PSYCHOANALYSIS, LITERATURE AND CRITICISM

PSYCHOANALYSIS, LITERATURE AND CRITICISM

 

One of the most interesting contributions of psychoanalysis is its implicit questioning of traditional views on the human subject, especially the Cartesian view of the subject as autonomous and unified, as rational consciousness fully aware of its intentions and motives. For literary criticism and theory, the implication of the kind of skepticism evinced by psychoanalysis is the same as in the case of structuralism or Marxism: the relegation of the author, of the creative self to a position of mere instrumentality. From such a perspective, the self is merely the site where forces over which it has no control are at work to shape the literary object. These forces are the institution of language  – or of literature -, from a structuralist perspective, and the ideologies corresponding to a certain material organization of society, for Marxism. In spite of the apparently sharp contradiction between Marxism and psychoanalysis (the former insisting on the social, the collective, and the latter on the individual), both of them share in fact a materialistic, deterministic point of view with respect to the making of the human subject.

For Sigmund Freud, our identities are closely connected with the complex bodily transactions that take place during our infancy and early childhood. This should not be viewed, however, as biological reductionism or as an asocial model of life, as Freud’s theories place strong emphasis on the relation between individual psychological complexes and the constitution of a certain cultural and social pattern.

The central place in Freud’s explanation of the emergence of the human subject is the famous Oedipus Complex. The latter organizes the structure of relations which gives us gendered identities and marks the transition from the pleasure principle, dominating our childhood, to the reality principle, which regulates our adult life and effects our insertion into an extra-familial pattern (society – i.e. the transition from Nature to Culture).

This insertion into a larger pattern governed by law, morality, social and religious authority – all connected with the real or symbolical image of the Father – is made possible only by the repression of our natural tendency to pleasure, of the libidinal energy which the infant’s contact with the maternal body had been producing. These energies are to be held in check by containing them in the realm of the unconscious.

The unconscious, the major discovery (or invention?) of psychoanalysis, is part of the structure of the human psyche, which comes into existence owing to the dynamic relation of its three components, described by Freud in The Ego and the Id (1923). The human subject, the ego that emerges from the Oedipal process, is an agency which opposes and regulates the instinctual drives of the id (the unconscious). The ego’s function is to mediate between the id and the external world, to defend the id from external interference and thus avoid unpleasure, which it does mainly by the tactics of delaying gratification. There is a permanent tension between the id and the ego, the former being governed wholly by the pleasure principle, taking no account of “whether or not its wishes are compatible with external demands” (Wright, p.11), while the latter is constantly “threatened by the pressure of unacceptable wishes” (ibid.) and has to comply, moreover, with the tyrannical demands of the superego. The superego takes shape with the decline of the Oedipus Complex and it represents the power exercised by parental and social constraint on the instinctual drives.

At a first stage in the development of the psyche – “primary narcissism,” or “narcissistic identification,” in Freud’s terminology – the ego is undifferentiated from the id, but at the stage of “secondary narcissism” ego-formation takes place through the emergence of a tendency to identify with other objects, which Freud calls the subject’s “ego–ideals” (i.e. objects that the ego “wants to be.” Both ego and superego are thus dependent on external objects which they introject (love-objects) and identify with (authority figures) respectively. The process of maturation is inconceivable outside the agency of the superego, which controls our adjustment to the external world and works to maintain our “normality” in a society founded on law, prohibition and authority. Maturation, understood as the process of insertion into the social dimension of life, has thus a high price: the repression of desire, i.e. of instinctual drives, and the deferment of gratification – the principles on which civilization itself is built (cf. Civilization and Its Discontents / Angoasă în civilizaţie, 1930)

When repressed desires cannot be satisfactorily contained, they tend to intrude into the ego, which has its own defense systems, and the result of this conflict is neurosis. The symptoms of neurosis reflect the compromising way in which the subject at once expresses his unconscious desire and tries to mount a defense against its surge, under the pressure of the demands of external reality.

