projecting into a dream
story his deepest feelings about himself, his parents,
his possible mate, and his sexuality.
How might Frank and Dorothy be read as symbolic
parents to Jeffrey?
In what other ways are Dorothy and Fantasy
projections of a mother and a father?
Exercise 5.4 Blue Velvet(2)
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Freud argued that all children undergo a moment of
passage in which they first experience sexual desire
for their mother or father, then learn to relinquish the
parental object.
Is Jeffrey acting out in fantasy form incestuous
desires that evolve more suitable forms as the film
progresses?
How is the mother’s body represented in the film?
Exercise 5.4 Blue Velvet(3)
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Like Alfred Hitchcock, Lynch is pessimistic
regarding human nature and the liberal dream that we
can all temper our animal urges, make civil
institutions that allow us to live together peacefully,
and achieve a community of mutually respectful
equals.
The film makes reference to an essay by Freud called
the uncanny, in which Freud discusses a short story
called the sandman.
Exercise 5.4 Blue Velvet(4)
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Moreover, traumas leave their mark on the psyche,
and abused children recall and continue to act out the
feelings that accompany trauma even as adults.
How does the sequence that follows enact a similar
scenario?
Frequently, the abuse of children shatters their sexual
identity and makes it difficult for them to achieve a
coherent adult identity.
Exercise 5.4 Blue Velvet(5)
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What is the significance of Frank’s fetishism?
If so , how would you explain his violence toward her?
Finally, what do you make of the erotic expression on
the face of Dorothy at the end as she embraces her
child?
In other words, is Lynch’s own filmic practice
perverse, an attempt to circumvent the father’s
injunction against incestuous desire?