Communication and Social Order

Hugh Dalziel Duncan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351527552
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In this highly influential study of art forms as models for a theory of communications, Hugh Dalziel Duncan demonstrates that without understanding of the role of symbols in society, social scientists cannot hope to develop adequate models for social analysis. He reviews critically major contributions to communication theory during the past century: Freud's analysis of dream symbolism, Simmel's concept of sociability, James' insights into religious experience, and Dewey's relating of art to experience.

PART ONE

Symbolic Contexts of Social Experience in Freud, Simmel, and Malinowski

1

Symbolic Interaction in Freud’s Work

THE IMPORTANCE OF SYMBOLS IN FREUDIAN THEORY

AS MANY have pointed out, Freud’s predecessors in the study of men were not the neurologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists from whom he borrowed some of his terms, but the great artists, and especially literary artists, of our civilization. In his early years, as his discussion of the case history of Elisabeth von R. shows, Freud was disturbed over the similarity between his presentation of case histories and the literary form of the short story. He says:

I have not always been a psychotherapist. Like other neuro-pathologists, I was trained to employ local diagnoses and electro-prognosis, and it still strikes me myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science. I must console myself with the reflection that the nature of the subject is evidently responsible for this, rather than any preference of my own. The fact is that local diagnosis and electrical reactions lead nowhere in the study of hysteria, whereas a detailed description of mental processes such as we are accustomed to find in the works of imaginative writers enables me, with the use of a few psychological formulas, to obtain at least some kind of insight into the course of that affection. Case histories of this kind are intended to be judged like psychiatric ones; they have, however, one advantage over the latter, namely an intimate connection between the story of the patient’s sufferings and the symptoms of his illness—a connection for which we still search in vain in the biographies of other psychoses.¹

In the closing paragraph of this discussion, Freud returns to the problem of symbolization. He tells us that when a hysteric “creates a somatic expression for an emotionally colored idea by symbolization, this depends less than one would imagine on personal or voluntary factors. In taking a verbal expression literally and in feeling the ‘stab in the heart’ or the ‘slap in the face’ after some slighting remark as a real event, the hysteric is not taking liberties with words, but is simply reviving once more the sensations to which the verbal expression owes its justification.” After quoting Darwin’s work on the expression of emotions, in which it is argued that expression originally had a biological purpose, he goes on to say that while constant use has weakened the meaning of such symbols and reduced them to figurative pictures, “hysteria is right in restoring the original meaning of the words in depicting its unusually strong innervations.”

The student of human motivation, then, will turn to literature because there he finds “detailed description of the mental processes,” and he will study the figures of speech used by those under stress, because they evoke the somatic symptoms of which they are an expression. But what has all this use of literature to do with science? And, if we say that poets know more than anyone else about human conduct, why should we not study poetry rather than psychology to find valid descriptions of behavior? For if hysteria is determined by symbols, then obviously the study of symbols would tell us much about hysteria, since the names given by the hysteric to feelings are all we know in any empiric sense, about such feelings. But at this point Freud drew back: “. . . it is perhaps wrong to say that hysteria creates these sensations by symbolization. It may be that it does not take linguistic usage as its model at all, but that both hysteria and linguistic usage alike draw their material from a common source.”²

The search for this common source, and the hope that he could represent psychical processes as “quantitatively determined states of specific material particles,” subject to the “general laws” of motion conceived of as “quantities in a condition of flow,” as he said in his Project for a Scientific Psychology, was never abandoned by Freud. But neither did he abandon the use of literature (as well as case histories) to develop his theory. As Jones tells us, and as we know from Freud’s speech on Goethe in 1930, Freud admired the poetic and philosophic mind. He did not think of literature as “intuition,” “insightful,” or as a kind of crude survey of human motives which would soon be refined by social science.³ To the very end of his life, artists and philosophers were “the few to whom it is vouchsafed . . . with hardly any effort to salvage from the whirlpool of their emotions the deepest truth to which we others have to force our way, ceaselessly groping among torturing uncertainties.”⁴

The paradox, then, in Freud’s work is that while he refused to study motivation in terms of symbols, he often illustrated what he had studied and conclusions he had reached, through illustrations drawn from symbolic works. His great work, The Interpretation of Dreams, is an analysis of language,⁵ dream language, whose meaning is elaborated by references to literature, legends, tales, indeed, almost the whole range of verbal expression. Yet while literary forms are used to explain the meaning of a dream, we are told that dream language is typically archaic in nature, and represents a regression to the most primitive mode of thought. This, in turn, can be understood only by the knowledge of the primitive forms of language which psychoanalytic theory can supply.

