Psychoanalytic Criticism

A Reappraisal

Elizabeth Wright

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745669236
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

What is psychoanalytic criticism and how can it be justified as a type of criticism in its own right? In this new and thoroughly revised edition of her classic textbook, Elizabeth Wright provides a cogent answer to this question and a wide-ranging introduction to psychoanalytic criticism from Freud to the present day.

Since each school of psychoanalysis has its own theory of the aesthetic process, the field is complex. Adopting a critical perspective, Elizabeth Wright focuses on major figures and texts in psychoanalysis and in literary and art criticism: classical psychoanalysis; Jungian analytic psychology; objects-relations theory; French psychoanalysis; French anti-psychoanalysis; feminist psychoanalytic criticism. Across these divisions certain problems recur, problems which conceal themselves in a wide range of surprising places, from Shakespearean tragedy to performance theatre from magic realism to detective fiction, from the German Lied to Wagner. These areas are investigated with reference to rival psychoanalytic theories, while connections are traced between the aesthetic process and the psychoanalytic approach.

Already established as the leading introduction to the field, this new edition of Psychoanalytic Criticism will be essential reading for students of literature and literary theory, psychoanalysis, feminism and feminist theory, cultural studies and the humanities generally.

PART I

1

Classical Psychoanalysis: Freud

1.1 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, 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. Owing to this rivalry of translations I have had to make use of both terms.) The mind comes into being out of the body. What is necessarily given at the start is 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 corner stone on which the whole structure of psycho-analysis rests’ (XIV, 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 prelinguistic 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-laden wishes out of conscious experience. The symptoms, dreams and parapraxes (‘Freudian slips’) that turn up in the course of this process represent the ‘return of the repressed’, a mechanism that marks both the emergence of the forbidden wish and the resistance to it. Within the unconscious, the flow of energy becomes bound up with certain memory-traces, developing the character of unconscious wishes that strive continually to break through against the counterforce exerted by the ego. Where the primary process allows the psychical energy to flow freely, the ‘secondary process’ transforms it into ‘bound energy’, in that its movement is checked and controlled by the rational operations of the ego. The censorship of the ego can be subverted, however, precisely because of the free shifting of energy in the primary process. The drives or wishes can get through in disguise, as the so-called ‘compromise formations’ of the return of the repressed. It is the nature of these disguises that has occupied classical psychoanalytic criticism. Where the earlier ‘instinct-psychology’ emphasizes that which gets through the disguise, that is the content of the wish, the later ‘ego-psychology’ concentrates on that which ‘controls’ the wish, the work’s formal devices.

Freud’s theory of the instinctual drives was dualistic throughout his work; he always opposes one drive with another. It is with the earlier theory that we are concerned for the moment; the opposition of the sexual instincts to the instincts of self-preservation. The sexual instinct plays a major role in psychical conflict precisely because it is always opposed by another instinct. This is invariably forgotten when Freud is accused of ‘pan-sexualism’, tracing all action to the sexual instinct; his radical notion of sexuality is confused with the popular understanding of the term. He calls the total available energy of the sexual instinct ‘libido’, and it is essential to realize that it is not solely directed towards sexual aims per se. Sexuality is to be understood as not specifically limited to the process of reproduction: ‘Sexual life includes the function of obtaining pleasure from zones of the body – a function which is subsequently brought into the service of reproduction. The two functions often fail to coincide completely’ (XXIII, p. 152). The prime example is the infant, who gets the pleasurable stimulation of the region or ‘zone’ around the mouth, hence called an ‘erotogenic’ (eros ‘love’; -gen- ‘create’) zone. The infant later, in sucking its thumb, is fantasizing the repetition of that sensual pleasure in the absence of nutritional need:

The baby’s obstinate persistence in sucking gives evidence at an early stage of a need for satisfaction which, though it originates from and is instigated by the taking of nourishment, nevertheless strives to obtain pleasure independently of nourishment and for that reason may and should be termed sexual (p. 154).

