Excerpts from Chapter 2: Psychoanalytic Criticism. In Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide by Lois Tyson (1999)
Author: Lois Tyson
Tyson, L. (1999). Chapter 2: Psychoanalytic Criticism. In Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc.
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We’re starting our study of critical theory with psychoanalytic criticism because, whether we realize it or not, psychoanalytic concepts have become part of our everyday lives, and therefore psychoanalytic thinking should have the advantage of familiarity. If you’ve ever told an angry friend “Don’t take it out on me!” you were accusing that friend of displacement, which is the psychoanalytic name for transferring our anger with one person onto another person (usually one who won’t fight back or can’t hurt us as badly as the person with whom we are really angry). Psychoanalytic concepts such as sibling rivalry, inferiority complexes, and defense mechanisms are in such common use that most of us feel we know what they mean without ever having heard them def ned. The disadvantage of such common usage, however, is that most of us have acquired a very simplistic idea of what these concepts mean, and in their clichéd form they seem rather superficial if not altogether meaningless. Couple this unfortunate fact with our fear that psychoanalysis wants to invade our most private being and reveal us to ourselves and to the world as somehow inadequate, even sick, and the result is very often a deep-seated mistrust of “psychobabble.” Indeed, our common use of the word psychobabble illustrates our belief that psychoanalysis is both impossible to understand and meaningless. Thus, in a culture that uses psychoanalytic concepts in its everyday language we frequently see the wholesale rejection of psychoanalysis as a useful way of understanding human behavior.
i agree because from what i read the reading is about how we cant controll our subconsious
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many concepts can be seen as reflections of our actions- mostly governed by our subconscious.
Although we don’t see it it becomes part of our lives and we may not notice it or know what it is but it’s becoming part of our everyday of lives.
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this shows how even the most mundane of behaviors and thoughts of a subject can be considered reflections of psychoanalytic concepts.
Honestly this is very true because i have done it in the past and i feel like sometimes it happens because at the moment you don’t know what to do or say.
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psychoanalytic concepts can help people identify why issues like family problems, complexes, and defense mechanisms; stem from deep-seared and repressed memories and traumatic experiences.
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this issue of incorrect interpretation could allow for misunderstandings and lead to cliches surrounding the subject- pushing people away from getting professional help, and making them continue on hurting themselves with unhealthy behaviors.
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most people behave a certain way due to past experiences that subconsciously govern their minds and lead them to do specific things.
People like to deny the existence of psychoanalytic concepts because it is the idea of defining issues we as humans cant see unless we really think about it. It can become meaningless because people say its a load of bs and they deny it.
I hope this chapter will show you that seeing the world psychoanalytically can be simple without being simplistic. If we take the time to understand some key concepts about human experience offered by psychoanalysis, we can begin to see the ways in which these concepts operate in our daily lives in profound rather than superficial ways, and we’ll begin to understand human behaviors that until now may have seemed utterly baffling. And, of course, if psychoanalysis can help us better understand human behavior, then it must certainly be able to help us understand literary texts, which are about human behavior. The concepts we’ll discuss below are based on the psychoanalytic principles established by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), whose theory of the psyche often is referred to today as classical psychoanalysis. We must remember that Freud evolved his ideas over a long period of time, and many of his ideas changed as he developed them. In addition, much of his thinking was, as he pointed out, speculative, and he hoped that others would continue to develop and even correct certain of his ideas over time. So the attempt in this chapter is to outline those areas of classical psychoanalytic theory that are particularly useful to literary criticism and to show how this view of human behavior is relevant to our experience of literature. Later in the chapter, we’ll also take a brief look at the more recent work of nontraditional psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan.1
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aspects of psychoanalytic theorem can be seen in various examples of literature.
For example, ‘The Catalyst’ by Laurie Halse Anderson- writes about the inner thoughts of the main character and their contrast with another character who goes through trauma also.
In the book “Flowers for Algernon” the main character has a mental disability and gets surgery to make him brilliant, his process through narration form being ignorant to intelligent shows how different states of the mind effect people views and feelings
The origins of the unconscious
When we look at the world through a psychoanalytic lens, we see that it is comprised of individual human beings, each with a psychological history that begins in childhood experiences in the family and each with patterns of adolescent and adult behavior that are the direct result of that early experience. Because the goal of psychoanalysis is to help us resolve our psychological problems, often called disorders or dysfunctions (and none of us is completely free of psychological problems), the focus is on patterns of behavior that are destructive in some way. I say patterns of behavior because our repetition of destructive behavior reveals the existence of some significant psychological difficulty that has probably been influencing us for some time without our knowing it. In fact, it is our not knowing about a problem—or, if we do know we have a problem, not realizing when it is influencing our behavior—that gives it so much control over us. For this reason, we must begin our discussion with the concept central to all psychoanalytic thinking: the existence of the unconscious.
I think this means that knowing and not knowing what are problems are make us oblivious to how it may affect our actions. But also knowing what our situation is could get us to take control and change our actions to be beneficial.
i think lots of people can agree with this because this can also connect to people taking their anger out on to other people even if they don’t realize that they are gibing attitude because of a problem they can be having. or it can affect the way they act or their attitude because they have no clue on what they are doing
Do you remember the song “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Rolling Stones? The idea expressed is “You can’t always get what you want, but you get what you need.” This formulation, with the addition of two words, gives us the key to thinking psychoanalytically: “You can’t always get what you consciously want, but you get what you unconsciously need.” The notion that human beings are motivated, even driven, by desires, fears, needs, and conflicts of which they are unaware—that is, unconscious—was one of Sigmund Freud’s most radical insights, and it still governs classical psychoanalysis today.
So do I unconsciously want my phone or is it consciously because I do not need my phone but do I want my phone?
The unconscious is the storehouse of those painful experiences and emotions, those wounds, fears, guilty desires, and unresolved conflicts we do not want to know about because we feel we will be overwhelmed by them. The unconscious comes into being when we are very young through the repression, the expunging from consciousness, of these unhappy psychological events. However, repression doesn’t eliminate our painful experiences and emotions. Rather, it gives them force by making them the organizers of our current experience: we unconsciously behave in ways that will allow us to “play out,” without admitting it to ourselves, our conflicted feelings about the painful experiences and emotions we repress. Thus, for psychoanalysis, the unconscious isn’t a passive reservoir of neutral data, though the word is sometimes used this way in other disciplines and in common parlance; rather, the unconscious is a dynamic entity that engages us at the deepest level of our being.
Does therapy and meditation work?I hear that its been able to access more parts of the mind?
i agree with this because it can cause people pain or guilt and we usually dont wanna solve them because we think they are too stressful and are really bad and overwhelming and difficult to handle.
As well as them being likely to follow the patterns of what they had once experienced, the children who have gone through different things such as what you said, abuse , they can view this situation through a different perspective and go against it.
