Literature, Psychoanalysis and the New Sciences of Mind

Leonard Jackson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317898306
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

At a time when psychoanalysis is attacked by biologists, psychologists and literary critics alike, this book offers a radical defence. Literature, Psychoanalysis and the New Sciences of Mind gives a clear introduction to the theories of Freud and Jung, the strange linguistic rewriting of Freud by Jacques Lacan. It explores the extraordinary variety of ways in which these writings have been applied to literature and literary theory. But for the first time, they are put in the context of recent biological theories of mind and sexuality.

Chapter 1

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Literature as psychotic fantasy

WHAT PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY EXPLAINS LITERATURE AND THE ARTS?

Literature as a test of psychological theory

All over the world, throughout the whole of history, people have been singing or reciting poems, acting in plays of various kinds, and telling stories. Recently – that is, in the last five or six thousand years – they have been writing these down. We call them works of literature. All this time, other people have been watching these works and listening to them, and sometimes reading them – not through compulsion, not through languid acceptance of a social duty, not even as a formal religious or university study (though all these things exist), but avidly, for the sake of personal desire, and sometimes with a total, if temporary, loss of self.

The cardinal question for literary theory is why this happens. This is a question for a science of psychology. It isn’t a philosophical question; it isn’t concerned with metaphysical categories, or the logic of value judgements. It isn’t a question for linguistics, since literature is only one of the arts; music, dance, painting and sculpture can be equally involving and are equally old; but none of them use words. It isn’t a question for sociology or comparative anthropology; these can perhaps explain the different forms literature takes in different societies, but not its universality. If literature is a human universal, we need a universal anthropology based on a fully general theory of psychology to explain its existence and functioning – and it becomes a good test of such a general theory; perhaps, indeed, the ultimate test. But associationist and behaviorist theories of psychology fail that test; and for all its recent promise, cognitive science fails too. Cognitive science cannot explain why any organism would want to spend hours entertaining false cognitions about the world!

The theory I am adopting in this book is that human beings are innate fantasists. Part of the time they are asleep – during REM sleep,¹ in fact – and the whole time they are awake, they are producing fantasy material in the form of images or basic narratives, which is marked by not corresponding, as normal consciousness does, to the world about them: its structure and content are determined from within. In fantasy, residues from daily conscious experience are combined with other material that does not come from consciousness, and is emotionally compelling. Works of art in general, and works of literature in particular, are sophisticated fantasies driven by what Freud called primary process thinking – that is, thinking in images and elementary narratives rather than words and arguments – and reworked by what he called a process of secondary elaboration in accordance with whatever are the current artistic conventions. Works of literature are admired by critics, and to a lesser extent ordinary readers, for socially accepted reasons that can be consciously discussed, and that are different from one period to another. But it is the underlying fantasy that renders them compulsive; and this is because, whenever you entertain a fantasy in consciousness, you are repeating deeply unconscious fantasy material.

This theory has been familiar for some time as an adaptation of Freud’s theory of dreams, and the obvious core of a Freudian theory of art. But recently Freud’s whole theory of psychology has been widely rejected as unscientific nonsense, not only by the biologists, behaviorist psychologists, and cognitive scientists who have thought it nonsense for years, but by softer thinkers like sociologists and even literary critics. Can one rescue it, and reconcile it with cognitive science, say, to remove the arid emptiness and triviality of that discipline, and bring it into touch with deeper motivations? I think one can. I am going to argue, in fact, that cognitive psychology, placed in its proper biological framework, is perfectly compatible with several versions of dynamic psychology, and that dynamic psychology, which studies instinct, symbolism, fantasy and the transformations of desire, requires a solid framework of human cognitive psychology and even of animal behaviour studies.

The total theory of literature that I am adopting is in one sense obvious: one needs cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics to explain the mechanics of reading – how a set of words on a page is transformed into a narrative experienced in the head; one needs a biologically based dynamic psychology, including an account of the unconscious, to explain how that narrative moves, excites and satisfies. But there is more to it than that.

Such a model of the way we understand art has profound implications for the way we understand human beings in general. I am arguing that at the heart of any cognitive psychology that is adequate to deal with human beings rather than computers, or indeed, with animals rather than computers, there is a large Jung-or-Lorenz-shaped hole filled with archetypes or, equivalently, instincts, and the archetypal images and narratives through which we apprehend them; and at the heart of that, a large Freud-shaped hole filled with aggression and sex, along with complex unconscious psychic mechanisms for transforming these, first into fantasy, then into complex choices of action. I shall be arguing in fact for a dynamic psychology that has come to terms with ethology as well as sociology, and offering that as the foundation for the theory of fantasy we have to have at the heart of any serious literary theory.

Paranoia in the tutorial room: a thought experiment

I will begin with a thought experiment.