The concept of what is sexual is thus greatly extended and complicated. Freud is showing that sexuality is not a mere matter of a biological urge but involves the production of fantasies under pressure of external circumstances. There is then a disjunction between mere physical need and mental satisfaction. In Freud’s view human sexuality is to be understood as what in 1910 he came to call ‘psycho-sexuality’ (XI, p. 222).

The libido is checked when it comes up against the environment and can only achieve partial satisfaction. In the course of an infant’s development those instinctual drives which Freud came to designate sexual or ‘libidinous’ in nature are channelled into zones. At each stage the infant has to give up a part of its bodily satisfaction: the breast, the faeces – its first product – and the unconditional possession of a penis. Its selfhood will depend on its assumption of a sexual identity, not merely anatomically determined, but psychically constructed. Until this is achieved the infant’s sexuality is ‘polymorphous’: it is at the mercy of the ‘component instincts’, functioning independently and varying in their aim, their object and their source (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in VII, pp. 191 and 167ff.). Only gradually and with difficulty do they become organized into what our culture considers to be adult sexuality. The match of biological sex with the sexual role determined by society is thus achieved, not given.

For Freud this matching is accomplished via the combined workings of the Oedipus complex and the castration complex. It is impossible in this short introduction to give an account of how Freud’s theory of gender evolved from the Three Essays (1905) through to his lecture ‘Femininity’ (1933) (XXII, pp. 112–35). The development of his theory has been of particular import to women (see Chasseguet-Smirgel 1981; Mitchell and Rose 1982), since it started out with the notion that until puberty the little girl sees herself as a little man. The account that follows can be no more than a summary of Freud’s later position, given on the most general lines.

Freud sees the child’s relationship with its parents as critical for the achievement of its proper sexual identity. The difficulties begin with the child’s dependence on the nurturing mother. Not only are there problems specific to the very formation of a self-concept in the initial separation from the mother’s body, but the love of the mother remains dominant in the early formative years. Inevitably, according to Freud, a perception of the father as rival in this love becomes insistent for the boy-child to the point where he is drawn into fantasies of the killing of this rival and of possessing the mother. This is the Oedipus complex. The way out of it is provided by the fears of the castration complex. The father is experienced as the source of all authority, all direction of desire, and thus as capable of castrating the boy-child, who unconsciously believes this to be the reason for the absence of the penis in the girl. The boy thus abandons his love for the mother and moves towards identification with the father, with the understanding that he too can in time occupy such a position of power.

The trajectory for the girl-child is not so straightforward. In her case the complexes work in reverse, and the castration complex ushers in the Oedipus complex. She interprets the absence of a penis as a failure in provision on the part of the mother. Under the influence of this disappointment she turns away in hostility from her mother, but in the unconscious the wish for a penis is not abandoned: it is replaced by the wish to bear the father a child. Hence the girl becomes the rival of the mother for the father’s love. Freud saw the fading of the Oedipus complex in the girl-child as a more uncertain process, because the identification with the father’s law, facilitated for the boy-child by the anticipation of power, is not so secure. Nor has he an adequate explanation of how the girl overcomes her jealousy of the mother and attains identification with her.

The Oedipus complex is for Freud the nucleus of desire, repression and sexual identity. Its residue is a life-long ambivalence towards the keeping and breaking of taboos and laws. As the complex declines, the superego is formed and becomes part of the topography of the psyche. The struggle to overcome the complex is never quite resolved. It is the cause of neurotic illness and raison d’être of the psychoanalytic process, where the patient is offered a chance to emancipate himself anew, by dint of a better compromise with authority. The psychoanalytic encounter restages the old drama through ‘transference’.

Transference and countertransference might be regarded as the ‘reader theory’ of psychoanalysis. In the non-clinical sense these phenomena are present to some degree in all our relationships: transference is a mode of investing persons and objects with positive and negative qualities, according to our early memories of significant experience of familial figures and the expectations founded thereon. ‘Countertransference’ defined in this mundane sense manifests itself in the ‘knots’ which result from the unending chain of mutual misreadings:

Since Jack is afraid

that Jill will think that

Jack is afraid

Jack pretends that Jack is not afraid of Jill

so that Jill will be more afraid of Jack.

