What is
Psychoanalysis?
• ‘Psychoanalysis is a theory of the
human mind, a therapy for mental distress, an instrument of research and a
profession. A complex intellectual, medical and sociological phenomenon’
• Ivan Ward and Oscar Zarate, Introducing
Psychoanalysis, 2000
• Psychoanalysis has shown:
– The relationship between sexuality
and human motivation
– The hidden meanings of psychological
events
– The importance of childhood
– Psychic conflict as part of the
human condition.
• ‘A discipline founded by Freud….
• A. As a method of investigation
which consists essentially in bringing out the unconscious meaning of the
words, the actions and the products of the imagination (dreams, phantasies,
delusions) of a particular subject.
• B. As a psychotherapeutic model
• C. As a group of psychological and
psychopathological theories…
-Laplanche and Pontalis,
The Language of Psychoanalysis, 1973
Sigmund
Freud (1856-1939)
• Sigmund Freud was an Austrian
psychiatrist who revolutionised psychology and invented the therapy of
psychoanalysis.
• After graduating from medical school
in Vienna in 1881, Freud developed his ideas on psychoanalysis until he was
forced to seek refuge from the Nazis and moved to in London in 1938.
• Mid 1890s onwards – development of
Psychoanalysis.
• 1893 – Begins studies on hysteria
with Josef Breuer
Freud’s
Apartment, Berggasse 19, Vienna, 1938- View of his writing desk
Freud’s
study is filled with antiquities from Ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt etc
The
collection is important because it can be linked to the idea of Psychoanalysis
itself as a kind of ‘archaeology’ which aims to study the unconscious
mind.
‘I
illustrated my remarks by pointing to the antique objects about my room. They
were, in fact, I said, only objects found in a tomb, and their burial had been
their preservation.’ – Freud’s explanation to a patient about the nature of the
unconscious.
Sexuality
and Development:
Alfred
Hitchcock’s film Spellbound, 1945
The film
begins by explaining its purpose is to highlight the virtues of psycho-analysis
in banishing mental illness and restoring reason.
‘Studies on
Hysteria’
• From 1885-1886 Freud worked in a
hospital in France with the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. His teachings on
hysteria influenced Freud’s interest in the problems of neuroses.
• Charcot had also been investigating
‘hypnosis’ (putting patients in
a trance-like state) as a diagnostic tool and through this Freud investigated
the hypothesis that ideas could inform a patient’s neurosis.
• Freud used hypnosis in the treatment
of patients until 1896
• Josef Breuer developed the concept
of ‘catharsis’ as a way of
dealing with neurosis - if a
patient could recall the moment a particular symptom appeared and re-experience
the associated emotion it would disappear.
Sigmund
Freud once hung a copy of this popular lithograph, Une Leçon du Docteur Charcot
à la Salpêtrière, in his consultation room in Vienna - it shows a hypnotized
woman during a lecture on hysteria.
Hysteria: OED
‘an old-fashioned term for a psychological disorder characterized by conversion
of psychological stress into physical symptoms (somatization) or a change in
self-awareness (such as a fugue state or selective amnesia)’
Definitions
• Neurosis: ‘A psychogenic affection in which
symptoms are the symbolic expression of a psychical conflict whose origins lie
in the subject’s childhood history.’
• Catharsis: ‘A Greek word meaning purification
or purging’ – seeking therapeutic affect
-Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of
Psychoanalysis, 1973
Repression:
• Freud concluded out of his ‘Studies
on hysteria’ that, if repressed, sexual emotions could cause neurotic symptoms.
• He concluded that if the patient did
not retain conscious access to their traumatic experiences and it was repressed
it would induce neurosis.
• This led him to investigate sexual
development, sexuality and sexual phantasy.
• He concluded: ‘that neurotic
symptoms were not related directly to actual events but to wishful phantasies,
and that as far as the neurosis was concerned psychical reality was of more
importance than material reality.’
Phantasy: ‘Imaginary scene in which
the subject is a protagonist, representing the fulfillment of a wish’ L&P
Free
Association:
• The unconscious mind is seen to be a
reservoir for repressed memories of traumatic events that continuously
influence conscious thoughts and behaviour.
• Our sexual instincts, their
development and repression are seen to be particularly problematic and the
causes of many of our anxieties and neuroses.
• Psychoanalysis suggests that which
is repressed can be freed in the process of analysis through Free Association
• Free
Association is the ‘method according to which voice must be given to all thoughts without exception,
which enter the mind, whether such thoughts are based upon a specific element
of produced spontaneously’ L&P
• …..Psychoanalysis as ‘the talking
cure’
Salvador
Dali, Lobster Telephone, 1936
Free
Association? Dali believed his ‘surrealist’ objects could reveal hidden desires.