Let us suppose that a student comes into my office and claims he is a hobbit. He wishes to consult me about a serious problem he has – perhaps the most serious problem anyone has ever had. Some years before, he had acquired an old ring, apparently of little value save for one curious property: to put it on made one invisible. He has now discovered that the ring had originally belonged to a very powerful and exceedingly malevolent being, who now wishes to get it back. If the being gets it back, it will become even more powerful, and even more malevolent; it will take over the world, and it will certainly destroy the comfortable world of hobbits. Only one creature stands in the way of this – himself – since he, by very arduous means, has the power to destroy that ring. For that reason the powerful and malevolent being is hellbent on destroying him: so he – my student, the self-proclaimed hobbit – is the one person who could save the world, and he is encircled by spies and assassins.

I will recognise him as a paranoid schizophrenic, suffering marked delusions of reference and persecution. I will wonder how one begins a conversation that will end with advice to see a good psychiatrist and may lead to his being sectioned in a mental hospital. I will treat him, in fact, in exactly the same way as the student who tells me she is an illegitimate daughter of the Queen, or the one who told me that his landlord was persecuting him and trying to poison him with a quarter of a pound of strychnine in his soy sauce. (One of these examples is true.)

The young person who follows him into my office is bubbling with enthusiasm. The book he has just read seemed utterly real, utterly convincing, despite its fantastic nature. It took one out of oneself completely, and one believed every word. With all that, it was serious, too. It was an examination of the nature of good and evil, and of the responsibility of individuals in relation to apparently overwhelming power.

I shall respond with warmth to this; after all, here is a student who has actually enjoyed a book, even if the book is The Lord of the Rings rather than Nostromo. With impeccable political correctness, I shall raise a few questions about the book. Isn’t there a degree of racism in the basic ideology? And perhaps a degree of immaturity – what about Edwin Muir’s suggestion that all the characters are schoolboys with Aragorn as head boy?

It is, of course, exactly the same book. The difference is the quality of belief, and the nature of the identification involved. The first student is projecting a heroic fantasy onto the world and identifying with its principal character. He does this much of the time, his belief is a real one, and it may well affect his future actions. (For example, he might decide that I am an emissary of Sauron and stab me with his little dagger. This is a disturbing thought.) If he believes the book in this way, he has symptoms indistinguishable from those of paranoid schizophrenia. The second student also projects a heroic fantasy on the world, and the same fantasy at that; and also identifies with the principal character. But he does this while sitting down and scanning the pages of the book, as it ‘takes him out of himself’. Disturb him and he’ll blink his eyes and be back in the real world again. He is unlikely to stab a lecturer, but if sufficiently enthusiastic, they may talk each other to death. Talk to him, and he is anxious to link the fantasy to the real world in any number of analogical ways; but it never occurs to him that it actually happened. There is no loss of contact with reality – or perhaps it would be better to say only a temporary, controllable and defeasible one.

From the point of view of the psychiatrist, it is the difference between the two students that is all-important; he is in the business of cure. For the literary theorist it is the similarity between the two cases that is theoretically interesting. We are trying to understand how literature works. How and why do we produce it? How and why do we consume it? The striking thing here is that there seems to be no essential difference between the content of the most popular works of literary entertainment, and those of paranoid fantasies. The James Bond films or the thrillers of Patricia Cornwell would have done just as well for my example as The Lord of the Rings. I could also have chosenWuthering Heights, or a gentler book than that. After a recent television adaptation, it is not impossible that there are people roaming the streets claiming to be Mr Darcy of Pride and Prejudice. I am not of course suggesting that the majority of paranoid delusional systems are taken from novels – they are not. I am noting, however, that they could be. In a sense, paranoid delusionsare elementary novels. What is different is the secondary elaboration of the fantasy, the proliferation of realist detail, the depth and ambiguity of treatment, and so forth.

Let me venture an account of what the second student is doing. He is using the book to introject a rich and elaborated paranoid fantasy. He is then engaging in a series of mobile identifications with the narrator, and with many of the major characters, in that fantasy. In fantasy, he is performing heroic deeds, and suffering bravely too, and it’s probably affecting his autonomic nervous system, though he’s sitting still. If I had him wired up properly, I could demonstrate this. Then he comes out of the fantasy to tell me about it, using a special academic language we have developed for this purpose, that objectifies and impersonalises experience, but is pretty transparent for those who know it. As we talk, we create a common object, a common cultural reference, having value for both of us. (I wish it were The Rainbow though. Come to think of it, it was, for that slightly more mature woman student … ) My second student is definitely not schizophrenic. Neither am I. But both of us show schizoid tendencies. We tend to withdraw from the real world from time to time and live in worlds of our own, or a common cultural world built out of those worlds.

My next student is a woman. She has been deeply affected by the book she has read, which isWuthering Heights. She has read it passionately, in a kind of intense dream. We argue whether Heathcliff is a realistic character – after all, he disappears as an uneducated boy and comes back as an accomplished gentleman confidence trickster, with no explanation of how he made that change. She insists that Heathcliff is utterly real – more real to her than any real person she has met. She is not psychotic. She is not deceived. She knows he is a fiction. She may well end up writing an essay on the Byronic hero in the nineteenth century novel. She might end up arguing that Heathcliff’s violence is a metaphor for the violence of sexual passion; it is projected onto him from his woman creator. But did she see, when she was reading the book, that it was her own passion she was projecting, to make this incomplete character seem intensely real? And does that mean that her own sexual feeling, in fantasy, was savage and masochistic? Would it be sexual harassment if I were to suggest as much?

