Intro to Critical Theory

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2. Intro to Critical Theory Psychoanalysis

3. Psychobabble? • psychoanalytic concepts have become part of our everyday lives • If you’ve told an angry friend “Don’t take it out on me!” • That’s displacement - transferring our feelings (in this case 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 • sibling rivalry, inferiority complexes, oedipal complexes, oral and anal stages of development, defense mechanisms… • Most of us have a simplistic idea of what these concepts mean • With psychoanalysis we can begin to understand human behaviors that until now may have seemed utterly baffling.

4. If psychoanalysis can help us better understand human behavior, then it can also help us understand literary texts • texts are about human behavior and a form of human behavior • Freud treated texts like dreams, daydreams, generally the fantasies of the author. • Psychoanalysis is not for psychotics, it’s for neurotics • Neurosis - Any of various mental or emotional disorders involving symptoms such as insecurity, anxiety, depression, and irrational fears. • Psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis are not the same things • Psychiatry takes an M.D. and typically treats mental illness as the result of chemical imbalances • Psychology uses various therapeutic approaches that largely do not involve medication • Psychoanalysis is based almost purely on Freud’s ideas • The “talking” cure

5. Psychoanalytic Criticism • Developed in response to psychoanalysis • Freud’s ideas were developed through the observation and treatment of patients • These ideas are based on those ideas • Very different than other critical approaches • BUT psychoanalytic critics are not psychoanalysts • Becoming a psychoanalyst takes at least ten years of preperation post M.D. or Ph.D. • To become a psychoanalyst you also have to be psychoanalyzed • At least a year of treatment

6. The Final Journeyby: Gudrun Pausewang a.k.a. the poop book Psychoanalytic criticism can tell us why it’s so poopy

7. The Final Journey is a Holocaust narrative about a Jewish girl and her grandfather being transported to the concentration camps • They are transported by train in a cargo car • As on any long journey, the voyagers find themselves in need of bowel relief. • A corner of the train is designated for waste. • The young heroine, Alice, unfortunately is a neat freak. • The novel focuses on bodily waste to the point of distraction

8. Some Poopy Quotes • “Over in the corner Max, the hair-cream man, was squatting, with no coat, no cross-stitched cloth held in front of him. No one even glanced at him; they were used to the sight by now.” • “She threw a fearful glance at the corner. The heap was breaking up, flowing outward in tongues, like slowly cooling liquid lava. She had seen a picture of it in one of Grandfathers books. It looked like a great, live animal, threatening the people.” • “Alice had to go three times in succession. Diarrhea. There was a queue waiting in front of the corner. When she got rid of everything in the end, she lay on grandfather’s lap, completely exhausted.”

10. why all the poop? Psychoanalytic criticism has the answer!

11. Psychoanalysis Key Concepts

12. Key Terms • Id - the uncoordinated instinctual drives of the psyche. • Driven by the pleasure principle • Pleasure Principle – people seek pleasure through instant gratification and avoid pain • The Id is the unconscious • “It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality, what little we know of it we have learnt from our study of the dream-work… We all approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations... It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle - New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933) • responsible for our basic drives such as hunger, thirst, and libido • It is amoral and selfish • Freud divided the id's drives and instincts into two categories • Eros are those that are crucial to pleasurable survival, such as eating and copulation. • Thanatos our unconscious wish to die, as death puts an end to the everyday struggles for happiness and survival

14. Ego – the realistic part of the psyche • Acts according to the reality principle • Reality principle - compels deferment of instant gratification for greater rewards later • Organized part of the personality that includes defensive, perceptual, intellectual-cognitive, and executive functions. • ...The ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world ... The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions ... in its relation to the id it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse. - The Ego and the Id • Conscious awareness resides in the ego • mediates among the id, the super-ego and the external world. • Strikes to find balance between primitive drives, morals, and reality

15. Super Ego - the critical and moralizing portion of the psyche • aims for perfection • mainly but not entirely unconscious • Includes ideals, spiritual goals, and the conscience that prohibits fantasies, feelings, and actions. • social appropriateness vs. id’s instant self-gratification

18. Unconscious – Not to be confused with the subconscious (sub- suggests something underneath yet ultimately accessible, un- suggests something not just underneath awareness but utterly without awareness • Repression – when we’re threatened by our drives, we defend against them and repress them. This generates the unconscious, which consists of repressed drives. • Repression isn’t bad. Without it, it’d be all sex and murder all the time.