According to the Tate Gallery; ‘Lobsters and telephones had strong sexual
connotations for him, and he drew a close analogy between food and sex.’
The Three
Stages of Infantile Sexuality:
• Psychoanalysis suggests that as
children develop they sense data in the world around them by connecting their
bodily sensations to emotions – fear, frustration, satisfaction, anger etc and
they are directed to the world around them.
• For the infant this would be the
family unit – the mother as they develop and are weaned.
• Freud identifies 3 stages which
shape the child’s sexual development:
• 1. The oral; 2. The anal; and 3. The
phallic stages of development.
• Here the infant’s capabilities of
physical gratification are centred on 1. the mouth; 2. the anal region; 3. the
sexual organs.
• Here the infant’s sexual development
relates to changes in their own body – auto-erotism
Mary Kelly, Post Partum Document, 1973-79.
Document I: Analysed Fecal Stains and Feeding Charts.
Document II: Analysed Utterances and Related Speech Events.
Document III: Analysed Markings and Diary Perspective
Schema.
Document IV: Transitional Objects, Diary and Diagram.
Document V: Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams.
Document VI: Prewriting Alphabet, Exergue and Diary
The Oedipus
Complex:
-Mythical story of Oedipus Rex
• Freud’s now famous formulation of
the Oedipus Complex is another important stage in his study of sexual
development, which he suggests we must pass through.
• He states: ‘I have found, in my own
case too, (the phenomenon of) being in love with my mother and jealous of my father,
and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood.’
The Oedipus
Complex:
• Freud is then suggesting that in our
early childhood sensuous-emotional relations come into conflict with each
other, producing loving and hostile wishes.
• On a basic level our understanding
of this is a desire for the death of the parent of the same sex and a sexual
desire for that of the opposite.
• This takes shape in different forms
and in specific modes according to gender.
• This theoretical notion allows him
to develop ideas such as ‘the castration complex’ and ‘penis envy’ out of the fear
of retaliation for this desire.
• i.e The boy fears castration and the
girl in the absence of the penis attempts to compensate for it.
The
Structure of the Mind:
The
Unconcious
• The
unconscious is created when a very young child’s drives and instincts start to
be disciplined by the cultural rules and norms of society.
• The
child is forced to repress culturally forbidden drives and instincts, and their
repression creates the unconscious.
• It
is a forbidden zone for two reasons: 1. the conscious mind cannot access it –
it is lost to us; 2. it contains outlawed drives and instincts.
• We
can never truly know ourselves.
• Sometimes,
the boundary between the conscious mind and the unconscious is breached –
dreams, ‘Freudian slips’, jokes etc.
Mapping the
Mind:
• Freud’s ‘first topography’ outlined
the apparatus of the psyche via the conscious,
preconscious and unconscious.
• This was first proposed in Sigmund
Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900.
• Freud’s ‘second topography’ (1923)
proposed that the structure of the mind consisted of the ego, id and super-ego.
• Here the ego is situated in relation
to the id and the external world.
The 2nd
Topography:
• Ego: The part of the mind that represents
consciousness. It uses reason. It mediates between the external world and internal
instincts. It is common sense. It is originally derived from bodily sensations
and the relationship between the surface of the body and the world. Its prime
function is ‘self preservation’.
• Freud ‘The ego is first and foremost
a bodily ego.’
• Id: The oldest part of the mind from
which the other structures are derived; ‘contains that which is inherited, that
is present at birth’; primitive, unorganized and emotional. – ‘the dark,
inaccessible part of our personality.’
• Superego: The parental influence; Relation
to the ideal-ego to which we feel we must conform. Agent of self-observation.
The super-ego monitors the ego – it is derived from parental criticism. The
standards of society that become embedded in our behaviour. ‘The voice of
conscience.’
Topography
(OED):
‘The
arrangement of the natural and artificial physical features of an area’
How does
our relationship to the external world develop?
• Jacques Lacan
• ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative
Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytical Experience’ (1949).
• Lacanian Psychoanalysis
The Mirror
Stage
• Theorist David Macey suggests that
by building on Freud’s concept of the ‘bodily ego’ Lacan instead argued:
• ‘The ego is an illusory product of
the imaginary identifications of the mirror stage.’
• So what is the mirror-stage?
