Theory for Classics

A Student's Guide

Louise Hitchcock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134050789
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia antica

This student's guide is a clear and concise handbook to the key connections between Classical Studies and critical theory in the twentieth century. Louise Hitchcock looks at the way Classics has been engaged across a number of disciplines.

Beginning with four foundational figures – Freud, Marx, Nietzshe and Saussure – Hitchcock goes on to provide guided introductions of the major theoretical thinkers of the past century, from Adorno to Williams. Each entry offers biographical, theoretical and bibliographical information along with a discussion of each figure's relevance to Classical Studies and suggestions for future research.

Theory for Classics, adapted from Theory for Religious Studies, by William E. Deal and Timothy K. Beal, is a brisk, thoughtful, provocative, and engaging title, which will be an essential first volume for anyone interested in the intersection between theory and classical studies today.

Part I
Predecessors

1 Sigmund Freud

Key concepts:

• unconscious
• repression
• Oedipus Complex
• psychoanalysis
• sublimation
• illusion
• pathography

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the founder of psychoanalysis as an academic discipline, was born into an assimilated, secular Jewish family in the Moravian town of Freiburg, Germany. However, the most formative place in Freud’s development was in fin de siecle Vienna where he took a medical degree at the University of Vienna in 1881. After winning a modest medical scholarship, he proceeded to work with Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893) at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris from 1885 to 1886. Freud was influenced by Charcot’s work on hysteria, which he diagnosed as a disease and treated with hypnotism. When Freud began his practice as a physician in Vienna in 1886, he focused on nervous disorders. Freud distinguished his method from Charcot’s by abandoning hypnotism in favor of encouraging patients to freely narrate their experiences. It was in Vienna that he initially proposed and refined his psychoanalytic discourse, presented in the landmark publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. Freud fled to London in 1938 to escape the advancing Nazis and died there in 1939.

The intellectual and theoretical legacy of Freud’s work in the humanities, especially literature, art history, and philosophy, is arguably one of the most important in the tradition of modernity. In addition to his assertion of the unconscious, his thesis that dreams possess an underlying logic, one that is discernible through a method of psychoanalytic interpretation, remains a centerpiece of Western cultural discourse. In a 1922 essay for a general audience Freud provides three definitions of psychoanalysis: (1) a discipline focused on investigating the unconscious; (2) a therapeutic method for treating nervous disorders; and (3) a growing body of data, providing an empirical component to his research. Together, these three definitions provide a helpful introduction to Freud’s approach.

The aim of Freud’s psychoanalysis was to investigate inaccessible mental processes through an analysis of the unconscious. Freudian terms such as the unconscious and repression have become commonplace, but in contemporary usage their precise meanings within Freud’s system are often lost. These two terms form a dynamic system that defines the very structure of Freudian psychoanalysis. The unconscious is, most simply put, the non-conscious part of the mind. As such, it affects conscious thought and behavior but is not directly accessible for interpretation. “We have learnt from psycho-analysis,” Freud argues, “that the essence of the process of repression lies, not in putting it to an end, in annihilating, the idea which represents an instinct, but in preventing it from becoming conscious … the repressed is a part of the unconscious …. How are we to arrive at a knowledge of the unconscious? It is of course only as something conscious that we know it, after it has undergone transformation or translation into something conscious” (“The Unconscious,” p. 573).

What the analyst must decipher is the various compromise formations—the distortions caused by the opposing forces of unconscious desire and those of repression—that become evident through an analysand’s retelling. Freud carried out his examinations through analysis of slips of the tongue, jokes, and above all dreams, which he called the “royal road” to the unconscious mind. Dreams, Freud believed, represent fulfillments of unconscious wishes and desires that the conscious mind censors because they are socially taboo or a threat to the integrity of the self. For Freud, the content of the unconscious is essentially those drives that are inadmissible to the conscious self and are therefore forced out consciousness through mechanisms of repression. These include drives and memories related to the “primal scene” (childhood recollection of seeing her/his parents having sex) as well as taboo desires related to the Oedipus Complex. Although repressed, they inevitably resurface in dreams, “Freudian slips,” and other forms of expression.