19. Psychosexual Developement • envisioned by Sigmund Freud at the end of the nineteenth century • central to his sexual drive theory • from birth, humans have instinctual sexual appetites (libido) which unfold in a series of stages. • Each stage is characterized by the erogenous zone that is the source of the libidinal drive during that stage. • These stages are, in order: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. • Freud believed that if, during any stage, the child experienced anxiety in relation to that drive, that themes related to this stage would persist into adulthood as neurosis. • Neurosis - Any of various mental or emotional disorders involving symptoms such as insecurity, anxiety, depression, and irrational fears. • Freud believed that people are born polymorphously perverse. • Polymorphous means many forms • Perverse means upside down or overturning • This implies people are born without any particular gender or sexual identity, and arrive or don’t arive at adult heterosexuality after passing through several phases…

20. Psychosexual Development

21. Oral Phase • lasts from the beginning of one’s life up to 1 year • the focus of gratification is on the mouth and pleasure is the result of nursing and exploration of ones surroundings • the Id is dominant since neither the ego nor the super ego is yet fully formed. • the baby does not have a sense of self and all actions are based on the pleasure principle • A key experience in this stage is weaning • leads to the first feeling of loss ever experienced by the baby. • Lack for Lacan • adds to the baby’s awareness of self, since it learns that not everything is under its control • This leads to the development of the ego • the gratification of needs will lead to the formation of independence and trust • A fixation can develop either due too much or too little gratification. • In the case of too much gratification, the child does not learn that not everything is under its control and that gratification is not always immediate (which are the results of weaning), forming an immature personality. • On the other hand, the child becomes passive since it has learned that whether it produces behavior or not, no gratification will come.

22. Anal Phase • lasts from about the 15th month to the third year of age. • the formation of ego continues. • the major experience during this stage is toilet training and results in conflict between the id and the demands of parents. • If you poop your pants, you’re happy in the short term, you no longer have to poop • Most kids are slightly less happy just after the short term when they find themselves wallowing in their own feces • You delay instant gratification by holding it in and pooping in the toilet • Most kids are happier in the long run this way • Most parents are also happier • Happier parents = happier kids

23. The resolution of this conflict can be gradual and non-traumatic, or intense and stormy • The ideal resolution will come if the child learns the importance of cleanliness and order gradually, which will lead to a self-controlled adult. • If the parents put too much emphasis on toilet training while the child decides to accommodate, this may lead to the development of compulsive personality, extensively concerned about order and neatness. • If the child decides to heed the demands of the id and the parents give in, the child may develop a messy and self-indulgent personality. • If the parents react, the child will have to comply, but it will develop a weakened sense of self, since the parents were the ones who controlled the situation, not the ego.

25. Why so Poopy? • The textual obsession with feces in The Final Journey relates to the characters personal compulsive behavior and may be evidence of some hang ups on the part of the author • One can psychoanalyze the text itself, the author who produced the text, or the society that produced the text (via it’s production of the author). • One would have to look at more of Pausewang’s works • If they all focus on bodily excretions then Pausewang has issues • If they all beat you over the head with details that have obvious Freudian undertones then it’s more a structuralist issue of intertexuality

26. Phalic Stage • from about three to five years of age • associated with the genitals. • Even though the gratification is focused on the genitals, this is not in the form of adult sexuality, mostly • Children become increasingly aware of their body and are not only curious about the bodies of other children, but also their parents. • Freud observed that children of this age can very often be observed taking off their clothes and playing “doctor” with each other • The major conflict of this stage is called Oedipal conflict • Freud used the term Oedipal for both sexes • In the beginning, for both sexes the primary care giver and main source of gratification is the mother. • As the child develops it starts forming a sexual identity and the dynamics for boys and girls alter. • For both sexes, the parents become the focus of drive energy.

27. For the boy • The mother becomes more desired • The father is the focus of jealousy and rivalry • he is the one who sleeps with the mother • The id wants to unite with the mother and kill the father • The ego, based on the reality principle, knows that the father is stronger. • The child also feels affectionate towards the father, one of the caregivers, and his feelings are ambivalent. • The fear that the father will object to the boy’s feelings is expressed by the id as fear that the father will castrate him. • The castration fear is not rational, and occurs on an unconscious irrational level.

