Psychoanalytic Criticism

Elizabeth Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136495922
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 2002. Modes and categories inherited from the past no longer seem to fit the reality experienced by a new generation. 'New Accents' is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change, to stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study. The purpose of this book is to give a critical overview of what has become a very wide field: the relationship of psychoanalytic theory to the theories of literature and the arts, and the way that developments in both domains have brought about changes in critical practice.

I

Introduction

 

The purpose of this book is to give a critical overview of what has become a very wide field: the relationship of psychoanalytic theory to the theories of literature and the arts, and the way that developments in both domains have brought about changes in critical practice. Psychoanalysis addresses itself to the problems of language, starting from Freud's original insight concerning the determining force within utterance: he draws attention to the effects of desire in language and, indeed, in all forms of symbolic interaction. The language of desire is veiled and does not show itself openly. To read its indirections, to account for its effects, is no simple matter. What is at issue?

Psychoanalysis explores what happens when primordial desire gets directed into social goals, when bodily needs become subject to the mould of culture. Through language, desire becomes subject to rules, and yet this language cannot define the body's experience accurately. What is of peculiar interest to psychoanalysis – some would say peculiar in the sense of both special and bizarre – is that aspect of experience which has been ignored or prohibited by the rules of language. Words fail to match it but it is actual none the less. The energies of this desire become directed outside conscious awareness, attaching themselves to particular ideas and images which represent unconscious wishes. Wunsch in Freud's terminology has this special sense, as desire associated specifically with particular images, whereas ‘desire’ is better retained for those underlying energies which are not yet bound to specific aims.

Only through its effects do we come to know the unconscious: through the logic of symptoms and dreams, through jokes and ‘Freudian slips’, through the pattern of children's play, and most crucially in the mutually affective relationship which human beings develop as a consequence of their past total helplessness and dependence on another person. These emotions, regenerated in the analytic situation, may be taken as evidence that no experience the body has is ever totally erased from the mind. In the unconscious the body does not take the social mould, and yet the conscious mind thinks it has. On the basis of clinical evidence psychoanalysis has built up a theory of how this difference comes about. It hypothesizes that there are certain stages of socialization each of which have their own problems of invasions from the unconscious. The joint recreation on the part of patient and analyst of the earliest stages in the patient's development is to be taken as evidence that no phase of development is ever totally outlived, no early satisfaction wholly surrendered. The neurotic and psychotic disorders which bring human beings to the consulting-room symptomatically speak of the mismatch between bodily desire and sexual-cum-social role.

None of this as yet can be scientifically proved, despite the efforts of the founder. If science is given a positivist definition, psychoanalysis cannot count as one of the physical sciences. What psychoanalysis has to offer therefore cannot be assessed without raising the problem of what a science is or can do. It is through its implicit questioning of traditional philosophic theories of how knowledge is acquired that psychoanalysis makes its most interesting contribution. Accounts of ‘the standing of psychoanalysis’ (Farrell 1981) continue to take for granted that psychoanalysis must situate itself in relation to other modes of knowledge and to ‘common sense’, and that therapy is the yardstick by which theory is to be measured. On the contrary, psychoanalysis is a theory of interpretation which calls into question the ‘commonsense’ facts of consciousness, facts which it maintains can only be reconstructed after the event. The assumption of a plain objectivity susceptible to a rigid true/false analysis is itself open to question. Science may continue to be reliable without necessarily accepting that labelling and measuring can do justice to that to which they are applied. The progress of science has been marked by revolutionary changes in the understanding of concepts, leading to definitions that are incompatible with those they replace, not merely falsifications of them (Kuhn 1970). At the most basic level of science, quantum physics, the question of interpretation emerges irrepressibly. Science is itself a highly interpretative activity, and it is as a science of interpretation – that is, in part, as a science of science – that psychoanalysis must be viewed (Foucault 1974, p. 373; see pp. 160–1 below). This is not to say that the theory must be accepted uncritically. The emphasis must be on the interpretative force of the theory instead of on a simplistic true/false analysis of what are highly subjective phenomena. There is a positivist error in thinking that subjective phenomena cannot be objectively studied. The effects produced in a body by its perilous entry via language into culture take the form of repetitions and patterned interactions from which laws can be derived, thereby making the unconscious a legitimate object of a special science (Althusser 1977).