Until we find a way to know and acknowledge to ourselves the true cause(s) of our repressed wounds, fears, guilty desires, and unresolved conflicts, we hang onto them in disguised, distorted, and self-defeating ways. For example, if I don’t realize that I still long for the love I never received from my long-dead, alcoholic father, I am very liable to select an alcoholic, aloof mate so that I can reenact my relationship with my father and “this time” make him love me. In fact, even when I do realize that I have this kind of psychological issue with my father, it is difficult to recognize when I am “acting it out” with another person. Indeed, I probably won’t see the profound similarity between my father and my beloved: I’ll focus instead on superficial differences (my father has dark hair and my beloved is blond). In other words, I will experience my longing for my neglectful father as longing for my current heartthrob. I will feel that I am in love with my current sweetheart, perhaps even desperately in love, and I will believe that what I really want is for my sweetheart to love me back.
i think that people do this sometimes because of something traumatic that has happened in there life or they just seek attention someplace else that they think they would get it from because where they are now they don’t receive it there (if y’all can understand)
I will not necessarily realize that what I really want in wanting this man is something I never received from my father. The evidence will lie in the similarities between his treatment of me and my father’s treatment of me and in the fact that, should I succeed in gaining the kind of attention I want from my current “crush,” either it will not be enough (he will never be able to convince me that he really loves me; I will think that my insecurity is proof of his indifference), or if he does convince me that he really loves me, I will lose interest in him because the attentive lover does not fulfill my need to reexperience the abandonment I suffered at the hands of my father. The point is that I want something I don’t know I want and can’t have: the love of my neglectful father. In fact, even if my father were still alive and had the kind of psychological rebirth that permitted him to give me his love, I would still have to heal the psychological wounds he inflicted over the course of my childhood—my feelings of inadequacy and abandonment, for example—before I could benefit from his love.
As you can see in the above example, the family is very important in psychoanalytic theory because we are each a product of the role we are given in the family-complex. In one sense, the “birth” of the unconscious lies in the way we perceive our place in the family and how we react to this self-definition: for example, “I’m the failure”; “I’m the perfect child”; “I must always ‘come in second’ to my brother”; “I’m unlovable”; or “I’m responsible for my parents’ problems.” The oedipal conflict (competition with the parent of the same gender for the attention and affection of the parent of the opposite gender) and all the commonplace ideas of old-style Freudian theory (for example, sibling rivalry, penis envy, castration anxiety) are merely descriptions of the dominant ways in which family conflicts can be lived. They give us merely starting points for understanding differences among individuals. For example, in some families, sibling rivalry (competition with siblings for the attention and affection of parents) can occur, in an important sense, between a parent and child. If I feel jealous of my mate’s affection for our child, what may be going on is a reenactment of my unresolved childhood rivalry with a sibling I believed was more loved by my parents than I. That is, seeing my mate’s affection for our child reawakens some or all of the hurt I felt when I saw my parents’ affection for the sibling I believed they preferred. And so I now find myself competing with my child for the attention of my mate.
Family, a lot of the time, shapes who we will become when we get older. They are very important parts of our lives in childhood, because it is when we learn and grow the most. So it would make sense that traumatic events involving the relationship you have with your parents greatly affect how you think and act when you are older, whether that be in a positive or negative way.
It seems that people commonly blame themselves for abuse, and I wonder if this is because they don’t want to believe that someone would treat them or someone they love so poorly. They want to think that everyone is perfect and nice, so they start believing that its their fault and no the other person’s.
theres this show i watched where this girl always felt like the ugly duckling and the unloved child in the family and she would do anything for attention and a lil feeling of love because her family never gave her that much attention unlike her siblings so she felt really bad but at the end she learns that her parents love her equally and etc
So, it can be said that the fundamental ways our minds have developed, paired with the huge difference in the environments we were raised in have changed the ways that psychology has worked or can be applied. Most would say that “penis envy” or the “oedipal conflict” are not correct or accurate, because women do not envy men’s reproductive organs, they envy their social standard and their privilege. Freud’s misinterpretation of these situations have led to the creation and belief of these ideas about the psychology of women or other peoples.
It is important to note that oedipal attachments, sibling rivalry, and the like are considered developmental stages. In other words, we all go through these experiences, and they are a natural and healthy part of maturing and establishing our own identities. It is when we fail to outgrow these conflicts that we have trouble. Here’s an example common to many women. If I remain in competition with my mother for my father’s love (a competition that can go on in my unconscious long after one or both parents are dead), I will probably be most attracted to men who already have girlfriends or wives because their attachment to another woman will allow me to replay my competition with my mother and “this time” win. Of course, I might not win the man this time, and even if I do, once I’ve won him I’ll lose interest in him. Although I probably don’t realize it consciously, his desirability lies in his attachment to someone else. Once he’s mine, he’s not so exciting anymore. On the other hand, if as a child I felt that I won my father’s affection from my mother (which he may have given me as a way of punishing or avoiding my mother), then I may be attracted to men who already have girlfriends or wives (and who don’t seem likely to leave them) because I feel I need to be punished for “stealing” Dad from my mother. Of course, another way to punish myself for stealing Dad from my mother (or for wanting to steal him or, if he sexually molested me, for feeling that it was somehow my fault) is to be unable to respond sexually to my mate.
Someone might pursue a married man because they were in competition with their mother for their father’s love, but they might pursue a mildly tempered man who will care about them and only them. Or they might not be interested in men, and maybe they would pursue a toxic relationship with another woman, or they could pursue a meaningful relationship with a caring woman.
It all depends on the person.
A common way in which men replay unresolved oedipal attachments involves what is often called the “good-girl/bad-girl” attitude toward women. If I remain in competition (usually unconscious) with my father for my mother’s love, I am very liable to deal with my guilt by categorizing women as either “like Mom” (“good girls”) or “not like Mom” (“bad girls”) and then by being able to enjoy sex only with women who are “not like Mom.” In other words, because I unconsciously associate sexual desire with desire for my mother, sexual desire makes me feel guilty and dirty, and for this reason I can enjoy it only with “bad girls,” who are themselves guilty and dirty and whom I don’t associate with Mom. This view often creates a seduce-and-abandon pattern of behavior toward women. When I seduce a “bad girl,” I must abandon her (sooner or later) because I cannot allow myself to be permanently attached to someone so unworthy of marriage, that is, unworthy of being classified with my mother. When I seduce a “good girl,” two things happen: (1) she becomes a “bad girl” and, like other “bad girls,” unworthy of my permanent commitment, and (2) I feel so guilty for “soiling” her (which is like “soiling” Mom) that I must abandon her to avoid my guilt. The point is that, for both women and men, only by recognizing the psychological motivations for our destructive behavior can we hope to begin to change that behavior.