• ‘Unable as yet to walk, or even to
stand up, and held tightly as he is by some support, human or artificial (what
in France, we call a ‘trotte-bébé’), he nevertheless overcomes in a
flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support and, fixing his
attitude in a slightly leaning forward position in order to hold it in his
gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image.’
• Jacques Lacan ‘The Mirror Stage as
Formative Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytical Experience’
(1949).
Lacan sees
this moment as important because it is through the relationship to the external
world or other that our sense of identity takes shape.
Prior to
the mirror-stage the child perceives the world through fragmented sensations.
At this moment they realise this and gain a sense of a concept of their self as
a ‘gestalt’ or total image, as they perceive their ‘own reflection in the
mirror.
‘The mirror stage is a turning point. After it the subject’s
relation to himself is always mediated through a totalizing image which has
come from outside’. (Theorist: Jane Gallop)
Dreams/
Surrealism:
Exploring
the mind:
• Psychoanalysis explores the
unconscious mind through a range of techniques:
• Free association (free verbal
expression via a rapid monologue).
• Automatic drawing and writing (free
expression via rapid drawing)
• Dream analysis
• These methods are seen to all access
to true spoken and realised thoughts, free from self- censorship .
Sigmund
Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900
• Idea of dreams as ‘disguised
hallucinatory fulfillments of repressed wishes’.
• Dreams are balanced between
censorship and expression.
• They can take different forms: ‘Convenience’ – dream as a wish
fulfillment; ’Traumatic’; ’Anxiety.’
• They can contain symbols which stand
for something else or represent meaning.
‘The Dream-Work’
• The process of understanding dreams
and the metaphors/ meanings they contain is linked to an interpretation of the
‘dream-work.’
• This is the relationship between:
• 1. The ‘manifest content’ of the
dream- that which is possible to read and;
• 2. The ‘latent content’ of the dream
– that which emerges from the unconscious.
• These are linked together and
transformed by the dreamer into the dream work.
Surrealism
• Surrealism helped to popularise
Freudian psychological theories about sex, dreams and the unconscious during
the 1920’s and 1930’s.
• They experimented with Automatism, which involved using
hypnotically induced sleep and trance-like states as a creative strategy to
liberate unconscious desire.
• Automatic writing involved the act
of spontaneously writing without censorship of thoughts.
• They focused on the importance of
the dream-world.
• Andre Breton worked in a
neurological hospital with shell-shocked soldiers and used psychoanalytical
methods.
René
Magritte, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1952
Exploration
of dream symbolism. Focus on contradiction between meanings of dream content
for the individual and the taxonomy of symbols in dreams.
Salvador
Dali’s Dream Sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s film Spellbound 1945
The film
begins by explaining its purpose is to highlight the virtues of psycho-analysis
in banishing mental illness and restoring reason.
Sigmund
Freud, The Uncanny, 1919
• Freud outlines the uncanny as being
related to that which is frightening appearing through forms such as the double
which leads to a ‘doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self.’
• He suggests that ‘the quality of
uncanniness can only come from the fact of the ‘double’ being a creation dating
back to a very early mental stage, long since surmounted – a stage,
incidentally, at which it wore a more friendly aspect.’ – i.e that which is
repressed.
The
Uncanny: Tate
Liverpool, 2004
• ‘muted sense of horror’
• ‘goose bumps’
• ‘Déjà vu’
• ‘All of these feelings are provoked
by an object, a dead object that has a life of its own, a life that is somehow
dependent on you, and is intimately connected in some secret manner to your life.’
• Definitions: Freud ‘that class of
the terrifying which leads us back to something long known to us, once very
familiar’.
• ‘Ernst Jentsch, who located the
uncanny in ‘doubts’ about ‘whether an apparently animate being is really alive;
or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not in fact be animate’.
As a tool
for analysis?
• Psychoanalysts are interested in art
as a visual means to consider our social morality – ideas of right and wrong,
the desirable, the taboo.
• Psychoanalytical critics may drawn
on psychoanalytical theory to investigate ideas around the producer of a work
of art and how the spectator or audience interprets it.
• This could, however, lead to a
reading which simply explores meanings around subjectivity and selfhood, over
the social- art of course is always produced in a particular time and place and
social situation.
• It is important to think about how
we might use a psychoanalytical approach- What would be gained? What are its
limits?
• It becomes a critical perspective or
tool for analysis within the remit of cultural theory.
Conclusions…
‘For Freud,
psychoanalysis is about memories, thoughts, feelings, phantasies, intentions,
wishes, ideals, beliefs, psychological conflict, and all that stuff inside what
we like to call our minds.’
-Ward and Zarate
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