This book tries to show in what way Freudian theory has been and still is part of an ongoing debate. As a body of knowledge acquired in the clinical situation it is itself open to more interpretation. One might consider whether it should focus on liberating the self in its efforts to achieve pleasure and avoid unpleasure (instinct- or id-psychology); whether it should strengthen that part of the self capable of social adaptation (ego-psychology and its offshoot, object-relations theory); whether it should centre on the division of the subject in language (structural psychoanalysis); or whether it should openly serve a revolutionary purpose by opposing and accusing social institutions (anti-psychiatry). All these positions are paralleled by the changing relations in literary theory and critical practice.

If there is a single key issue it is probably the question of the role of sexuality in the constitution of the self, and crucially, how this sexuality is to be defined. This raises the question why we should still be bothering with psychoanalytic theories of sexuality in the context of literature and the arts. Critics from Kenneth Burke and Lionel Trilling onwards have warned against it while at the same time hallowing the process by which psychoanalysis can be made literary. This now familiar theme has been taken up again in a recent collection of critical essays on Freud:

Freud's principal literary speculation is not to be found in the familiar psychosexual reductions that tend to characterize his own overt attempts at the psychoanalysis of art. [It lies] instead in his notion that the very mechanisms of the mental agencies are themselves the mechanisms of language.

(Meissel 1981, p. 2)

This kind of declaration is usually intended to protect literature and art from the unwary psychoanalytic critic who would ineptly perpetrate psychobiography and all manner of vulgar Freudianisms on the innocent art-object. Freud has anticipated this objection. ‘It may be’, he writes in his analysis of Jensen's story Gradiva:

that we have produced a complete caricature of an interpretation by introducing into an innocent work of art purposes of which its creator had no notion, and by so doing have shown once more how easy it is to find what one is looking for and what is occupying one's own mind.

But, he argues, even if the author was unaware of the work's ‘rules and purposes’, ‘nevertheless we have not discovered anything in his work that is not already in it. We probably draw from the same source and work upon the same object, each of us by another method’ (Freud 1953, IX, pp. 91 and 92).

Author and reader are both subject to the laws of the unconscious. To concentrate on ‘mechanisms’ without taking account of the energies with which they are charged is to ignore Freud's most radical discoveries: it is precisely the shifts of energies brought about by unconscious desire that allow a new meaning to emerge. A desexualized application of psychoanalytic criticism, a confining of it solely to the mechanisms of language -whether as an example of the plenitude of ambiguity (New Criticism and its offshoots: the ‘work’ of an author) or as a set of perpetually shifting ambivalences (deconstruction: the ‘workings’ of language in a ‘text’) – does not engage the full explanatory force of psychoanalytic theory. An essential point is missed. Psychoanalytic theory brings out the unconscious aspect of utterance through its concentration on the relationship between sexuality and social role. Clinical practice has borne out to what extent sexuality, in its wider Freudian sense, is the component of intention, how all utterance is concerned with the satisfaction of the needs of bodies which have become socialized. The literary text, the work of art, is a form of persuasion whereby bodies are speaking to bodies, not merely minds speaking to minds. The plays of Samuel Beckett graphically present us with images of bodies, or parts of bodies, sometimes comically, sometimes desperately, struggling to channel their desire through speech. Conversely, the theatre of Antonin Artaud assaults us with images of the body's violent refusal to become entrapped in language. Creative activity can here be seen as a material process, with both author/actor and reader/viewer implicated as desiring bodies.