28. girls follow the same psychosexual development • Whereas the boy would develop a castration anxiety , the girl would go on to develop penis envy, envy felt by females toward the males because the males possess a penis. • The Student Who Misunderstood • feminists are going to have a problem with this argument • The envy is rooted in the fact that without a penis, the female cannot sexually possess the mother as driven to by the Id. • As a result of this realization, she is driven to desire sexual union with the father. • Her eventual move into heterosexual femininity, which culminates in giving birth, grows out of her earlier infantile desires, with her own child taking place of the penis • Freud considered the Oedipal conflict experienced by girls more intense than that experienced by boys, potentially resulting in a more submissive and less confident personality. • Later theorists have renamed this “female oedipal conflict” the Electra Conflict

29. In both cases the conflict between the id drives and the ego is resolved through two basic defense mechanisms of the ego. • repression the blocking of memories, impulses and ideas from the conscious mind • Identification incorporation of characteristics of the same-sex parent into the child’s own ego. • The boy by adopting this mechanism seeks for the reduction of castration fears • His similarity with the father is thought to protect the boy from him. • The identification of girls with the mother is easier • She realizes that neither she, nor her mother have a penis.

30. If the conflict is not resolved, a fixation in this stage (the phalic stage) may lead to… • Women can • Strive for superiority over men • if she had overwhelming feelings of devastation due to lack of penis • be seductive and flirtatious, or very submissive and with low self-esteem. • men can • exhibit excessive ambition • Be gay • Feminist, Gender, and Queer Theorists are ultimately ok with this, even though it seems insulting at first. • Overall, the Oedipal conflict is very important for the super-ego development, since by identifying with one of the parents, morality becomes internalized, and compliance with rules is not any more the result of punishment fear. A poor identification with the opposite sex parent may lead to recklessness or even immorality.

31. Hamlet • Hamlet’s father is killed by Hamlet’s uncle Claudius while Hamlet himself is away. • Claudius marries Hamlet’s mom • Hamlet comes home to find his father dead, his uncle on the thrown, and his own path to the crown obstructed • The ghost of Hamlets father tells him of Claudius’ guilt • Hamlet takes FOREVER to do something about it. • Why? It’s not because Hamlet is reluctant to kill. • Under the Freudian account, it’s due to Hamlet’s own guilt, why might he be guilty? Why might he even identify with his uncle?

32. Back to the Phases of Development… • Latency phase • typified by a solidifying of the habits that the child developed in the earlier stages. • Whether the Oedipal conflict is successfully resolved or not, the drives of the id are not accessible to the ego during this stage of development, since they have been repressed during the phallic stage. • the drives are seen as dormant and hidden (latent), and the gratification the child receives is not as immediate as it was during the three previous stages. • pleasure is mostly related to secondary process thinking. • Drive energy is redirected to new activities, mainly related to schooling, hobbies and friends. • Problems however might occur during this stage, and this is attributed to inadequate repression of the Oedipal conflict, or to the inability of the ego to redirect the drive energy to activities accepted by the social environment.

33. Genital phase • lasts from puberty, about the twelfth year of age, and onwards. • detachment from the parents. • coming tp terms with unresolved residues of the early childhood. • focus is again on the genitals, like in the phallic stage, but this time the energy is expressed with adult sexuality. • while in the phallic gratification is linked with satisfaction of the primary drives, the ego in the genital stage is well-developed, and so uses secondary process thinking, which allows symbolic gratification. • The symbolic gratification may include the formation of love relationships and families, or acceptance of responsibilities associated with adulthood.

34. Freudian Psychoanalytic Critics… • Give central importance in a literary interpretation to the distinction between the conscious and unconscious mind. • They associate the works “overt” content with the former, and the “covert” content with the later, privileging the later as being what the work is really about, and aiming to disentangle the two. • This is essentially the same as dealing with implicit and explicit ideologies. • Pay close attention to unconscious motives and feelings of either the author or characters • Demonstrate the presence in a literary work of classic psychoanalytic symptoms, conditions, or phases • Make large scale applications • Focus on psycho drama over social drama • Hamlet isn’t about a power struggle over the thrown, it’s about Hamlet’s guilt, his identification with Claudius, and how his mommy ruined sex for him.

35. How to write psychoanalytical literary criticism • Interpret an author psychoanalytically • Pausewang displays neurosis through her text demonstrating anxieties stemming from complications during the anal phase of her psychosexual development. This can be demonstrated by looking at the following passages in the text… • Peter Pan is an enactment of Barrie’s own Oedipal complex wherein we see Pan kill the father embodied in Hook (often played by the same actor as Mr. Darling) and… • Interpret a character psychoanalytically • Alice has hang ups stemming from developments during the anal phase • Pan and the Oedipal complex • Hamlet and Oedipal complex

38. Sign, Signifier, Signified

39. Lacan believed… • There is a perpetual barrier between signifier and signified • A signifier may have different signifieds • “an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier” • The “sound-image” (your word for something), takes precident over the concept it represents.