The defenses, anxiety, and core issues
Our unconscious desires not to recognize or change our destructive behaviors— because we have formed our identities around them and because we are afraid of what we will f nd if we examine them too closely—are served by our defenses. Defenses are the processes by which the contents of our unconscious are kept in the unconscious. In other words, they are the processes by which we keep the repressed repressed in order to avoid knowing what we feel we can’t handle knowing. Defenses include selective perception (hearing and seeing only what we feel we can handle), selective memory (modifying our memories so that we don’t feel overwhelmed by them or forgetting painful events entirely), denial (believing that the problem doesn’t exist or the unpleasant incident never happened), avoidance (staying away from people or situations that are liable to make us anxious by stirring up some unconscious—i.e., repressed—experience or emotion), displacement (“taking it out” on someone or something less threatening than the person who caused our fear, hurt, frustration, or anger), and projection (ascribing our fear, problem, or guilty desire to someone else and then condemning him or her for it, in order to deny that we have it ourselves).
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there seem to be destructive side effects to this subconscious behavior.
since we dont realize what we do unconsciously so we dont know how to change it
Additionally it isn’t just that we don’t know how to change. I think it is that unconsciously we know what we are doing and how to change but we fear that change and what it will do so we stay the same. Because we have formed these identities around our destructive behavior which is related to our unconscious self, so I think everyone knows how to change they we just all fear change without admitting it.
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this shows how human would rather try to run away from their issues- pushing them into the subconscious, rather than facing and overcoming them.
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the mind used repression, selective memory, denial, avoidance, displacement and projection to avoid what they do not wish to deal with.
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selective memory and perception only allow for only what the subject perceives as “un-painful” to be remembered; and even goes as far as to subconsciously modify memories based off of events that seem “overwhelming” to the subject.
Perhaps one of the most complex defenses is regression, the temporary return to a former psychological state, which is not just imagined but relived. Regression can involve a return either to a painful or a pleasant experience. It is a defense because it carries our thoughts away from some present difficulty (as when Death of a Salesman’s Willy Loman fashes back to his past in order to avoid the unpleasant realities of his present life). However, it differs from other defenses in that it carries with it the opportunity for active reversal, the acknowledgment and working through of repressed experiences and emotions, because we can alter the effects of a wound only when we relive the wounding experience. This is why regression is such a useful therapeutic tool.
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this method could end up helping those who seem haunted by their past- by revisiting certain events that might have caused them pain upon remembering, and helping them work through it.
Many people suffer through horrible experiences but eventually get through it. As an example if an adult suffered a horrible childhood what if they return to those horrible experiences. Meaning that revisiting those memories actually harms a person. If that happend how would thta help someone.
Many psychological experiences can function as defenses, even when not formally defined as such. For example, fear of intimacy—fear of emotional involvement with another human being—is often an effective defense against learning about our own psychological wounds because it keeps us at an emotional distance in relationships most likely to bring those wounds to the surface: relationships with lovers, spouses, offspring, and best friends. By not permitting ourselves to get too close to significant others, we “protect” ourselves from the painful past experiences that intimate relationships inevitably dredge up. Having more than one romantic or sexual partner at a time, breaking off romances when they start to evolve past the infatuation stage, and keeping oneself too busy to spend much time with family and friends are just a few of the many ways we can maintain an emotional distance from loved ones without admitting to ourselves what we are doing.
As we go through friendships and relationships people get hurt.And, sometimes everntually that relationship may reach an end causing people to seperate themselves so that they can’t get hurt anymore.
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the act of secluding oneself could be set up by the fear of getting hurt by similar experiences that made them feel lonely in the first place.
Of course, sometimes our defenses momentarily break down, and this is when we experience anxiety. Anxiety can be an important experience because it can reveal our core issues. Let’s begin our discussion of core issues and their relationship to anxiety with some examples of the more common core issues.
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anxiety for example, can really highlight one’s internal struggles with themselves, since it shows what they are most fearful of doing based on past traumatic experiences.
Fear of intimacy—the chronic and overpowering feeling that emotional closeness will seriously hurt or destroy us and that we can remain emotionally safe only by remaining at an emotional distance from others at all times. As we saw above, fear of intimacy can also function as a defense. If this particular defense occurs frequently or continually, then fear of intimacy is probably a core issue.
If someone has the feae of intimacy it may be because in the past they got close with someone but in the end all it did was harm them. And now that person may be to scared to get close with someone again because they don’t want to hurt themselves again.
Fear of abandonment—the unshakable belief that our friends and loved ones are going to desert us (physical abandonment) or don’t really care about us (emotional abandonment).
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since they feel like they’ve been hurt by those around them; the subjects in question would most likely not want to seek out help in fear that those trying to help them will also hurt them in the end in an act of betrayal.
Fear of betrayal—the nagging feeling that our friends and loved ones can’t be trusted, for example, can’t be trusted not to lie to us, not to laugh at us behind our backs, or in the case of romantic partners, not to cheat on us by dating others.
There have been times in my life where I would ask my friend something, and I knew the truth but then she would lie to me. So I uderstand that people have this fear because they feel like they can’t trust their friends.
so like, ive felt this because of a problem me and my ex bestfriend had. but basically she betrayed me because she told the lunch monitor that i was the one throwing wet paper towels and T.Ping the girls bathroom when it was actually her doing it. and i got so mad because i got detention for a whole week and she got away scott free and it got me so mad. and she like told people my secrets when we stopped being friends. and it hurts bad but you get over it.
Low self-esteem—the belief that we are less worthy than other people and, therefore, don’t deserve attention, love, or any other of life’s rewards. Indeed, we often believe that we deserve to be punished by life in some way.
I know that I can relate to this because I feel like I am less worthy than others, and that I have to live up to people. And I feel this way because I feel like I need to be enough for my parents. And I think that a lot of children feel this way. That they need to be enough for their parents, and even their friends.
Insecure or unstable sense of self—the inability to sustain a feeling of personal identity, to sustain a sense of knowing ourselves. This core issue makes us very vulnerable to the influence of other people, and we may find ourselves continually changing the way we look or behave as we become involved with different individuals or groups.
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self-deprivation, and the act of believing that the subject is not good enough can potentially cause them to create mental blocks for themselves- disabling them from doing certain things (since they’d possibly believe that they shouldn’t even attempt due to fear of failure); possibly leading them into an even worse state of mind.
Oedipal fixation (or oedipal complex)—a dysfunctional bond with a parent of the opposite sex that we don’t outgrow in adulthood and that doesn’t allow us to develop mature relationships with our peers. (Tyson 26–27)
You may notice that some of the core issues listed above seem related. Just as fear of intimacy can function as both a defense and a core issue, a given core issue can result from another core issue or can cause the emergence of another core issue. For example, if fear of abandonment is my core issue, I am liable to develop fear of intimacy as a core issue as well. My conviction that I will eventually be abandoned by anyone for whom I care might lead me to chronically avoid emotional intimacy in the belief that, if I don’t get too close to a loved one, I won’t be hurt when that loved one inevitably abandons me. To use another example, if low self-esteem is my core issue, I might develop fear of abandonment as a core issue as well. My belief that I am unworthy of love might lead me to expect that I will be abandoned eventually by anyone I love. Or my low self-esteem might lead me to develop fear of intimacy. My belief that I am less worthy than other people might lead me to keep others at an emotional distance in the hope that they won’t find out that I am unworthy of them. Of course, these are just some of the ways that core issues are connected to one another. I’m sure you can think of others.