(Laing 1974)

This process is unconscious: at its worst it leads to a futile reaction and counterreaction, but at its best it may lead to the shifting of old agreements and the making of new ones that better satisfy desire.

The managing of these phenomena in the clinical situation is directed towards helping this process where it has got stuck. The ‘free association’ of the patient, her saying whatever comes to mind (see the beginnings of this technique in Freud, II, p. 63), gradually reveals that which determines her. Freud distinguishes between two kinds of transference (for a detailed account see Laplanche and Pontalis 1973, on whom this discussion in part relies; see also Wollheim 1971, pp. 152–4). In the first instance transference was for Freud the displacement of feelings from one idea to another (see the section on dreams below). In the analytic situation intense feeling, or ‘affect’, is transferred to the analyst (the dreams the patient brings may have been dreamt ‘for’ him), and becomes organized around a group of hostile and loving wishes. The patient’s wishes and demands are devices of resistance, the attempt to win the analyst by undermining his authority, so that the repressed wish may at last be granted. The interpretation of the resistance – the words and actions which block off access to the unconscious – is thus the key technique of psychoanalysis. The mechanism of transferring past experience onto the figure of the analyst is set in motion just when the repressed wish is in danger of emerging. Psychoanalytic reader-theory, as will be seen, looks for such points of resistance in both readers and texts, as manifestations of the compulsion to repeat.

The second kind of transference develops in the course of the treatment. Freud calls it the ‘transference neurosis’. The nearer the analyst gets to the repressed complex which induced the illness the more the patient’s behaviour becomes pure repetition and divorced from present reality. He is in the grip of the ‘repetition compulsion’, the uncontrolled return of the repressed. Freud’s fascination with art is partly due to his admiration of the artist for the ability to control the return of the repressed, as his discussions of art show (see particularly his essay on ‘The uncanny’ in Part III).

Freud’s view of countertransference was cautious: he saw it as the analyst’s uncontrolled response to the patient’s transference, an inappropriate reaction to be taken care of in the training-analysis. Laplanche and Pontalis define it as ‘the whole of the analyst’s unconscious reactions to the individual analysand – especially to the analyst’s own transference’ (1973, p. 92). For some analysts the psychoanalytic encounter becomes the mutual playing out of the subjectivities of analyst and analysand: there is transference and countertransference on both sides (see André Green in Part II, who works out a parallel relationship for writer and reader). For others, such as Jacques Lacan, transference and counter-transference can only be negotiated via the spoken word: resistance that is played out between two bodies will only close up the unconscious. Speech, on the other hand, will open it up, for here resistance is directed against the father’s law, the order of language, which implicates both analyst and analysand in something beyond a dual relation (Lacan 1977b, pp. 123–34). It is the narration of the analysand, rather than his behaviour, which will therefore enact the reality of the unconscious, which for Lacan is in the very structure of language (for a literary demonstration of narration as transference, see Shoshana Felman in Part III).

The most general implication of all this for a theory of reading is as follows: if the patient’s ‘text’, his presentation of experience, can cause a disturbance in the analyst which allows for a new interpretation, this turns upside down the notion that the reader is the analyst and the text the patient, which has so infuriated opponents of psychoanalytic criticism. Readers do not only work on texts, but texts work on readers, and this involves a complex double dialectic of two bodies inscribed in language.

The value of Freud’s opening up of the ‘royal road’ to the unconscious is that it led to the realization of the universality of this endless conflict and adjustment that bodies must perforce engage in if they are to effect any kind of social compromise, if they are to speak at all.

1.2 The dream and the strategies of desire

Dreams have a privileged place in Freud’s metapsychology: ‘the interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of unconscious activities of the mind’ (V, p. 608). As a result of investigating them, in himself and his patients, he found himself more and more engaged with conflict and the overlapping of interpretations. Dreams, par excellence, reveal themselves to be boundary phenomena, in that they occur where intentions are in opposition, where bodily desires have to come to terms with society.

Whichever of the three models of the psyche is drawn upon, what takes place at the frontiers of the divisions is of prime importance. For the ‘dynamic’ model one can ask how the primary process affects the secondary process; for the ‘economic’, how the reality and pleasure principles are evidenced in psy...