Perhaps the strongest testimony of Freud’s respect for creative writers was his admission that since the “gifts and abilities of the artist are closely bound up with the capacity for sublimation, we have to admit that also the nature of artistic achievement is inaccessible to us psycho-analytically.” This, said in 1910 in his book on Leonardo, is repeated several times throughout his works. Thus in the exposition of his work he wrote in 1913, “The Claims of Psycho-Analysis to Scientific Interest,” he declares that while the “motive forces of artists are the same conflicts which drive other people into neurosis and have encouraged society to construct its institutions . . .” yet how or why it is “that the artist derives his creative capacity is not a question for psychology.” ⁶

At times, indeed, Freud’s respect for the literary mind is so great that it is hard to distinguish between what is literal and what is metaphor in his use of literary material. He often “discovers” that a literary work like Hamlet or Oedipus Rex proves or corroborates some aspect of psychoanalytic theory, and then continues to quote the literary work as further proof of another psychoanalytic concept. Thus, he tells us that the ideational contents and memory traces of the experience of former generations, man’s archaic heritage, exist in myths, tales, and legends, which are transmitted biologically as well as socially. The individual brings into life at birth not only “dispositions” but symbolic expressions which are hypostasized into a kind of substance. This functions mechanically in the cathexis of the libido. At such times Freud seems almost ready to make communication a category as well as a phase of experience, in line with the tradition of Dewey, Mead, and Burke.

But, as we shall see, he never does. Symbols are modes of expression which have never been individually acquired but are a racial heritage. Such symbols have a fixed meaning, and whether they are found in dreams, mythology, folklore, relation, art, or literature, symbols mean what they do largely because language originated in attempts by men to satisfy their sexual needs. Thus, while it is true that men developed language for communication, this communication was sexual. As time passed, speech was used to accompany work. Men learned to make work agreeable by accompanying their work with rhythmically repeated sounds. Through these rhythms sexual interest was transferred to work. Thus, all words came to possess two meanings, one pertaining to sex, the other to the work which went on as words were uttered. Words became disassociated from their original sexual significance. Because of this a number of rootless words came into existence; they were of sexual origin but had lost their sexual meaning.

FREUD’S ATTEMPT TO COMBINE QUALITIES AND QUANTITIES IN HIS DESCRIPTION OF CATHEXIS

Psychical states are reflections of material elements subject to the laws of motion, in Freud’s theory. These elements, called neurones, function mechanically. Nervous excitation is subject to the principle of inertia—that is, neurones tend to get rid of excitation, as when sensory stimulus is followed by motor discharge. Paths of discharge develop for reducing and ending stimulation. Internal stimuli, however, cannot be reduced or ended by simple motor discharge, as when we flee from danger. Mental contents (ideas) replace neurones, and the tendency of neurones to get rid of excitation is replaced by a pleasure-displeasure principle which reflects, in the mind, the mastering of stimuli. Wishes are currents in the mind. They arise from displeasure but end in pleasure, which is reached in the discharge of tension through the motor apparatus of the body.

But there is no orderly progression from tension to motor activity. Orderly progression occurs only when secondary processes of thought replace the primary. Secondary processes employ the reality principle, which is subject to canons of logic and casual inference. On the primary level, the level of pure pleasure principle, thought takes place in a purely mechanical fashion. Ideas are associated through emotional equivalences based on association of ideas with a discharge of tension. Such ideas can be displaced so that the object associated with the discharge of one type of nervous excitation can serve as the object of another. Thus, a snake and a penis are emotionally equivalent. Logical relations of the kind we use in conscious thought are not used. Emotional equivalences are regulated by the tendency toward discharge in pleasure. The pleasure principle makes no distinction between true or false, immediate or remote satisfaction, real or imaginary; it functions like an electric current which, once it is turned on, must run its course.

The Ego, with its secondary processes, is distinguished by a Reality principle, as opposed to the pure pleasure principle. The Ego represents sanity and reason; the Id, the passions. It tests correspondence with reality, interposes a process of thinking, secures postponement of motor discharge, dominates the Id, and defends itself against the Super Ego. At this point Freud’s images of the Ego shift from those of the mind as a machine to mind as an agent. The mechanical image of mentation and the functioning of the Id now becomes a dramatic image. The Ego becomes a sort of agent in the mind. This agent is depicted like a monarch who must protect himself against enemies without (as the Super Ego), as well as those within (the Id).