Dreams are the “royal road” – as Freud puts it – towards the unconscious, the symbolic fulfillment of unconscious wishes. They are symbolic “texts” which need deciphering, precisely because the ego is censorious and watchful even in our sleep. Another way of access to the unconscious, from the point of view of psychoanalysis as a therapeutical practice especially, is provided by parapraxes, the unaccountable (at the rational level) slips of the tongue, failures of memory, stumblings, stammerings, misreadings, etc.; or by jokes, whose basic libidinal, anxious or aggressive content Freud has pointed out.

Language is, then, an important way of access to the unconscious, and an indicator of psychological disturbances of one kind or another. It should not be surprising therefore that Freud was significantly concerned with literature and the creative act.

Freud’s account of literature, and of art in general, is closely connected with his explanation of neurosis. One way of dealing with wishes that cannot be fulfilled is by sublimating them, i.e. directing desire towards a substitute object, which is socially more acceptable. Intellectual and artistic work represents such an unconscious re-investment of desire, which leads to a certain independence of the ego from the external world, since the sources of pleasure are no longer in it, but depend on inner, psychic processes. Sublimation may be seen as a “double” to neurosis, but while neurosis represents the unhappiness and misery through which civilization puts the ego, sublimation is connected with human creativity and with all the achievements of civilization and culture.

The activity of the artist is similar, for Freud, to the production of fantasies and to day-dreaming, a related strategy of avoiding the pressures of reality. Imagination is thus a means of satisfying wishes that are otherwise difficult to fulfil, and Freud points out: “the poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious (…). What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied” (“Creative Writers and Day-reaming,” in Lodge, p.35). Both the process of sublimation and that of fantasizing, as ways of avoiding neurotic conflict, represent basically the tendency to re-create a pleasure that was formerly experienced – usually in infancy, because, as Freud shows, “Actually we can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another. What appears to be a renunciation is really the formation of a substitute or a surrogate” (ibid., p.37)

The difference between the neurotic and the artist lies in the latter’s capacity to find a way back from the illusion or fantasy, from the world of the imagination, and to get again a firm foothold in reality. Freud finds the writer’s work more similar to the child’s activity of playing. Like the child, the writer “creates a world of fantasy, which he takes very seriously – that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion, while separating it sharply from reality” (ibid.). The writer is also in command of his fantasy, while the neurotic is possessed by it. This difference had been already grasped by Charles Lamb, who defended the basic “sanity” of the true genius: “The poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject but has domination over it.”

The form of the literary work represents the result of the writer’s act of arranging and presenting his fantasies or day-dreams in such a way as to render them acceptable. Fantasies are normally concealed, because they cause in other people a feeling of repulsion, “undoubtedly connected with the barriers that rise between each single ego and the others” (Freud, in Lodge, p. 42). Just as wit and word-play, i.e. the form of jokes, soften their aggressivity and make them socially acceptable and enjoyable, so literary form is a means of altering and disguising the purely egoistic character of the day-dream. The aesthetic pleasure that literary form produces in the reader is a sort of “bribe” which is meant to break the resistances of his own ego and prepare him for a greater release of pleasure, which comes form “a liberation of tensions in our minds” (ibid.). The aesthetic dimension of the literary work is thus implicitly seen as a therapeutical device, since it involves, for both writer and reader, an unconscious lifting of repression, without the offensiveness that usually accompanies it.

This function of form brings the literary work close to the dream. Literary form corresponds to what Freud calls the manifest content of the dream, i.e. its more coherent and apparently articulated aspect. What interests Freud primarily in his analyses is the way in which the unconscious drives/instincts, which represent the latent content, the raw material of the dream, is transformed into manifest content. This is the dream-work, which consists in several operations, the most characteristic of them being condensation (i.e. a multitude of elements in the latent content are reduced to only a few; several meanings are fused into one) and displacement (i.e. the centering of the manifest content on elements which do not have the same importance in the latent content, so that what may appear marginal in the former may turn out to be essential in the latter).

Another important technique in the dream-work is the process of secondary revision, which consists in the reorganization of the dream materials so as to form a relatively consistent and comprehensive narrative. It seems as if, through this technique, the unconscious acknowledges the demands of rationality and logic that conscious thought presupposes, and mimics its orderliness. Freud points out that this only reflects the persistence of censorship during the dream and proves that our consciousness is never entirely asleep. The latter performs in fact a first act of “interpretation” on the dream, conferring it a coherence and intelligibility of which the analyst must always be suspicious, and which he must never treat with greater attention than the apparently absurd, obscure elements (cf. Interpretarea viselor, pp.384-385).