I think that a fear of one thing can lead to the fear of something else. For example, the fear of abandonment and betrayal can lead to the fear of intimacy. Because if a perosn feels abondoned, or betrayed that person may be to scared to opn up to anyone else and then have the fear of intimacy.
We can see this as many people who believe and enforce one prejudice may believe in others.
The most important fact to remember is that core issues define our being in fundamental ways. They do not consist of occasional negative feelings, such as passing episodes of insecurity or low self-image. Having an occasional “bad-hair day,” for instance, does not indicate the presence of a core issue. Rather, core issues stay with us throughout life and, unless effectively addressed, they determine our behavior in destructive ways of which we are usually unaware. In other words, anxiety can tell us a good deal about ourselves because we are anxious in situations in which our core issues are in play. For example, I become anxious when one of my friends goes to the movies with another friend because it makes me relive the abandonment I felt from a neglectful parent whether or not I see the connection between the two events. That is, I feel abandoned now because I was wounded by feeling abandoned as a child, and I am anxious because I don’t want to admit to myself that, in some important way, I was abandoned by my parent. So I become hurt and angry with my friend without consciously knowing why. My unconscious knowledge of the reason why is what makes me anxious. In this way, anxiety always involves the return of the repressed: I am anxious because something I repressed—some painful or frightening or guilty experience—is resurfacing, and I want to keep it repressed. Psychoanalysis, as a form of therapy, is the controlled working in and with anxiety. Its goal (unlike that of ego psychology, which is a popular form of therapy today) isn’t to strengthen our defenses or restore us to social adaptation but to break down our defenses in order to effect basic changes in the structures of our personality and the ways we act.
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certain issues can be seen in someone’s character- and can lead them to do things that maybe others- with their own respective core issues; wouldn’t consider doing. These issues can end up governing people’s lives- and the way that they perceived reality; all stemming from their subconscious tendencies and past impactful memories.
Many of my friends get scared when they miss out on something that happened. Like the author said people feel neglected when they miss out on something. And it could be that my friends actually feel neglection from someone else because they were invited to hang out with us, but in my case I think she just felt like she would miss everything because she wasn’t there, and that she won’t be part of a conversation because she wasn’t there.
Under ordinary circumstances, however, our defenses keep us unaware of our unconscious experience, and our anxiety, even if it is somewhat prolonged or recurrent, doesn’t succeed in breaking through our repression. How then, without the aid of psychotherapy, can we learn about the operations of our own unconscious? As I noted earlier, patterns in our behavior, if we can recognize them, provide clues, especially in the area of interpersonal relations and, within that domain, especially in our romantic or sexual relationships, because it is here that our initial unresolved conflicts within the family are reenacted. In addition, we have access to our unconscious, if we know how to use it, through our dreams and through any creative activities we engage in because both our dreams and our creativity, independent of our conscious will or desire, draw directly on the unconscious.
Dreams and dream symbols
Many times I wake up and can’t remember anything so I wonder whether or not I dreamed. People will always tell me I did dream because we always dream but I sometimes think that I never dreamed some nights.
well it is said (dont quote me on this) that we do dream but we only remember a little bit of those dream or some dreams. so we can be dreaming is just ww dknt remember it at all
When we sleep, it is believed that our defenses do not operate in the same manner they do when we are awake. During sleep, the unconscious is free to express itself, and it does so in our dreams. However, even in our dreams there is some censorship, some protection against frightening insights into our repressed experiences and emotions, and that protection takes the form of dream distortion. The “message” our unconscious expresses in our dreams, which is the dream’s underlying meaning, or latent content, is altered so that we don’t readily recognize it through processes called displacement and condensation. Dream displacement occurs whenever we use a “safe” person, event, or object as a “stand-in” to represent a more threatening person, event, or object. For example, I may dream that an elementary school teacher is sexually molesting me in order to express (and at the same time avoid) my unconscious knowledge that one of my parents sexually molested me. Condensation occurs during a dream when-ever we use a single dream image or event to represent more than one unconscious wound or conflict. For example, my dream that I’m battling a ferocious bear might represent psychological “battles” or conflicts both at home and at work. Or, to expand on the above example, my dream that I am being sexually molested by an elementary school teacher might represent my unconscious feeling that my self-esteem is under attack by any number of family members, friends, and colleagues. (A single dream event may thus be a product of both displacement and condensation.)
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the passage notes how during sleep our subconscious feels “free” to do what it wants- expressing itself in subliminal ways that regularly; when the subject is awake, cannot occur.
But if we are being protected then why do we have nightmares. If we are supposed to be protected from frightening insights then why when we dream we have nightmares and see frightening insights.
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this shows that the subconscious still utilizes defense mechanisms that it would regularly use to repress certain things- even though during sleep it has the power to express itself wit very little limitations.
I mean not all nightmares come from a place of initial fright..like you could think about something that you saw on the internet and it gets contorted into something scary. Or maybe i’m wrong and all nightmares come from fright and you were “subconsciously scared” when you saw it.
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the text states that sometimes subjects will place certain people in their dreams as a “stand-in” for specific emotions; as a part of dream displacement.
Is dream displacement considered a nightmare? And if nightmares are dreams that showcase your fears then does that mean your scared of getting (molested in this case) but I guess nightmares aren’t limited just to fears. Dream displacement also seems to be a way of relief as it is a defense.
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events that might transpire in a subject’s dreams can be reflections of deeper and reoccurring issues that the person is being subjected to- as a way to make sense and reflect on those (mainly) traumatic experiences.
Because displacement and condensation occur while we dream, these processes are referred to collectively as primary revision. What we actually dream, once primary revision has disguised the unconscious message, or the dream’s latent content, is the dream’s manifest content. The dream images described above— images of an elementary school teacher molesting me and of myself battling a ferocious bear—are examples of manifest content. What these images actually mean is the dreams’ latent content, and that is a matter of interpretation. Is the elementary school teacher a stand-in for one of my parents, or are the images of sexual molestation a stand-in for verbal attacks on my self-esteem? Does the bear represent a psychological conflict, and if so, what is that conflict? In interpreting our dreams then, our goal is to recall the manifest content and try to uncover the latent content. However, we must remember that, at this conscious stage as well, we’re very liable to unconsciously change the dream in order to further protect ourselves from knowing what is too painful to know. For example, we might forget certain parts of the dream or remember those parts somewhat differently from how they actually occurred. This process, which takes place when we are awake, is called secondary revision.
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it seems that dreams have the ability to make the subject manifest content- rather than understanding that it is a matter of interpretation. This usually leads to the subject remembering the dream in a certain way- most likely in order to further protect themselves, by forgetting the parts that they might have deemed as traumatic and tried to repress.
