Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature

1. Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature Structure of the Mind, Child Development & Love Dream and Sexual Symbols Lacan’s Views of Desire & Split Identity Psychological Disorders

2. Outline • Q & A on Family Relations • Subjectivity, Repression and Sublimation • Interpretation of Dreams • Examples of Dreams • Freud’s, Language, Some Paintings • from the textbook • Other types of Dreams • Sexual Symbols • Literature and Psychoanalysis

3. Q & A: more examples of “family” relationships • How is the story of Peter Pan psychoanalyzed? Does that influence your appreciation of this fairy tale? (157-60) • What does the excerpt from Sons and Lovers show about Paul? (156) • Do you have stories of Electra complex (154-55) (hatred of the mother for the loss of penis and love for the father)  Wish to imitate the mother; to be given a child by her father, to bear him a child.

4. Peter Pan • Wendy’s last night at the “female-dominated” nursery (a space for play) before being socialized as a dominated woman; • Peter (the boy who refused to grow up, ) never grows up, recognizing sexual attraction only in the form of mothering; • Family drama in the children’s world • Peter, mother and father to the lost boys; • Nana the dog as a “mother” • Effacement of the real fathers: • Mr. Darling; • Captain Hook

5. Peter Pan – Context and Afterwards • The deleted and ignored: p. 160 – Peter’s coming back to W’s daughter (Jane) with a dagger; the Lost Boys– its homosexual environment • Finding Neverland and J.M. Barrie’s relations with The Llewelyn Davies family (all boys) • ”When copying the will informally for Sylvia's family, Barrie inserted himself in an additional paragraph: Sylvia had written that she would like Mary Hodgson, the boys' nurse, to continue taking care of them, and that perhaps "Jenny" (Mary's sister) could come help; Barrie wrote "Jimmy" (Sylvia's nickname for him) instead of "Jenny” • The boys – One (George) was killed in action in World War I. Michael, with whom Barrie corresponded daily, drowned at a known danger-spot at Oxford, one month short of his 21st birthday. –possibly a suicide pact with his friend and possible lover Rupert Erroll Victor Buxton. ".(source)

6. Subjectivity: (Liberal) Humanism (since Renaissance) • Opposed religious dogmatism and scientism • Affirms the human (but not the divine or the natural) • The individual (over the social and its structure) • Rational consciousness (over the unconscious) • Freedom (over determinism) • Self-knowledge (over knowledge of others or the world) • Individual experience (over objective knowledge)  Subjectivity = human self

7. Subjectivity: Modern Views—split or conflictual subjects • I think, therefore I am (textbook p. 140) •  Freud: I express and repress my desires, therefore I am. •  Lacan: I am where I don’t think; I think where I am not. •  Marxism: I work, therefore I am not (alienation); I shop, therefore I am?

8. Subjectivity: Modern Views (2) • Subject as being • “subjected” (p. 140) • Located in time, space and “structures of rights and obligations”; • Constructed by culture, language and desire: even desire is culturally instigated (e.g. Kaja Silverman) • Constructed through language because language offers us “subject positions”(e.g. Chris Weedon) 主詞﹦主體位置  split between the speaking subject and spoken subject

9. Repression and Sublimation • Repression: (Addition to textbook 147-48) (clip 16:00) • Two kinds: primal repression (which establishes the unconscious), secondary repression • Separates ideas from energy  with ideas banished to the unconscious (ascodes),  andenergy repressed, converted into another affect,orinto anxiety) •  The return of the repressed (assymptoms): when repression is not successful. • examples of symptoms (alsocoded): Freudian slips, jokes, and dreams. • Sublimation– de-sexualizes the love-object, sublimate instincts into “higher” cultural pursuits

10. The dream-work . . . • Dreams-- the royal road to the unconscious. • Transforms the 'latent' content of the dream, the. 'forbidden' dream-thoughts into the 'manifest' dream stories. • Such ‘transformation’ (or disguise, i.e. condensation and displacement, secondary revision) allows the desires to be expressed without being stopped by the censor.