This emphasis upon the bodily aspect of art poses a problem for psychoanalytic criticism because it neglects the public and the social. It is a problem with which psychoanalytic aesthetics battles intermittently on two fronts: first, there is the worry as to how the work of artistic merit is to be distinguished from the ‘work’ involved in the construction of dreams or fantasy; second, there is the question of regarding the work as ‘text’, no longer the property of a single author, but produced in a network of social relations. Each of these questions is concerned with the part that consciousness (whether true or false) plays in the creative process, and the way ideology affects the reading and writing of texts: the language of desire has both a private and a public aspect and that is why the literary and artistic work is a ‘text’, the proper reading of which is no simple matter.

Though psychoanalytic criticism is irresistibly drawn to those texts that are classified as literature (and art), it has not been able to provide a satisfactory theory of aesthetic value, but then neither has any other approach. It contributes rather to an understanding of the creative process, both before and in language, and this has implications for aesthetics. Beginning with Freud, this account deals with those psychoanalytic theorists who have been the main contributors to the criticism of literature and the arts, either directly or indirectly (through their work being taken up by others). Included also are theorists (Derrida, Foucault) who have had an effect on psychoanalytic criticism.

The outline follows a historical course, though like Freud's famous sequence of sexual maturation, no stage ever totally supersedes another. On the contrary, recent French contributors have tried to merge an id-centred approach, focusing on the emotions attached to the sexual drives, with the abstract linguistic one of structural psychoanalysis. Tracing out a sequence of development in chronological order does not therefore imply that there is a necessary logical order. Such a method merely enables me to give as clear as possible an exposition of the field while still leaving room for critical appraisal. The aim will be to show how psychoanalytic theory and practice, not always working in concert with each other, have contributed to the theory and practice of criticism. There are four variables here, which makes for a complex set of interactions. At the same time I shall attempt to trace out the ideological assumptions that underlie successive developments in both theory and practice. Though the overall aim is exegesis, which must include showing what is of worth even where there are deficiencies, there will be an underlying and unconcealed attempt to point to what has now emerged as the most valuable aspect of psychoanalytic criticism.

My criteria derive from a three-fold scheme: first, I see psychoanalytic criticism as investigating the text for the workings of a rhetoric seen as analogous to the mechanisms of the psyche; second, I argue that any such criticism must be grounded in a theory which takes into account the relationships between author and text, and between reader and text; and third, I argue that these relationships be seen as part of a more general problem to do with the constitution of the self in social systems at given moments in history.

PART I

2

Classical psychoanalysis: Freud

Theoretical principles and basic concepts

Though the summary of Freudian theory given here cannot but be selective, it aims to indicate what sort of knowledge psychoanalysis has to contribute to the understanding of literature and the arts. The same mechanisms which Freud shows as determining in normal and abnormal behaviour come significantly into play when we are engaged in aesthetic activities of any kind. The theories which follow offer various explanations of how the unconscious functions in the production and consumption of the arts. This section will introduce the main concepts of psychoanalytic theory: the models of the psyche, the concept of repression, the role of the sexual instincts – their nature and place in Freud's theory of the unconscious, and the phenomena of transference.

Sigmund Freud (1886–1939) gives a genetic explanation of the evolutionary development of the human mind as a ‘psychical apparatus’. He regarded such an explanation as providing a scientific basis for a theory of the unconscious, by which he relates it directly to the needs of the body. He looks at the mind from three points of view: the ‘dynamic’, the ‘economic’ and the ‘topographical’ (see Freud 1953, XX, pp. 265–6 for a brief summary). These are not mutually exclusive interpretations but emphasize different aspects of the whole. All three are evidence of Freud's attempt to derive the mind from the body.

The ‘dynamic’ point of view stresses the interplay of forces within the mind, arising from the tensions that develop when instinctual drives meet the necessities of external reality. (The German word for these drives is Triebe, translated as ‘instincts’ in the Standard Edition, but because, as will be seen, they are to be distinguished from instinct in animals, it is now more usual to translate Triebe as ‘drives’, particularly when the notion of pressure is at stake.) The mind comes into being out of the body. What is necessarily given at the start are the needs of the body itself: these are inseparably connected to feelings of pleasure and pain.