But that means that unconsciously we know the truth to something happening in our life but we let ourselves know because we are scared for what will happen when our conscious knows. Something else that this makes me wonder is why do we sometimes forget we dreamt at all. Or why is it that when we dream, and then wake up we remember dreaming but we can’t put the pieces together and can’t really remember what happened but do remember what happened.
some people try to avoid problems like these because maybe they think it will solve itself or go away but it actually builds more pain to them. but i agree with you.
It may be helpful to think of the dream’s manifest content as a kind of dream symbolism that can be interpreted much the way we interpret symbols of any kind, if we keep in mind that there is no one-to-one correspondence between a given symbol and its meaning. That is, while there are some images that tend to have the same symbolic meaning from dreamer to dreamer, at least if those dreamers are members of the same culture, there are also important individual differences in the ways we represent our unconscious experience in our dreams. So to increase our chances of interpreting our dreams accurately, we must learn over time how we tend to represent certain ideas, feelings, and people in our dreams, and we must know the context in which a particular dream image occurred: what happened in the dream before, during, and after a particular dream image appeared?
yeehaw
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even though the subject could believe that the situations that they are seeing are very real- it is important to be able to discern whether certain aspects of the dream are in context or not- since misunderstandings of these dreams could lead to further negative affiliations.
This is talking a lot about analyzing dreams and the symbols they hold. But what if when we dream we don’t realize that there is something symbolic, and we just let it go, and it continues to harm unconsciously , but we can’t do anything about it because we don’t realize it’s happening. Additionally it says that we must understand what people represent in our dreams, but would first understanding what is happening to us in the real world help understand our dreams.
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if a subject were to correctly interpret their dreams they could possibly learn more about the issues that they are facing- and allow them to reflect as well as figure out ways to work things out for themselves.
Certain general principles of dream interpretation tend to apply in most cases, and they are as follows. Because dreamers create all the “characters” in their dreams, there is a real sense in which each person we dream about is really a part of our own psychological experience that we project during the dream onto a stand-in. If I dream that my sister gives birth to a stillborn child, for example, I might be dreaming either that I have given birth to a stillborn child (a failed relationship? a failed career? a failed artistic endeavor?) or that I am a stillborn child (am I feeling abandoned? helpless? depressed?) . As this example makes evident, dreams about children almost always reveal something about our feelings toward ourselves or toward the child that is still within us and that is probably still wounded in some way.
yeehaw
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this explains how dreams can seem like projections of past events that we’ve been effected by in the past- while being completely interpreted by our subconscious.
The author is giving these example through the perspective of an adult, but what if it was a child. Especially if it is a child dreaming this. The author says that the child represents it’s wounds from childhood. But what if a child is dreaming this, is it just the wounds that the child is feeling at the moment.
Given that our sexuality is such an important reflection of our psychological being, our dreams about our gender roles or about our attitudes toward ourselves and others as sexual beings are also revealing. In order to interpret these dreams, we need to be aware of the male and female imagery that can occur in them. Male imagery, or phallic symbols, can include towers, rockets, guns, arrows, swords, and the like. In short, if it stands upright or goes off, it might be functioning as a phallic symbol. For example, if I dream that I am holding my friend at gunpoint, I might be expressing unconscious sexual aggression toward that friend or toward someone else for whom that friend is a safe stand-in (such as my friend’s mate or my mate). In addition, my sexual aggression might be interpreted in a number of ways: is the emphasis on the sexual, on the aggression, or on both? Do I desire my friend’s mate, or am I jealous of my friend’s mate? Do I want to become more assertive in my sexual relationship with my mate, or do I want to hurt my mate’s sexual self-image as my mate has hurt mine? To decide which interpretation is correct requires more data in the form of other similar dreams, patterns in my waking behavior, and an honest analysis of my feelings about the dream and about the people involved. Analogously, if I dream that I am being held at gunpoint, I might be expressing an unconscious feeling that my sexuality, or my identity in general, is being exploited or endangered.
i had these dreams when I was about 7 that i was killing an alien with my pew pew gun (that’s what I called it as a kid) and i almost died… and then i woke up.
Those images seem like basic masculine objects, but I feel like the images that men and women feel shouldn’t be limited.
yeehaw
why cant that dream be a representation of something else in this scenario?
Female imagery can include caves, rooms, walled-in gardens (like the ones we see in paintings representing the Virgin Mary), cups, or enclosures and containers of any kind. If the image can be a stand-in for the womb, then it might be functioning as female imagery. Thus, if I dream I am trapped or lost in a small, dark room, I might be expressing an unconscious fear of my mother’s control over me or an unconscious fear that I have never completely matured as a human being. Perhaps I’m expressing both, for these two problems are certainly related. Female imagery can also include milk, fruit, and other kinds of food as well as the containers in which food is delivered, such as bottles or cups (yes, there is an overlap here with womb imagery)—in other words, anything that can be a stand-in for the breast, which is itself a stand-in for emotional nurturing. So if I dream that I am trying to feed a litter of hungry kittens from a small and rapidly diminishing bottle of milk (a dream that either gender can have), I might be expressing an unconscious feeling that too much is being asked of me by my children or by my spouse or by my employer—or by all of them—or that I am putting too much pressure on myself to take care of others. Analogously, if I dream I am hungry or looking for food, I might be expressing an unconscious need for emotional nurturing.
yeehaw
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it seems like memories from a subject’s childhood are the most prevalent in the subconscious mind- later governing what they subconsciously perceive in their lives.
To move to other kinds of symbols, if I dream about water—which is fluid, changeable, sometimes soothing, sometimes dangerous, and often deeper than it looks—chances are good that I’m dreaming about my sexuality or the realm of the emotions or the realm of the unconscious. So a dream that I’m about to be overwhelmed by a tidal wave probably indicates some fear of being overwhelmed by a repressed emotion that I fear is about to erupt. Of course, water is also related to our experience in the womb, so dreams that involve water, especially immersion in water, might also be about our relationships with our mothers. Dreams about buildings may refer to my relationship with myself, with the attic or the basement as the stand-in for the unconscious. Or dreams about buildings may refer to my relationship with some institution that the building represents for me, for example, the church, the school, the company for which I work, or the law (which, because it represents social rules and definitions, might be a stand-in for my superego). Although we might often dream about fears and wounds that we know we have—that are clearly part of our conscious experience—our dreams about these concerns probably indicate that we need to work further on them, that they bite into us in ways we aren’t ready to admit. Of course, recurring dreams or recurring dream images are the most reliable indicators of our unconscious concerns.
Since our dreams are part of our unconscious when we dream about something from our conscious it may be some form of communication. If something happens to us and we think we have healed, later in life we may have a dream (controlled by our unconscious) trying to remind us that we still need to heal. So while the unconscious and conscious work at different times they can communicate, and that can be through dreams.
yeehaw
yeehaw
usually when subjects have reoccurring dreams with very similar symbolism- it represents the many struggles that they could be dealing with throughout their lives.