For Freud, the unconscious (id—primal instincts) is not static. It is bound in a series of complex mechanisms with the super-ego (“a special agency … self-criticism”), i.e., rational thought, reason, or one’s conscience (“The Uncanny,” p. 211). The site of conflict, tension, and negotiation is the ego (das Ich). It is the dynamic tension or play between these forces that distorts or disguises unconscious desire. The task of the analyst is to locate these compromise formations and decipher them. Freud writes that:

almost everywhere there can be found striking omissions, disturbing repetitions, palpable contradictions, signs of things the communication of which was never intended …. One could wish to give the word “distortion” the double meaning to which it has a right, although it is no longer used in this sense. It should mean not only “to change the appearance of,” but also “to wrench apart,” “to put in another place.”

(Moses and Monotheism, p. 52)

What makes Freud’s work extraordinary, then, is his attempt to develop a systematic means to access and interpret the unconscious. In the passage quoted here he explicitly elides the actions of psychical processes with those of textual interpretation (one influenced by the Jewish interpretive strategies of Midrash (commentary)) in a gesture that renders one’s conscious life, the life history of the ego, a text littered with “suppressed and abnegated material,” i.e., the traces of another origin (ibid.).

The Oedipus Complex is particularly important to Freud’s understanding of human consciousness and the origin nervous disorders. Although the tragedy of Oedipus lies in the shame of his unwitting murder of his father and marriage to his mother, the broader Freudian meaning of the Oedipus Complex concerns the young child’s attraction to the parent of the opposite sex and jealousy of the parent of the same sex. Although girls and boys experience this attraction and negotiate this complex differently, resolution is achieved by making a transition from jealousy of, to identification with, the same sex parent. Freud believes that the Oedipus Complex is a universal event, and the failure to negotiate it successfully is the primary cause of nervous disorders. The larger significance in this and other myths lies in absorbing the universal meaning in it by every new generation, whether it means resolving the parental tension in Oedipus or restoring order from the chaos in the story of Electra.

Freud’s second definition of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic method for treating nervous disorders involves an act of interpretation “concerned with laying bare these hidden forces”; one that from its inception, Freud desired to raise to the status of a science, what he called “an impartial instrument” (“The Uncanny,” p. 220). By investigating his patients’ life history, Freud sought to objectively demonstrate his contention that “in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish—that everything is somehow preserved and that in suitable circumstances …. It can once more be brought to light” (Civilization and its Discontents, p. 16). The presence of these “hidden forces” is made evident through everyday occurrences such as forgetting proper names, incidental mannerisms, slips of the tongue (i.e. Freudian slips or parapraxes), bungled actions, and, most importantly, dreams. Collectively all of these elements comprise the psychopathology that Freud is keen on identifying and interpreting. It is the analyst’s task, he argues, to pinpoint these slips, these inabilities, the unsaid within discourse, so as to help the patient attain knowledge of the repressed experiences that cause neuroses.

Of course, it was primarily with his identification of the constitutive elements of dreams, the dream work as Freud terms it, that psychoanalysis stakes its claim to our attention. Dreams, Freud believed, represent the fulfillment of unconscious wishes that the conscious mind censors because they are socially taboo, unpleasurable, or a threat to the integrity of the self (the ego). What has been repressed is represented in dream imagery. This representation occurs only after the repressed material has undergone distortion [Entstehung] brought about by condensation, displacement, pictorial arrangement, and secondary revision. Condensation is the process whereby a number of people, events, or meanings are combined and reduced to a single image in a dream. Displacement, on the other hand, is the process by which one person or event is dispersed into many linked associations, whether it is a similar sounding work or a symbolic substitution. The remaining element of pictorial arrangement and secondary revision are the means by which the dream is finalized; together they arrange the dream contents in such a way that the manifest content (the dream as the dreamer experiences it, i.e. the literal text of the dream) does not completely hide the latent content (the repressed unconscious material). It is this opening in the otherwise seamless construction of the dream work that allows Freud to intervene.

Freud’s intervention, his “talking cure” as one of his early patients phrased it, a therapeutic method for treating nervous disorders, requires the analysand to narrate his or her life history. Lying on a couch, the analysand recounts his or her life history with little interruption from the analyst, who sits behind the patient listening for subtle manifestations of unconscious processes that indicate neurosis. Freud’s urging (in On Beginning the Treatment) that “the patient must be free to choose at what point he shall begin” has been seen as influenced by Homer’s invocation of the Muse to “start from where you will” at the beginning of The Odyssey (Nobus, In “Polymetis Freud,” p. 262). In this more or less uninterrupted, free association by the patient, language is not taken at face value. Rather Freud’s self-imposed task is to sift through the language of the conscious mind for traces of the unconscious, i.e., traces that index the presence of latent or repressed content. In the act of recounting one’s life history certain elements pique the analyst’s curiosity: an odd turn of phrase, a mishandled image, the repetition of a certain word, a nervous tic, and so on. These elements hint at the faulty areas of the construction of the self, which indicates the absent-pres-ence of what has been repressed: the little thread, which if pulled unravels the entire fiction. This is why the ego, one’s conscious sense of self—what you presume to be self-evident and non-contradictory—is, in fact, a fiction.

