Psychoanalysis

1. Psychoanalysis Conclusion & Continuation Fetishism as an Example

2. Outline • Sigmund Freud • Jacque Lacan • Fetishism • Continuations • ego psychology & object-relations theory • Connections with Marxism

3. Freudian Psychoanalysis: General Comment --Deconstruction • Freud begins with a series of hierarchical oppositions: • normal/pathological, • Sanity/insanity, • Experience/dream, • Conscious/unconscious, • Life/death. The first –prior and richer;The second– negation or complication; • Freud: the first –”a special case of the fundamentals designated by the second term.”(Jonathan Culler qud in Wright 124)

4. Freudian Psychoanalysis: possible functions & criticism A. Psyche, Id psychology & Child development: The theory of Oedipus complex and penis envy -- helps explain gendering processes in patriarchal society. -- Freud's limitations or our misunderstanding? -- inability to explain female sexuality--"What do women want?" -- its focus on infantile psychology. "Between ordinary adult personality traits and infantile psychology thereare layers upon layers of relationships, experiences, values and meanings."

5. Freudian Psychoanalysis: possible functions & criticism B. Psychobiography and Art as Dream work. -- psychobiography (treating artists as patients, art as dream work, and explaining art in terms of his/her life) can be reductive, ignoring art’s aesthetic aspects on the conscious level. (e.g. E. Bishop’s objectification/distantiation of her loss ) -- We can examine our own transference in reading. -- interpretation of dream: helps us understand the languages of dream.

6. Freudian Psychoanalysis: possible functions & criticism C. Psychological Pattern & Disorders • Pattern: -- repression  displacement/sublimation or fixation/regression -- repetition compulsion, defense mechanism, death/life instincts • Disorder -- the return of the repressed through symptoms. -- Helpful for character and self analysis; -- entering the symbolic order means having reality checks; otherwise, we may become psychotic.

7. Freudian Psychoanalysis: Lacan • Add linguistic elements to Freud’s analysis. • Barred subject: S-ier/S-ied; or S; • The differences between need, demand (with language) and desire. • The mother as feminine Other, our needs for the “others” (objet a). • The three orders of human existence: constant antagonism between the Real and the Symbolic, our mirror images and the need to “look.” • --Is this another fiction?

8. Fetishism An example of controversies and continuation

9. Fetishism – of Different Kinds • (Religious fetishism 拜物教--人體、物體、神像和護身符四大類); • Erotic/Sexual fetishism; • Commodity fetishism and Colonial fetishism

10. FETISHISM—general def. • Erotic fetishism-- the dependence on particular objects (part of a body or an inanimate object) to obtain sexual arousal. • Most common fetish objects are Female underwear, Leatherwear, and Rubber. Using female underwear for fetishistic purposes is one reason for partial cross-dressing.http://www.schools-out.org.uk/san_definitions.html

11. Erotic fetishism- Examples • Clothing Fetishism- underwear- uniforms (e.g. Exotica)- gloves - shoes/boots/pantyhose • (Body) Modification- tattoos- piercing • Material Fetishism- leather- fur- velvet (e.g. Blue Velvet)

12. Erotic fetishism- Examples • Body Fetishism- legs/feet - hair- nails/claws - belly buttons • Other Fetishism- manaquins/robots- cross dressing - cigarette

13. Erotic fetishism- Freud’s analysis • Disavowal: The little boy sees the mother’s genitals and simultaneously denies his perception of her castration. //his castration fear Solution -- denial/acceptance of her castration, and by extension his own, by finding a substitute. • Fetish: • A substitute for the mother’s missing penis; • Linked metonymically to the female genitalia; • Never the same as the original, which is a fiction. (imaginary phallus or phallic mother)

14. Erotic fetishism- Reasons • Fetishization: • eroticizes an object or a non-genital part of one’s body; • allows the boy to remain intimate with the “phallic mother” while at the same time enter the symbolic, accepting the father’s law and developing his masculinity. • Lacan’s example: Little Harry (Grosz 119-20) • Is fetishism all about need for power and identification? • Are we all fetishists, one way or another

15. Prosperine, 1877 Fetishism: example • Fazio's Mistress, 1863.D.G.Rossetti 

16. Erotic fetishism- Extention • Visual Pleasures in Hollywood films • –the camera takes a male perspective, watching female stars as passive object of look • Satisfy two kinds of desire: • Male voyeurism –peeping in order to possess • Fetishism --look and identify with the glamorized female stars; -- fetishizing women’s body on the screen; in order to project them as “phallic mother” (//e.g. film noire: the woman has to be a lack, losing memory of her identity.)