41. The unconscious is structured like language (is language) • Humanists believed in “essences”, your nationality, your sex, your gender, your religion, your sexuality. For the Humanists , these were all “essential” parts of who you are • For Lacan, there’s no “you” in there, just language • The notion of a unique separate self is deconstructed • Language is detached from the real world

42. The Three Realms • The Real – The world outside and beyond the symbolic and imaginary. We can never experience this. • The state of nature from which we have been forever severed by our entrance into language. • Lacan represents this state of nature as a time of fullness or completeness that is subsequently lost through the entrance into language. • As far as humans are concerned, however, "the real is impossible”. It is impossible in so far as we cannot express it in language because the very entrance into language marks our irrevocable separation from the real. • the real continues to exert its influence throughout our adult lives since it is the rock against which all our fantasies and linguistic structures ultimately fail. • White Noise - Most photographed Barn In America • Simulacra and Simulation – Baudrillard • Baudrillard claims that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs. • Simulacra = Latin for similarity

43. The Three Realms • Imaginary Order – The fundamental narcissism by which the human subject creates fantasy images of both himself and his ideal object of desire. • The Mirror Stage – The illusion of the unified self, formation of the ego • Lacan proposes that human infants pass through a stage in which an external image of the body (reflected in a mirror) produces a psychic response that gives rise to the mental representation of an "I". The infant identifies with the image, which serves as a gestalt of the infant's emerging perceptions of selfhood, but because the image of a unified body does not correspond with the underdeveloped infant's physical vulnerability and weakness, this image is established as an Ideal-I toward which the subject will perpetually strive throughout his or her life. • Freud deals with idealized self image primarily through his ideas on narcissism • Self love • Object choice • Parents • Frankenstein • The idea of a unified self is an illusion, consider cell life and its ultimate implications • Ask Morgan about being scared of her own reflection

44. “Mr. Hayworths”

45. The Three Realms • Symbolic Order – The social world of linguistic communication, and the acceptance of the law. Once a child enters into language and accepts the rules and dictates of society, it is able to deal with others. The acceptance of language's rules is aligned with the Oedipus complex, according to Lacan. The symbolic is made possible because of your acceptance of the Name-of-the-Father, those laws and restrictions that control both your desire and the rules of communication. Through recognition of the Name-of-the-Father, you are able to enter into a community of others. • Follows mirror stage, the acquisition of language • The Name of the Father – Everything you can’t do, mainly mom.

46. Lacanian Critics • Pay close attention to unconscious motives and feelings, but instead of excavating for those of the author or characters, they search out those of the text itself, uncovering contradictory undercurrents of meaning, which lie like a subconscious beneath the conscious of the text… deconstruction. • Look for Lacanian psychoanalytic symptoms or phases in a text. • Explore lack and desire • Lack – • Imaginary Phallus – what the child assumes someone must have in order for them to be the object of the mother's desire • Symbolic Phallus – The thing itself, the thing women don’t have, the thing women are • Real Breast – Represents lost union with the mother, the state of being prior to the emergence of a self • Desire – longing that persists once need has been satisfied, longing for what one lacks • See the literary text as an enactment or demonstration of Lacanian views about language and the unconscious, particularly the endemic elusiveness of the signified, and the centrality of the unconscious.

47. Carl Jung • Freud’s Contemporary • Less centered on sexuality • Libinal Types vs. Character Types • Extrovert and Introvert are his ideas

48. Collective Unconscious – • Common to entire human race • Derived from the whole of human history and recurrent life-situations • It’s existence is revealed through shared dreams, daydreams, common works of the imagination, images and symbols as well as recurrent motifs in mythology and religion • Takes the form of primordial images or “archetypes” • Archetypes - a collectively inherited unconscious idea, pattern of thought

49. Key Jungian Archetypes • The Anima • A man’s archetypal image of a woman • Can have different aspects (Mother, Virgin, Whore, etc) • The feminine aspect of a man • The Animus • A woman’s archetypal image of a man • (father, wise old man, etc) • The masculine aspect of a woman • The Self - represents the unification of the unconsciousness and consciousness of an individual • The Persona – The idea of yourself that you try to project to others

50. The Shadow – “Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.” -Psychology and Religion" (1938). In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. P.131