Regardless of how frightening or disturbing our dreams are, they are relatively safe outlets for unconscious wounds, fears, guilty desires, and unresolved conflicts because, as we have seen, they come to us in disguised form, and we will interpret them only to whatever extent we are ready to do so. In addition, if a dream becomes too threatening, we will wake up, as we most often do during nightmares. However, if my nightmares begin to occur while I’m awake—that is, if the breakdown of my defenses is more than temporary, if my anxiety cannot be abated, if the truth hidden by repression comes out before my conscious self in a manner I can neither disguise nor handle—then I am in crisis, or trauma.
If we dream terrifying things how are our dreams safe outlets for our unconscious wounds. If the unconscious is free in dreams and makes us dream what we do which can be scary how is that safe. Shouldn’t our unconscious realize what objects symbolize in our dream and realize how scary our dreams can be.
yeehaw
yeehaw
due to all of the repressed memories one can forcibly remember whilst they are sleeping- many may think that dreams can be scary- but in actuality its just the subconscious ’ way of working through and rationalizing certain events that have effected us, usually leading to the ability to understand our issues and work through them over time.
The meaning of death
the meaning of death…i guess you can say the reaction to someones death and why they died. so for example like the titanic. jack died because he wanted to save rose from drowning. so he risked his life for rose out of love which gives meaning to his death
Crisis brings into the spotlight wounds, fears, guilty desires, or unresolved conflicts that I have failed to deal with and that demand action. I am flooded by the past because I can now see what was really going on. This is how I can know myself through crisis. Trauma is also used, of course, to refer to a painful experience that scars us psychologically. Thus, I might experience the childhood trauma of losing a sibling to illness, accidental death, or suicide and, in later life, experience the trauma, or crisis, of being flooded by all the guilt, denial, and conflict I’ve repressed concerning that death. And I might also see, for example, the ways in which my parents unconsciously encouraged my guilt in order to relieve their own.
Trauma can haunt you and effect your everyday life and make you experience immense psychological pain
trauma that scars us psychologically, might not always be visible, in the sense that we can’t remember the source of the trauma or the experience at all. when we are very young we can’t necessarily recognize that what is happening to us is inherently good or bad. because of this our brain pushes it back as far back in our subconscious as possible.only to be realized decades later. our brain uses the most powerful defense mechanism.
yeehaw
all fears seem to be linked to and rooted in a fear of death/dying.
It’s saying that anything that hurts could traumatized you and that it can cause suicide.
yeehaw
wether it is emotional or physical- if a person becomes traumatized then it will leave a deep scar in their life- and perhaps make them fear the world even more.
this remind me of what happened to jessica after what happened with bryce
I get driven to the train station a couple days a week by my grandma and my dad always tells me to hurry up and get ready fast because he feels bad that we are making her wait so long. he always tells me to wave goodbye at her when we leave the car because she loves us so much and we don’t have much time left with her.
yeehaw
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the passage explains how that person’s parents encouraged their child’s guilt as a way to avoid their own.
In fact, our relationship to death, whether or not we are traumatized by it in childhood, is a principal organizer of our psychological experience. Before we examine how our relationship to death operates in this way, it is important to note that death is the subject that, it seems to me, has given psychoanalytic theorists the most trouble probably because of its importance in their own, as well as everyone else’s, psychological experience. There has been some tendency to treat death as an abstraction—that is, to theorize about it in ways that don’t allow us to feel its force too intimately—presumably because its force is too frightening. So even when, or especially when, theorists have addressed the subject of death directly, they sometimes have done so in ways that tend to keep it at an emotional distance from themselves and, therefore, from us. I think this is the reason—to cite just one example—behind Freud’s theory that death is a biological drive, which he called the death drive, or thanatos.
yeehaw
the fear of death is apparently a driving factor for humans no matter their life experiences.
i think this part of the article is trying to say that people treat death like for example a car accident, you see them happen all the time but its not gonna happen to you right? No one treats those situations like actual threats until they actually happen. No one wants to deal with those threats or have them always on their mind.
yeehaw
it looks like some choose to treat death as a mere abstraction of its actuality.
In suggesting that human beings have a death drive, Freud’s attempt was to account for the alarming degree of self-destructive behavior he saw both in individuals, who seemed bent on destroying themselves psychologically if not physically, and in whole nations, whose constant wars and internal conflicts could be viewed as little other than a form of mass suicide. He concluded that there must be something in our biological makeup as a species to explain this death work, this psychological and physical self-destruction. Of course, when we conceptualize our death work as a drive, as something natural and unavoidable, we are off the hook of having to probe too deeply into its workings or to try to change it; after all, nothing we do can alter a biological drive. This is why I call the concept of the death drive an abstraction, an idea that operates only on the conceptual level, with no connection to the concrete world of experience. Although the concept of the death drive rests on biology, which is concrete reality, it takes our thoughts and our feelings out of the everyday world of action and responsibility, just as abstractions do. And this is exactly why I think some theorists have found abstract explanations of death attractive. Such explanations take us out of the everyday world in which our acts of psychological and physical self-destruction occur.
yeehaw
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he describes this as the “death Drive”) to his patients
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he tries to explain how the biological makeup-of human beings that react in this psychological "death or not.
me and my partner were talking about this and how you never know when your time is up and how you’d die. that being a natural cause which can sometimes be unavoidable or some other cause . and its scary
yeehaw
yeehaw
if someone were to live in a place that they enjoyed, then they’d feel a lot better about their life, and perhaps not think about the impending nature of death.
A more useful, and I think more accurate, way of understanding our relationship to death is to examine it in relation to the rest of our psychological experience, of which it is an integral part. If we do this, we will see that death, in particular, fear of death, is intimately connected to a number of other psychological realities. And we will see that individuals respond to death in various ways because of differences in their psychological makeup. In other words, while the processes I am about to describe probably occur in all of us, they will occur to different degrees and with different results in each individual.
First and foremost, for many of us, the thought of our own death keys into our fear of abandonment, our fear of being alone. Death is the ultimate abandonment: no matter how close we are to our loved ones, no matter how important we are in our communities, when we die we die alone. Even if we die in a plane crash with two hundred other people, we each die our own private death. Thus, one of the greatest comforts religious belief can offer is to assure us that we will not die alone and that after we die we will not be alone: God the Father will be there for us and with us. Our Heavenly Father will not abandon his children even when everyone else we know has done so.
this reminds me of a song by xxxtentacion because he always said that people die alone. and plus you never know when you die whether being with someone or alone in a coma or other
Some people argue that religion was made because people feared the unknown, and that they constructed a way of thinking that aligned with what they hoped happened after death to ease that fear of being alone. And this could be why there are so many different religions, because people have different ideas of what they believe the afterlife is like.