In psychoanalysis, the speaking human subject is approached as a divided subject, a site of conflict between conscious and unconscious drives that do not form a single, integrated, whole self. Therefore, the enunciations of the “I” of language are not to be accepted without hesitation because more often than not they represent only the alibis of the ego. What Freud is after is the trace of the origin: the alibi (literally, what is in another place).

Freud’s third definition of psychoanalysis is a growing body of scientific research, including case studies, research data on the mind and brain, and interpretations of other aspects and works of culture. Indeed, Freud did not restrict himself to analyzing individual human subjects, nor did he ignore other fields of academic research in the natural sciences and humanities. Rather, he was a prolific interpreter of culture, approaching it through archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, literature, and religion.

The model of psychic preservation, the presence of the past in the present, is one Freud borrows from archaeology, drawing inspiration from a variety of sources, from Schliemann’s discovery of Troy to ancient Rome. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud posits an analogy between the psychic preservation and an archaeological model, specifically Rome, the Eternal City. He explains how the topography of Rome is shot through with ruins and remnants of the past; they are found “dovetailed into the jumble of the great metropolis which has grown up in the last few centuries since the Renaissance” (p. 17). Freud takes the model of an archaeological site with its subsequent layers of ruins and maps it onto human consciousness because this is how the past is preserved in the present; it is a model of immanence. He argues that we should compare the past of a city with that of the mind. He asks us to “suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past” (ibid.). In both models, what Freud posits is a spectral palimpsest that recalls his famous explanation of the Wunderblock, wherein all that has been written on the tabula rasa is preserved in the wax on which it rests. This model of immanence is important because it provides a spatial metaphor that enables one to read the traces or residual effects of the past in the present. Moreover, it helps us to understand Freud’s insistence when it comes to the constant action required to repress an unconscious desire. He is adamant when he asserts that the “process of repression is not to be regarded as an event which takes place once, the results of which are permanent, as when some living thing has been killed and from that time onward is dead; repression demands a persistent expenditure of force …. The maintenance of a repression involves an uninterrupted expenditure of force” (“Repression,” p. 572).

From Freud’s first major text The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) through works dealing with religion, such as Totem and Taboo (1913), and even in later work such as Civilization and Its Discontents, a conception of the human being is given. It posits that humans are driven by two primal instincts: self-preservation and libidinal satisfaction. These instincts abide no normative social laws besides satisfaction. This drive towards satisfaction is a destructive force. Unchecked, only violence and death would result from our march toward unabashedly selfish fulfillment. Thus, Freud argues that there is a need for civilization and social order to repress these instincts; to make civilization as such possible these instincts must be addressed. One of the primary means for dealing with these instincts that Freud identifies is sublimation.

In sublimation, he argues, repressed material is “promoted” into something grander or is disguised as something “noble”. For example, sexual urges may be given sublimated expression in the form of intense religious experiences or longings, or the production of art and literature, so that essentially, it performs a cathartic function (see also Kristeva). “Sublimation,” Freud writes, “of instinct is an especially conspicuous feature of cultural development; it is what makes it possible for higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic or ideological, to play such an important role in civilized life” (Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 44). Substitutive satisfactions are illusions in contrast with reality because what we desire is satisfaction and yet “there is no possibility at all of its being carried through; all the regulations of the universe run counter to it” (ibid., p. 23). Thus, we are made to derive enjoyment in illusory, second-tier forms. However, sublimation provides Freud with a means to further investigate how repressed material continues to exert a determining influence over conscious life, how and why primal instincts are perpetually present, always threatening to take over. This potential for desublimation occurs not only on the individual level, but on the collective level as well because sublimatory ventures like religion and art are social illusion. Sublimation has important implications for interpreting myth and for understanding the history of classics as a discipline, through investigating and analyzing the motivations of some of its major figures, such as Winckelmann’s homosexuality or Schliemann’s psychopathic tendencies.

Fre...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Predecessors
• PART II The Theorists