11. 3 kinds of Dream as wish fulfillment • 1st: wish fulfillments---the disguiseis successful and the dream proceeds undisturbed, • 2nd: anxiety dreams --the disguise is absent or insufficient; the forbidden wish emerges, causes anxiety, and the dreamer wakes up • 3rd: content is disturbing but the feeling is not -- the wish is particularly well disguised by a misalliance of content and feeling. (e.g. dreaming of a family member’s death) • (later) nightmares… the revisiting of our traumatic moments

12. Dream Language • Four elements: (clip 18:30) • Condensation (of image, persons and words) --e.g. the joke “Erring Dirty Laundry” in our textbook (sordid+sorted) • displacement, --e.g. switches a person's hatred of Mr. Appleby to that of a rotting apple. • Symbolization, or consideration of representibility, • secondary revision

13. clip 11: 30 – Irma’s dream (against Otto and Irma)  dream as a wish fulfillment; interpretation by free association (e.g. Irma, connected with his daughter and his other patient) Examples of Dreams (1) Freud’s own dream—wish fulfillment

14. A Businessman dreamed that his alarm clock said $6.30, but not 6:30 time is money A graduate student’s dream of “overeating” while outlining his PhD dissertation  “food for thought.” Examples of Dreams (2) Language

15. Examples of Dreams (3) • Henri Rousseau, The Dream (1910) –Who is the dreamer and what is it about?

16. Examples of Dreams (3) • “Dream” by Henry Rousseau –about the dream process • Wish fulfillment of the woman reclining on a divan. • Displacement: from a French drawing room to a jungle; • Condensation: day and night; the piper (human and non-human—like a satyr), • Sexual symbols: flowers, serpent, birds. • “The painting is an illustration, but not a replica of dream” (Cf. Adams 133-34)

17. Examples of Dreams (4) • “Dream” by Henry Rousseau –secondary revision (1914) • Yadwigha, falling into sweet sleep, heard in a lovely dream the sounds of a musette played by a kind enchanter. While the moon shone on the flowers, the verdant trees, the wild snakes lent an ear to the instrument's gay airs. • Yadwigha is no fantasy--she was a real friend of Rousseau's. To most male painters of his era, women were wives, lovers, prostitutes, models and muses, but rarely close friends. Rousseau, however, was known as an exception. (source) • ( S. Plath “Yadwigha, on a Red Couch, Among Lillies ”

18. Examples of Dreams (5) • Textbook –excerpt from The Wanderground (pp. 151) • “remember room” • Re-structuring the condensed but disparate images: • sandlewood and wine + candle spilling over telephone bill, steak, car and heat • Wires • Man on the side , brassiere  Jim, Rosie, nursing home

19. Other types of Dreams & Interpretation • Does every dream have its latent content? • Foreboding dreams • Dreams related one’s physical condition • Dreams as fulfillment of our conscious wishes • Interpretation: • REM (38:02) : Rapid Eye movement (the more REM we have, the more dream we have, and the longer we sleep.) • Ask the Dream Doctor http://www.dreamdoctor.com/index.shtml

20. Sexual symbols: • Frued's notion of symbolism: the whole world can be absorbed narcissistically, the sexual drives can attach themselves to anything the senses perceive. • Examples: Rene Margritte

21. Sexual symbols: examples • Usually interpreted in their contexts (chap 3: 54) • The hat as the symbol of a man (of the male genitals): a woman dreams of wearing such a hat (the middle piece of which is bent upwards, while the side pieces hang downwards [here the description hesitates]) and feeling cheerful and confident • Representation of the genitals by buildings, stairs, and shafts. (He is taking a walk with his father in a place ... one can see the Rotunda (圓形建築物), in front of which there is a small vestibule to which there is attached a captive balloon; the balloon, however, seems rather limp. His father asks him what this is all for; he is surprised at it, but he explains it to his father. • The male organ symbolised by persons and the female by a landscape. (“No Problem)

22. Literature and Psychoanalysis • Artist as daydreamer (chap 3 55) • Is literary work like a patient in front of literary critics as analysts? (Cf. textbook 144-46) • It’s hard to tell how much “control” an author has over his/her work; whether it is “manipulated” dream or fantasy. (Cf. 153) • The reader/critics themselves can be patient/texts. • Psycho-analyzing a text or its author cannot exhaust their meanings or values.

23. Next Week • Jacque Lacan -- Identity as Split and in Lack, Desire as Displacement (Reader: chap 3 pp. 61-67; chap 4 pp. 161-76) • Elizabeth Bishop's 3 poems • Ref. at YouTube “In the Village” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SJEylT-4GI