Fear of abandonment also plays a role when we fear the death of others. When children lose a parent, when adults lose a spouse, the overwhelming feeling of loss is often a feeling of abandonment. How could you leave me? Don’t you love me? What did I do wrong? Sometimes the bereaved feel abandoned even by God. In this context, whether we realize it or not, the death of a loved one pushes our guilt buttons: somehow I must have been inadequate; I must have done something wrong or I wouldn’t be punished in this way. In fact, fear of such a loss, of such intense psychological pain, is probably the biggest reason why some of us are afraid to get too close to another person or are afraid to love too deeply. If I can hold something back, not give my whole self over to the loved one, then I will be better able to bear the loss when the beloved dies.
so basically felt this a lot because ever since i was little, i’m so scared of my parents dying because i cant live without them because they are always with me and are really supportive and i’m scared to loose them because of the fear of abandonment
Fear of death is thus often responsible—along with other reasons, as we saw earlier—for fear of intimacy. This is one of the ways we can see how fear of death often results in fear of life. That is, our fear of death, of losing our life, can result in our fear of being intimately attached to life. “When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose,” as so many blues and folk songs have pointed out. This fear of life can also be played out as a fear of risk. The ultimate loss, of which I am utterly terrified, is death. Therefore, I can’t take any risk that might result in death. But life itself ultimately and inevitably results in death. Therefore, I can’t risk living my life. I must somehow remove myself from it by doing as little as possible and by feeling as little as possible: I will try to be emotionally dead to avoid being hurt by death. Taken to its logical extreme, this relationship to death will result in suicide. My intense fear of losing my life makes living so painful and frightening that my only escape is death.
If we complicate matters by realizing that our fear of death is not merely fear of biological death but translates for most of us into fear of loss in general—loss of my mate’s attention, loss of my children’s love, loss of my health, loss of my job, loss of my looks, loss of my money—then we can see how death, emotional death if not biological death, is so attractive, at least on the unconscious level: if I don’t feel anything, then I can’t be hurt. And if we realize that our first experience of death is not biological at all, but the psychological “death” most of us suffered the frst time we felt abandoned by a parent, then we can see the ways in which our early experiences of abandonment created our fear of death. This desire not to feel, this desire to insulate ourselves from life in order to insulate ourselves from pain, is probably the most common form of death work.
Is it any wonder then, given the enormous role that death plays in our lives, that we should be fascinated with it? In fact, I think it’s reasonable to conclude that the greater our fear is, the greater our fascination becomes. Put another way, the greater the role that death work plays in our psychological being, the greater our attraction is, despite the horror that accompanies it, to death in all its forms: we can’t see too many violent movies or docudramas about natural disasters; we can’t keep our eyes off the roadside car wreck; we can’t see too many news reports about child abuse, rape, and AIDS; we can’t see too many made-for-television movies about people who kill their spouses or their lovers’ spouses, or too many talk shows on which members of dysfunctional relationships display their dysfunctions apparently with no more self-awareness than children displaying their favorite toys. Our fascination with media representations of death and death work is another example of how we project our fears and problems onto people and events outside ourselves. This fascination thus operates as a defense: if I think about the child abuser on the other side of town (or from a different social class or ethnic background from mine) I divert my attention from the ways in which I’ve been abused or from my abuse of others.
The meaning of sexuality
Another area of psychological experience that has tended to elicit abstract explanations—and as we saw above, this points to its frightening power in our lives—is human sexuality. For some psychoanalytic theorists, especially in the past, sexuality was a matter of a biological pressure that is discharged in the act of sexual intercourse. Freud called that drive eros and placed it in opposition to thanatos, the death drive. However, Freud didn’t stop there. For one thing, he realized that our sexuality is part and parcel of our identity and thus relates to our capacity to feel pleasure in ways that are not generally considered sexual. This is why he believed that even infants are sexual beings who pass through stages oral, anal, and genital—in which pleasure is focused in different parts of the body. (You can imagine the furor and the misunderstanding that caused in Victorian society!) Theorists have continued to build on Freud’s insights, and psychoanalysis today sees a close connection between our sexuality and our identity because the origin of our sexual being is in the nature of the affirmation or disruption of our sense of self that occurs in childhood. Therefore, our sexuality is one of the clearest and most consistent barometers of our psychological state in general. For psychoanalysis, our sexuality is an inescapable human reality to which we must live a relationship. Our sexuality is not a matter of biological drive-discharge mechanisms but a matter of meanings. In analyzing sexual behavior then, the appropriate psychoanalytic question is “What conscious and unconscious meanings and purposes do I express or enact in my sexuality?” Do I use sex to “purchase” something I want from my mate? Do I withhold sex to punish my mate? Do I avoid sexual encounters altogether? Do I seek frequent sexual encounters with different people? It is interesting to note that these last two questions both suggest a fear of intimacy—if I get too close to someone I will lose myself or be emotionally harmed—because varying our sexual partners can protect us from getting close to any one person as effectively as avoiding sexual encounters completely.
It is how you feel about another person.
Freud discovered that our sexuality is part of who we are that it defines us. Saying it defines us is much different than saying it is part of us. A person’s sexuality is part of their identity but it does not define who they are. Freud is saying that sexuality is a part of our identity and is related to the amount of pleasure a person feels in ways that aren’t generally considered sexual. So yes our sexuality can be related to how we act, it does not define our identity.
I’m guessing that he means that even kids are sexually active because they go through many changes in their body and have feelings.
right like they dont even know what that is…
I think that these “stages”, like learning to be potty trained, or being breast fed during infancy, can effect someones sexuality later in life. This could possibly be a reason for someone developing some sort of fetish later in life.
I think it depends on the person. If a person finds not having sex as a punish, that could be very different than a guy that doesn’t care about sexual intercourse.
In certain relationships if someone gets mad at the other they may punish their girlfriend boyfriend wife husband or whoever it is by not having sex with them. And for some people this may be a big deal because they just like having sex and then not having sex may affect them. Or maybe that person likes sex because of a core issue they have so not having sex could affect them. But there are also people that don’t need sex all the time so it isn’t really a punishment.
agreeed because i know some people like to wait for the right person or after marriage because they’re scared
Of course, sexual behavior is also a product of our culture because our culture sets down the rules of proper sexual conduct and the definitions of normal and abnormal sexual behavior. (For psychoanalysis, there is no meaningful difference between normal and abnormal, and the issue isn’t one of moral versus immoral behavior; there are merely psychological differences among individuals, and the issue is one of nondestructive versus destructive behavior.) Society’s rules and definitions concerning sexuality form a large part of our superego, or the social values and taboos that we internalize (consciously or unconsciously) and experience as our sense of right and wrong. Whereas the word conscience, as it is usually used, generally implies something good—as Jiminy Cricket says, “Let your conscience be your guide”—the word superego often implies feeling guilty when we shouldn’t, feeling guilty only because we are socially programmed (usually through the family) to feel so, as when we feel guilty for taking a lower-paying job even when we know that it is a more satisfying or socially important one, or when we feel guilty, as many of us still do, for having sexual relations with our beloved prior to marriage.