Next I have two students in, a man and a woman, as if anybody cares; we are all egalitarians now, and I for one cannot tell the difference between a male student and a female one from an anonymous exam script. The text is The Magus. The girl, in this case, is cleverer; mildly post-structuralist, but clear with it; crisply she points out that this text is itself a study in the nature of novelistic illusion, brilliantly self-referential, but never finally disturbing our bourgeois complacencies in the way genuine French New Novel does. I admit she is right. Her companion, however, is the one who read the book passionately, and he is disturbed. Stammeringly, he tries to make sense of the sadistic role-plays in which Nicholas is trapped as victim; seduced and tricked into showing himself to himself as sexual Nazi and suffering voyeur; and at last holding back desperately when invited to crack that whip again and again across the bare back of the girl who has seduced and humiliated him and is now so vulnerable, bound half-naked to a whipping frame with everybody looking on.

He is disturbed, it is clear, because it has become his fantasy; he is fighting against the sexual sadism it injects into his mind, and to which he, dismayingly, finds himself responding. The girl, meanwhile, is becoming most uncomfortable. John Fowles did not disturb her at all; but the revelation that she has a sexual maniac sitting next to her does. I wonder if she realises that she has one sitting opposite her as well? Fowles disturbs me a little, and used to, a lot. Yet none of us believes in Fowles’s book; and all of us have read books with worse violence and sex. (Nobody actually gets hurt in The Magus, save in memories of the first world war, and the sexual encounters are consensual and not implausibly excessive in number. In Angela Carter, now, Little Red Riding Hood has sex with the wolf after he has eaten her grandmother. There’s real violence for you.)

What on earth are we all doing, introducing these savage fantasies of sex and violence into our lives? Most literature is the same – from The Iliad, Oedipus Rex, Lysistrata, to Regan inKing Lear getting off on the violence against Gloucester, as she helps put out his eyes. Sometimes the fantasies are more disguised than others; in Pamela there are hundreds of pages of restrained fantasy about a rape that never happens; in Pride and Prejudice both hero and heroine are humiliated and laid bare in a purely metaphorical way. Violence and sex are transmuted into conflict and romance; but do they lose their underlying quality? Is there not some level of fantasy in the reader’s mind in which they are violence and sex still, and can sometimes provide the same autonomic reactions? And is that not the level at which we become addicted to literature, requiring our regular fix of readerly excitement to get through the day or the week?

A book – or the equivalent in other media, a film, a play, a painting, a piece of music, a dance – is a mind-altering drug, and hence a mood-altering drug, of infinitely greater precision than any chemical; it can reach the precise neural net that stores an archetypal image. I am a pusher, aiming to create or mould a lifelong addictive habit. I have the habit myself. I can read a couple of serious Victorian novels, or twenty detective stories, in a week and not think anything unusual has happened. And every one of those is a portable psychosis. It is obvious that these brief and controllable psychotic episodes we insist on having – several times a week, and in advanced cases of lyric poetry addiction, perhaps fifty times in a day – do something for us, though it is not in the least obvious whether it is good or bad.

In view of the content of violence and sex that these episodes often have, can they possibly be good? Some of the major religions have sometimes said ‘No. You should read only the Good Book’. My students have in fact, read some of this; we included it in the first year course. Psalm 137 is unquestionably Good, though a layman might mistake it for a ferocious invitation to genocide. So are the accounts of how God allowed his only son to be tortured to death to purge the sins of mankind. Many Christians have supposed that it is necessary to mental health and salvation to spend an hour or so each day thinking about this delightful episode. It will escape nobody’s attention that this is, psychologically speaking, simply another type of experience of literature. One can get a fix, not a thousand miles away from an artistic one, in a prayer meeting. If religions too provide an analogous fix, we are getting nearer to the universal claim: perhaps all human beings need their regular dose of psychotic fantasy?

Which science of psychology can explain fantasy?

The question that any literary theorist has to ask of a science of psychology is what produces the desire for literature, and the addiction t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: where psychoanalysis stands now
• 1 Literature as psychotic fantasy: what psychological theory explains literature and the arts?
• 2 The new cognitive psychology: behaviour, thinking and fantasy in animals and human beings
• 3 The sceptical Freudian: psychoanalytic theory and its discontents
• 4 Art as fantasy and defence: the basic psychoanalytic theory of art and literature
• 5 Instinct, archetype and symbol: making Jung into a scientific theorist
• 6 The first post-structuralist: a cognitivist critique of Jacques Lacan
• 7 Reading 'otherwise': some versions of post-structuralist psychoanalytic criticism
• 8 The structure of unconscious sexual fantasy: sexual difference, behavioral genetics and symbolic meaning
• Suggestions for further reading
• Select bibliography
• Index of topics
• Index of names, works and characters