17. Erotic fetishism- Criticism • Reflects Freud’s emphasis of-- • Female castration, male castration anxiety • Freud’s privileging the phallus • Feminist responses 1. Rejection –fetishism coincides with the norm of phallocentrism. 2. Female fetishism: e.g. collection of memorabilia; self-fetishization; 3. Rewriting: female disavowal—women disavow their own castration through narcissism or hysteria. It also explains female development of lesbianism.

18. Examples for analysis: Mulholland Dr. –its “Narcissistic” Elements • As a revision of film noire, it has a woman, but not a man, in pursuit of a femme fatale (who is mysterious and amnesiac). • The fetishistic images in the film turn to be those of herself. • Mirror/reality forms a vicious circle, and there is no outlet for her.

19. Greta Garbo vs. Diane

20. Rene Magritte, The Dangerous Liaisonhttp://bertc.com/magritte_menu.htm • The woman hides behind a projected “phallic” image of herself.  contradiction between soliciting gaze with the gesture of modesty and self-projection. • (Cf. Wright 185)

21. Fetishism: Literary Examples • Hemingway • his male heroes – all amputees. (Jake Barnes is missing his penis. Harry Morgan is missing his arm. Harry Walden has a gangrenous leg. Colonel Cantwell has been shot "twice through the hand.“) • a fear of castration  envy of masculine grace. • an unsettling identification with the "castrated" woman, which paradoxically intensifies castration anxiety. e.g.

22. Fetishism: Literary Examples “問金庸情是何物：禮物、信物、證物”– by 張小虹； -- Some fetishes may not be sexual in nature e.g. -- green light in The Great Gatsby (national fetish) -- commodity fetish (e.g. The commodities in such realist novels as Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath or Sister Carrie)

23. Fetishism of Other Kinds: Colonial Fetish • sexual fetish the sexualized "fetish of colonial discourse" (Homi Bhabha) • colonial fetish: • in the ambivalent space "in between“ • an imposed identity and the reality of their humanity for the colonized • between the recognized and the disavowed, • between fear and desire for the colonizers. • The tropes of the sexual fetish are present in the colonial fetish, but syncretized with certain tropes of colonialist experience and identity to embody the larger socio-political context of colonial relations.

24. Fetishism of Other Kinds: Colonial Fetish • e.g.1. the image of the submissive and sweet Oriental woman (Madame Butterfly); • 2. Jimmie Durham Self-Portrait (1986) Sexually powerful aborigine. -- sea shells for ears, bits of animal hide hair; one turquoise eye is just to show a little "Indianness," and the feathers revealed by an open chest cavity imply a certain "light-heartedness." and defiantly "large and colorful" genitals.

25. Fetishism of Other Kinds: Commodity Fetish • The charming and enigmatic nature of commodity  Exchange values added to it; • relations between the products // relations between men e.g. Cell phone, Hello Kitty, etc. • More next time.

26. Psychoanalysis: continuation

27. ego psychology & object-relations theory • Ego psychology – deal with the management of fantasies for the maintenance of identity; • (id psychology– instinctual drives and private fantasies) • Object-relations: • feelings about the mother projected to an external object;  multiple interactions with the object  establish one’s relations with reality.

28. Combined with Marxism • The symbolic order – filled with signs of ideologies; • Commodity –as a sublime object of our desire (to hide the inner split in us). • Analyzing cultural symptoms. e.g. the need for stigmatization when SARRS occurs. • Treating Psychoanalysis as a discourse that gets form when traditional families are challenged. (e.g. Foucault)

29. Reference • Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reappraisal by Elizabeth Wright. Polity,1998.\ • Elizabeth Grosz Jacque Lacan: A Feminist Introduction

30. Next Week • Reader: chap 5 to p. 214 • "Snowed Up"