Society puts down rules and so it restricts some people from being who they really want.
Society has pretty much decided what is right or wrong when it comes to sex, some people agree with it and others don’t.For example, many people believe that we should wait until marriage to have sex. Additionally some people think it is wrong for people to have sex if it isn’t a male and female. While there are many people who just say that people should make their own choices there will always be the people that tell us what to do and what not to do which affects the choices people make. And even if we say don’t listen to others everyone is always listening to what others have to say about them.
For example, in some societies, people are shunned for being attracted to the same sex. In some society’s it is seen as taboo for someone, especially women, to get pleasure from sex. Some people would say that a specific sexual desire/behavior is wrong, immoral, or gross, while someone else wouldn’t think anything of it.
While no, there isn’t a simple way to dictate what is right or wrong, because what’s considered “normal” is up to the person because technically it is an opinion, I do believe some sexual desires/behaviors are immoral and wrong. For example, pedophilia. An adult can’t have a sexual encounter with a child because they are too young to give consent, and could have a harmful effect or give the child trauma. Another example of an immoral sexual desire/behavior is rape. Just because someone’s attracted to children or wants to have sex with someone without their consent, doesn’t make it okay just because that’s their preference. I believe if someone feels this way, they need to get professional help to stop this way of thinking, and if they act of it, they need to go to prison.
i agree, but there is a difference between “immoral” and “abnormal”. while things like pedophilia are immoral, there are abnormal sexual fantasies. like if someone were to fuck a tree. you wouldn’t say thats normal, but can you say that doing that is immoral?
In Jane the Virgin her grandma gives her a flower which represents her virginity. Jane promises her grandma that she will not loose her virginity until she gets married. Every time she tries to break that promise she remembers what her grandma told her and she stops. That is society controlling how your brain is programmed. It makes Jane think that it was her decision and her word when it wasn’t, it was her grandmas.
in the tv show Jane the virgin her grandma gives her a flower and tells her that when she has sexual intercorse and is not married the flower will die and so when she grows up her mind is programmed and every time she is about to have intercorse she stops and feels guilty.
The superego is in direct opposition to the id, the psychological reservoir of our instincts, and our libido, or sexual energy. The id is devoted solely to the gratification of prohibited desires of all kinds—desire for power, for sex, for amusement, for food—without an eye to consequences. In other words, the id consists largely of those desires regulated or forbidden by social convention. Thus, the superego—or cultural taboos—determines which desires the id will contain. The ego, or the conscious self that experiences the external world through the senses, plays referee between the id and superego, and all three are def ned by their relationships: none acts independently of the others and a change in one always involves changes in the other two. In this way, the ego is, to a large degree, the product of conflicts between what society says we can’t have and what we (therefore) want. For this reason, the relationships among ego, id, and superego tell us as much about our culture as they do about ourselves.
Indeed, it is the cultural context that has helped us come to a more meaningful understanding of some of Freud’s early concepts that seem to contradict our own sense of how the world works. For example, many women, whether they consider themselves feminists or not, have a difficult time believing that little girls, upon realizing that little boys have penises, suffer from penis envy, or the desire to have a penis, or that little boys, upon realizing that little girls don’t have penises, suffer from castration anxiety, or the fear that they will lose their penises. The explanation for these two phenomena becomes clear, however, when we realize the cultural context within which Freud observed them: Victorian society’s rigid definition of gender roles, which was used to oppress females of all ages and to elevate males to positions of dominance in all spheres of human activity. Is it any wonder that a little girl will want (at least unconsciously) to be a little boy when she realizes that little boys have rights and privileges she isn’t supposed to even desire? In other words, when you see “penis envy” read “power envy.” It’s power and all that seems to go with it—self-esteem, fun, freedom, safety from physical violation by the opposite sex—that little girls envy. And what little boy, upon realizing his social superiority to, and power over, little girls, isn’t going to have some anxiety about losing it? “You’re a girl, you sissy!” has the power to wound little boys (and big boys!) because it threatens them with just such a loss of power. Castration anxiety is thus best understood as fear of demotion to the powerless position occupied by females.
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It stands to reason that you won’t f nd every psychoanalytic concept we’ve dis-cussed represented in every literary work you read. Our job, when we read psychoanalytically, is to see which concepts are operating in the text in such a way as to enrich our understanding of the work and, if we plan to write a paper about it, to yield a meaningful, coherent psychoanalytic interpretation. From the perspective of classical psychoanalytic theory, which is our primary focus in this chapter, we might attend mainly to the work’s representation of oedipal dynamics or of family dynamics in general; to what the work can tell us about human beings’ psychological relationship to death or to sexuality; to the way the narrator’s unconscious problems keep asserting themselves over the course of the story; or to any other psychoanalytic concepts that seem to produce a useful understanding of the text.
Some critics have objected to the use of psychoanalysis to understand the behavior of literary characters because literary characters are not real people and, therefore, do not have psyches that can be analyzed. However, psychoanalyzing the behavior of literary characters is probably the best way to learn how to use the theory. Furthermore, this practice has been defended by many psychoanalytic critics on two important grounds: (1) when we psychoanalyze literary char-acters, we are not suggesting that they are real people but that they represent the psychological experience of human beings in general; and (2) it is just as legitimate to psychoanalyze the behavior represented by literary characters as it is to analyze their behavior from a feminist, Marxist, or African American critical perspective, or from the perspective of any critical theory that analyzes literary representations as illustrations of real-life issues.
Many literary characters go through the same things many real life people go through. Characters also behave certain ways because of things they go through which is exactly what happens to real people. Characters can be analyzed based on their story and actions which can further the research of psychoanalysis. In other words analyzing characters can help to analyze people.
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- How do the operations of repression structure or inform the work? That is, what unconscious motives are operating in the main character(s); what core issues are thereby illustrated; and how do these core issues structure or inform the piece? (Remember, the unconscious consists of repressed wounds, fears, unresolved conflicts, and guilty desires.)
- Are there any oedipal dynamics—or any other family dynamics—at work here? That is, is it possible to relate a character’s patterns of adult behavior to early experiences in the family as represented in the story? How do these patterns of behavior and family dynamics operate and what do they reveal?
- How can characters’ behavior, narrative events, and/or images be explained in terms of psychoanalytic concepts of any kind (for example, regression, crisis, projection, fear of or fascination with death, sexuality—which includes love and romance as well as sexual behavior—as a primary indicator of psychological identity, or the operations of ego-id-superego)?
- In what ways can we view a literary work as analogous to a dream? That is, how might recurrent or striking dream symbols reveal the ways in which the narrator or speaker is projecting his or her unconscious desires, fears, wounds, or unresolved conflicts onto other characters, onto the setting, or onto the events portrayed? Symbols relevant to death, sexuality, and the unconscious are especially helpful. Indeed, the use of dream symbols can be very useful in interpreting literary works, or passages thereof, that seem unrealistic or fantastic, in other words, that seem dreamlike.
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