When Freud turned to the concrete problems of his patients and attempted to create hypotheses which could be related in some empiric way to what he observed, that is, what his patients said and expressed about themselves, he gave up trying to fit psychological theory into a mechanical model. His speculations on infantile sexuality, mechanisms of defense, and his final statements in An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940) on the Ego, are expressed in nonmechanical images. The Oedipus complex is a dramatic image. The son’s longing to sleep with his mother, Freud tells us, “is the subject of the Oedipus complex, which Greek legend translated from the world of childhood phantasy into a pretended reality.” The world of childhood phantasy cannot be understood by literal application of the Oedipus legend, for in this there is no castration fear, and Oedipus did not know that it was his father whom he had killed and his mother whom he had married. We know it, Freud tells us, from psychoanalytic theory. Castration occurs in the Oedipus legend, “for the blinding with which Oedipus punished himself after the discovery of his crime, is, by the evidence of dreams, a symbolic substitute for castration.” The ignorance of Oedipus, in turn, is a “legitimate representation of the unconsciousness into which, for adults, the whole experience has fallen and the doom of the oracle, which makes or should make the hero innocent, is a recognition of the inevitability of the fate which has condemned every son to live through the Oedipus complex.” ⁷

Differences from the psychoanalytic view are the result of a “poetic handling of the material.” This is not really an “addition of extraneous subject matter but merely a skillful employment of the factors present in the theme.” And, finally, those who do not accept the “true” Oedipus theme as a psychoanalytic theme, suffer from a “general lack of comprehension” like that displayed by literary critics whose “lack of comprehension” of the “solution” to the problem of Hamlet⁸ by reference to the psychoanalytic version of the Oedipus legend (the “Oedipus complex”) showed how ready “is the mass of mankind to hold fast to its infantile repressions.” Symbols mean what they do because

dream-symbolism extends far beyond dreams; it is not peculiar to dreams, but exercises a similar dominating influence on representation in fairy tales, myths, and legends, in jokes and folklore. It enables us to trace the intimate connections between dreams and these latter productions. We must not suppose that dream-symbolism is a creation of the dream work; it is in all probability a characteristic of the unconscious thinking which provides the dream work with the material for condensation, displacement, and. dramatization.⁹

Now, displacement and dramatization are very different terms. One is derived from mechanical models; the other, from linguistic. Mind is explained in the mechanical model by topographical imagery; and in the dramatic, by dramatic or forensic imagery. The unconscious is the realm of repressed memories and emotions, but the unconscious is described as a kind of place, and the mind as a place or a number of places, in which ideas move about in space. Instinctual stimuli, or excitation impulses, pass on in three kinds of neurones; those of perception, of memory, and those which are necessary for the retained mem...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Part One Symbolic Contexts of Social Experience in Freud, Simmel, and Malinowski
• 1 Symbolic Interaction in Freud’s Work
• 2 Georg Simmel’s Search for an Autonomous Form of Sociability
• 3 Malinowski’s Theory of the Social Context of Magical Language
• Part Two The Self and Society as Determined by Communication in James, Dewey, and Mead
• 4 Society As Determined by Communication
• 5 Communication and the Emergence of the Self in the Work of George Herbert Mead
• 6 The Final Phase of the Act
• 7 The Problem of Form in Mead’s Theory of the Significant Symbol
• Part Three The Function of Symbols in Society: an Application of Burke’s Dramatistic View of Social Relationships
• 8 Burke’s Dramatistic View of Society
• 9 Social Order Considered as a Drama of Redemption Through Victimage
• Part Four Burke’s Sociology of Language
• 10 The Structure and Function of the Act in the Work of Kenneth Burke
• 11 A Rhetoric of Motives
• 12 The Rhetoric of Social Order
• Part Five Social Mystification in Communication Between Classes
• 13 Toward a New Rhetoric
• 14 Social Mystification and Social Integration
• 15 Reason and Hierarchal Disorganization
• 16 The Rhetoric of Ruling
• 17 Rhetoric as an Instrument of Domination Through Unreason
• 18 Social Order Based on Unreason
• Part Six A Sociological Model of Social Order as Determined by the Communication of Hierarchy
• 19 Social Order as a Form of Hierarchy
• 20 The Communication of Hierarchy
• 21 Hierarchal Address
• 22 A Sociological View of “Inner” Audiences
• Part Seven Hierarchal Transcendence and Social Bonds
• 23 Social Transcendence
• 24 Equality and Social Order
• 25 The Establishment of Money as a Symbol of Community Life
• 26 Money as a Form of Transcendence in American Life
• Part Eight The Social Function of Art in Society
• 27 Comedy and Social Integration
• 28 The Comic Scapegoat
• 29 Comedy as the Rhetoric of Reason in Society
• 30 Tragic and Comic Sexual Themes Compared
• Part Nine By Way of Conclusion
• 31 A Sociological Model of Social Interaction as Determined by Communication