From the ‘economic’ point of view pleasure results from a decrease in the degree to which the body is disturbed by any stimulus. Unpleasure results from an increase in disturbance. In the interaction of the body with the external environment a part of the mind Freud calls the ‘ego’ evolves to mediate the actions of the body so as to achieve the optimal satisfaction of its needs. In particular the ego is concerned with self-preservation. This of its nature implies that there has to be control of these basic instincts if there is to be an adjustment to reality. Under the economic model this is viewed as a struggle between the ‘reality principle’ and the ‘pleasure principle’, in which the body has to learn to postpone pleasure and accept a degree of unpleasure in order to comply with social demands.

The third point of view is the ‘topographical’ of which there are two versions. The psychical apparatus is here conceived of in a spatial metaphor as divided into separate sub-systems, which together mediate the conflict of energies. In the first of the two versions Freud sees the mind as having a three-fold division, conscious, preconscious and unconscious. Consciousness he equates with the perception system, the sensing and ordering of the external world; the preconscious covers those elements of experience which can be called into consciousness at will; the unconscious is made up of all that has been kept out of the preconscious-conscious system. The unconscious is dynamic, consisting of instinctual representatives, ideas and images originally fixated in a moment of repression. But these do not remain in a fixed state; they undergo a dynamic interplay in which associations between them facilitate the shift of feeling from one image or idea to another. In Freud's terminology they are regulated by the ‘primary process’, a type of mental functioning where energy flows freely by means of certain mechanisms. These mechanisms, of crucial interest for psychoanalytic criticism, will be explained later in this chapter in the sections on dreams and art, where their function as strategies of desire will be discussed. The second version of the topographical scheme was introduced by Freud in 1923, when he came to view the mind as having three distinct agencies: the ‘id’, a term applied retrospectively to the instinctual drives that spring from the constitutional needs of the body; the ego as having developed out of the id to be an agency which regulates and opposes the drives; and the ‘superego’, as representative of parental and social influences upon the drives, a transformation of them rather than an external agency. This model of the psyche is often called the ‘structural’ model and is the one drawn on by ego-psychologists.

With the appearance of these agencies, the picture of dynamic conflict becomes clearer. The id wants its wishes satisfied, whether or not they are compatible with external demands. The ego finds itself threatened by the pressure of the unacceptable wishes. Memories of these experiences, that is images and ideas associated with them, become charged with unpleasurable feeling, and are thus barred from consciousness. This is the operation known as repression: ‘the essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance from the conscious’ (XIV, p. 147).

Unfortunately this theory, what there is of it, is far from simple. If the notion of there being unconscious mental processes is to be seen as the key concept of psychoanalysis, it has of necessity to be linked with the theory of repression, ‘the cornerstone on which the whole structure of psychoanalysis rests’ (p. 16). Freud makes a distinction between two senses of the term. ‘Primal repression’ initiates the formation of the unconscious and is ineradicable and permanent. Although the forces of instincts are experienced before socialization, such experience is neither conscious nor unconscious. Freud cannot account for how such forces find representation in the mind. He has to hypothesize that these instincts have become bound to thoughts and images in the course of early (pleasure/pain) experience. Primal repression consists of denying a ‘psychical representative’ (that is an idea attached to an instinct) entry to the conscious: a fixation is thereby established, splitting conscious from unconscious. Without these initial imprintings the later entrance into language that establishes personhood could not be achieved. For Freud primal repression marks a pre-linguistic entry into a symbolic world. Lacan, on the other hand, reserves the term for the second stage of symbolization, the entry into language (for further discussion of this problem see Weber 1982 on Freud, pp. 39–48; see also Laplanche and Leclaire 1972, on Freud versus Lacan, pp. 155–63).

The term ‘repression’ in its second and more generally known sense is used by Freud to designate repression proper or ‘after-pressure’ (XIV, p. 148): it serves to keep guilt-lad...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• General editor's preface
• Acknowledgements
• General editor's preface
• 1 Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• References
• Further reading
• Index