Psychoanalytic Accounts of Consuming Desire

Hearts of Darkness

John Desmond

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780230252196
• eBook ISBN: 9781137289087
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

Provides an accessible introduction to psychoanalytic explanations of consumer desire. Topics are drawn widely to reflect the scope of Freud's vision and include dreams, sexuality and hysteria. Discussion is widened to selectively include authors such as Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan, and to include evaluation of current research.

1

Dreams

What do androids dream of? (Dick, 1968)

Introduction

This chapter is divided into three parts. Freud’s ideas are outlined in the first part, which are then related to consumption in the following two parts. In part one, three dreams are used to introduce Freud’s understanding of the dream process. The dream of Irma illustrates the role played by processes of condensation and displacement, acting in concert to shape the manifest content of the dream into a rebus requiring decoding by analysis. The dream of la belle bouchère illustrates the role played by identification, which Freud draws on in his analysis to demonstrate that a dream always fulfils a wish, even when appearing to deny it. Finally, the peculiar hallucinatory nature of dreams is discussed through Freud’s analysis of the dream of the burning child, which also illustrates the role played by regression in the dream process. The second part touches on the recruitment of Freud’s ideas by commercial interests during the 1940s and 1950s in seeking to market the consumer dream. This concludes with a brief discussion of the furore created in the late 1950s surrounding the use of subliminal advertising. The final part addresses some of the criticisms that have been levelled against Freud’s theory of dreams, focusing specifically on Hans Eysenck, who amongst others, contributed to the death of Freud’s ideas in the USA.¹ There follows a discussion of recent evidence in relation to the role played by unconscious processes in consumer behaviour; it concludes that these are in line with a psychoanalytic understanding.

For the newcomer attuned to the demands of modern science, perhaps the most disconcerting thing about Freud is that he seems to feel challenged to explain absolutely everything. Inscribed into his theory is the idea that when one gazes into the character of the modern person, one detects the sediment of layers laid down through the long course of human evolution. Nowadays the construction of such grand narratives has largely gone out of fashion, perhaps ironically, due to a succession of authors erecting the grand narrative that there is no narrative to be told in the post-modern era.

When Freud seeks to explain the process of dreaming, he is not content simply to explain to the reader the often offensive reality of the latent, or hidden, content of the dream, as opposed to its superficial, manifest content. He also feels bound to explain to us that the process of dreaming itself connects us to our primeval past. As he explains it, when in the process of dreaming, we move from the sophisticated realm of conscious language to the unconscious realm of the dream-image constituted by primitive perception, we re-trace the steps that humanity took in the course of its long evolution. Even in the dream, which is surely the most symbolic realm described by Freud, there is the link to the animal and indeed the reptile within.

The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, [1900] 1999) was not published until Freud was in his forties, and it was a decade before it made him famous. The text begins by reflecting on ancient and modern accounts of the functions of dreams. For example, one function is that of sensory excitation; we hear a noise while asleep and it is woven into our dream; or we dream of finding ourselves naked, waking to find that the bedclothes have slipped from the bed. Following detailed investigation, including the analysis of his own dreams in addition to over a thousand others, Freud concluded that such events form part of a more complex process wherein the dream combines recent, often trivial material from the past few days with that from infantile memories in fulfilling an unconscious wish. The dreamwork is thus intimately bound up with the expression of hidden desire.

Understanding dreams

Freud’s brief description of his dream of Irma is amongst his most famous. His recollection begins as follows:

The dream of Irma

23–24 July 1895

A great hall – many guests whom we are receiving - among them Irma, whom I immediately take aside,, as though to answer her letter, to reproach her for not yet accepting the ‘solution’. I say to her: ‘If you are still having pain it is really your own fault’. – She replies: ‘If you only knew what pains I now have in the neck, stomach and abdomen; I am drawn together.’ I am frightened and look at her. She looks pale and bloated; I think I have overlooked something organic after all. I take her to the window and examine her throat. She shows some resistance to this, like a woman who has a false set of teeth. I think she does not need them.. Her mouth then opens without difficulty and I find a large white spot to the right, and at another place I see extended grayish-white scabs attached to curious curling formations, which have obviously been formed like the turbinated – I quickly call Dr. M. over who repeats the examination and confirms it. ... Dr. M. looks quite different than usual; he is very pale, walks with a limp, and his chin has no beard... . My friend Otto is now also standing beside her, and my friend Leopold percusses her small body and says: ‘She has some dullness to the left below’, and also calls attention to an an infiltrated portion of the skin on the left shoulder (something which I feel as he does, in spite of the dress)... . M. says; ‘No doubt about it, it’s an infection, but it doesn’t matter; dysentery will set in and the poison will be excreted’ ... We also have immediate knowledge of the origin of the infection. my friend Otto has recently given her an injection of propyl formulation; propylene ... . Proponic acid ... . Trimethylamine (I see its formula printed before me in bold type)... . Such injections are not to be given so rashly ... Probably also the syringe was not clean.²

The dream contains a number of characters who are somewhat recognizable to Freud. They include Irma, a friend but also one of his patients, and also his colleagues Dr M., Leopold and Otto. Freud’s analysis of the dream begins with his recognition that much of its content happened recently; he had been writing up Irma’s notes late into the night. He deals systematically with each aspect of the dream by meticulously drawing out its associations through the technique that he calls free association. In the course of this detailed analysis he notices that Irma and Dr M. are not portrayed as they are in real life. On further examination he finds that the image of each dream character is different to that of the real person, being instead a composite of the attributes of several real people. This is an example of the major dream process that he called condensation. Freud relentlessly follows in turn the chain of associations inspired in him by each element of the composites. For example, the character Irma who appears in the dream shares some characteristics with his real patient Irma, who had rejected Freud’s ‘solution’, but more of that later. The real Irma is characteristically rosy cheeked, so Freud asks, why is she depicted in the dream as being pale and puffy? The real Irma did indeed suffer from stomach pains but not from pains in the abdomen or throat. Freud recognizes that the dream relates to his anxiety, that perhaps his diagnosis of Irma is wrong and that, after all, her illness really is organic. Freud had never examined the real Irma’s throat before. So whose throat is in the dream? This reminds him that he had examined the throat of a governess who on first impression looked beautiful but had destroyed that impression by removing her dentures to facilitate his examination. Where did the image of Irma standing by the window come from? Freud recalls another association. The real Irma had a close woman friend whom Freud admired. When he visited her one evening, he discovered this lady in the same position, by a window, as the one Irma assumed in the dream. The woman’s physician, Dr M., who also appears in the dream, said that the woman had a diphtheritic membrane. Freud also recalls that, like Irma, this other lady, too, was prone to hysteric choking. He concludes, ‘So in the dream I have replaced my patient for her friend.’ Now Freud recalls that he had wondered in real life if this lady had need of him, but she had so far shown herself strong enough to deal with her symptoms by herself. Irma’s paleness, puffiness and bad teeth bring to Freud’s mind another patient, one who was shy and unusually pale and puffy.

This chain of associations leads Freud to wonder why he had exchanged Irma with the other women in the dream? Was this because the real Irma had not accepted his solution? Some time ago, when Freud had first started treating her, he had explained that all he could do for his patients was to make them aware of the hidden meaning of their symptoms, a ‘solution’ which he now repudiated. In this respect Irma was like her friend, who believed that she could go it alone and had no need for Freud’s solution either. The figure of Dr M. in the dream is also a composite, fashioned from aspects of the real Dr M. and Freud’s brother. Freud recognizes that one reason he may have fused them in his dream is that he had earlier put a proposition to each which they had rejected. Like Irma, Dr M. also had little time for Freud’s solution.

As Freud progressively unravels the meaning of the dream, so the impulses revealed become darker. The white patch in the throat recalls the serious illness suffered by his daughter two years earlier. The scabs on the nostrils recall Freud’s own experience of such scabs consequent to his early habit of cocaine ingestion. The later reference to an injection is linked by Freud to the death of a friend from cocaine abuse, to whom Freud had earlier espoused the drug. On further reflection the dream yields up its sexual nature. A friend of Freud’s had associated trimethylamine as one of the products of the sexual metabolism. The real Irma is a young widow, as is her friend who helps form the composite of Irma in the dream. Freud’s male friend, the expert in trimethylamine, is also an expert on the nose and has revealed some very remarkable connections between the nostrils and the female sexual organs.

At its heart the dream fulfils certain wishes. It becomes clear to Freud that a major role of the dream, particularly in is latter parts, is to mock those who might disagree with his ‘solution’; that is, with psychoanalysis. This is what unites the triad of figures constituted by Irma, Dr M. and Otto. Freud comes to understand that in the dream he had wished that Irma had an organic illness, which would basically get him off the hook as her pain would be Otto’s fault; it is Otto who in the dream gives her the injection. The dream thus avenges Freud on Otto, who in real life annoyed Freud by saying that Irma continued to suffer and so could not be considered cured. The dream exonerates Freud of responsibility for Irma’s condition, tracing this to a number of factors. Dr M., who also disagreed with Freud in real life, is also ridiculed in the dream for making the nonsensical comment, given that dysentery would set in, with the elimination of the poison Irma would get better.

Read in its entirety, which is to be recommended, Freud’s dissection of the dream is a masterpiece of detailed reflection and recollection. What is even more amazing is his capacity to reveal to himself knowledge that would have been painful, even caustic: that in his sleeping hours he is as preoccupied as the least of us in jealously protecting his world view.

The dream of Irma has since been subject to a huge amount of discussion and further analysis. Lacan conducts an extensive analysis as part of his 1954–1955 seminar on the developmental stages in the formation of the ego.³ While the goal of wish-fulfilment might be the goal of all dreams, this does not mean the recuperation of the narcissistically wounded ego for Lacan but rather the decentring of the subject in relation to the ego. Considering the dream as a two-act drama, the first major incident occurs at the end of Freud’s dialogue with Irma; when confronted with the scabs, Freud stares straight into the abyss of trauma. Lacan’s argument rises to a height of florid speculation, likening Freud’s vision of the scabs to his own concept of the Thing, pointing to ‘the horrible discovery of the flesh one never sees, the ground of all things, the underside of the face’. This is a moment for Lacan of extimacy by rendering what is profoundly intimate as an impersonal representation, producing an identification with human mutability and decay (Lacan, 1988d). The second key scene of the dream involves a shift of register. Where the first scene revolves around the triad of figures that form the composite of Irma, the second stages the rivalry of three brothers (Freud, Otto, Leopold) in relation to an imaginary father, Dr M., who functions as a representative of the paternal law. This second triad does not stand for death but for judicial speech and the symbolic law. This dream inaugurates for Lacan psychoanalysis; ‘Where id was, there ego shall be.’

He emphasizes however that to recognize oneself as being a subject of the unconscious, one’s ego must do more than simply traverse the experience of a traumatic impact of vulnerability in the face of death. Arriving at an appropriation of the unconscious which after all is the aim of analysis, the subject fades before symbolic law. By not waking up and instead moving seamlessly from a dialogue with a representative of death to making an appeal to a representative of paternal authority, Freud performs this subjection to the symbolic order.⁴

Bronfen (ibid.), retracing the actual events that occurred between Freud, Fliess and Irma, describes their unhappy relations in excruciating detail, including the botched operation on Irma’s nose and its aftermath, from which it took her months to recover. Fliess had inadvertently left a sizeable piece of gauze in the wound, which he had then sutured, leaving it to suppurate. From Freud’s reports at that time, he identified with Irma, reporting his feelings of lassitude and helplessness. There are three women in the dream, Irma, the governess and the third, whom Freud mentions in passing in a footnote, is his wife Martha (née Bernays), who is pregnant at the time with a child, unwanted by Freud or Martha. Overall, an altogether darker story emerges from Bronfen’s analysis of its marginalia, involving the treatment of vulnerable women by powerful men.

Discussion

The dream of Irma is scarcely three-quarters of a page long. Freud’s analysis of the dream is eleven pages long, and subsequent discussions by others would fill volumes. This indicates the degree of compression that takes place in a dream. In the dream of Irma, Freud provides a glimpse into the different forms of operation of the unconscious, which he described as the primary mode of thought and how this d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Dreams
• 2  Sexuality
• 3  Mastery and Self-Control
• 4  Narcissism
• 5  Death
• 6  Lack
• 7  Freedom
• 8  Hysteria
• Notes
• References
• Index