Freud’s major work The Interpretation of Dreams (1900; England and U.S.A.: 1932) inaugurated a daring mode of reading, a hermeneutics of suspicion/negative hermeneutics (as Paul Ricoeur calls it), for which the message is always an enigma, and the truth is always disguised, sometimes beyond retrieval. His work not only inspired literary criticism with a new conception of textuality, but also provided it with a whole new range of critical “motifs”. At its beginning, psychoanalytic criticism experienced the fascination of treating the literary text like a dream text, of investigating it as an analyst does his patient, trying to determine its gaps, omissions, contradictions, ambiguities and distortions, and treating them as symptoms for various complexes belonging to the Freudian repertoire.

Thus, the “classic” form of Freudian criticism, the Id-psychology criticism, relies on the assumption that the work of art represents the embodiment of the author’s unconscious desires, over which the author has no control and which surface in the work in the form of images and symbols that the critic must decipher. This kind of analysis proceeds by relating the work to the author’s psyche, which is explored through the examination of his earliest childhood experiences, available from what is known of his life, from the analysis of his fictional characters and of his “typical symbols.”

Marie Bonaparte’s reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, in her work The Life and Works of E.A.Poe – A Psychoanalytic Study (Paris, 1933; London, 1949), represents such an example of psychobiography. She undertakes a study of Poe’s life and stories, relating figures/persons in the former to figures (in the rhetorical sense) in the latter. In a section of her study, “Tales of the Mother,” for instance, Bonaparte demonstrates how Poe’s necrophilia and fixation on his mother are transferred onto fictional figures through displacement, as in dreams, and how the dominant symbolism attaches itself to the sexual drive. In “Tales of the Father,” she analyses how male figures in Poe’s stories represent “the return of the repressed,” standing for the father, who “comes back to avoid Poe’s imaginary parricide and incest” (Wright, p.41). Her conclusion is that Poe’s stories are more like anxiety dreams than wish-fulfilling ones, enacting the permanent return to a traumatic experience: the death of his mother. The unconscious wish of being reunited with his dead mother is embodied in stories which function at the same time as censors to that wish, renewing and strengthening resistance to it.

Id-psychology criticism viewed literary form in the same way as Freud did: as a device for undermining the resistance put up by the ego and relaxing its defenses, “sugar-coating” an “offensive content” and “bribing critical powers with aesthetic pleasure (analogous to aesthetic fore-pleasure”) (Jacqueline Rose, in Wright, p.28).

In contrast to it, the American version of psychoanalytical criticism, Ego-psychology criticism, contends that aesthetic form reflects “the ego’s attempt to maintain and extend its boundaries over the id” (Wright, p.28). Freud’s assertion, in “The Ego and the Id” (1923) that “psychoanalysis is an instrument which enables the ego to achieve a progressive conquest of the id” (quoted in Wright, p.57) may be seen as a support to this more optimistic version of interpretation, which prefers to see the ego not as a “frontier creature,” as Freud called it, negotiating “between inner demands and external prohibitions” (Wright, p.57), but as a stable identity, which is strengthened by socialization, and whose “managing” capacities are emphasized.

The American psychoanalyst and critic Ernst Kris (Psychoanalytical Explorations in Art, 1952), drawing on William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) and on Lionel Trilling’s two essays “Art and Neurosis” (1945) and “Freud and Literature” (1947), advances a theory of creativity in which the unconscious (the id) appears as “tamed,” and the ego has all the credit for aesthetic ambiguity. Ambiguity is not the result of the emergence of unconscious fantasies, but of the ego’s capacity to control and organize the impulses of the id into a safe and harmonious complex of multiple meanings. Owing to this conception of the ego as a stable and efficient agency, ambiguities are all accountable with reference to a public code. This search for literary meaning not in the author’s private fantasies but in “the public encodings of the private” (Wright, p.61) brings this kind of psychoanalytical approach closer to New Criticism than to Id-psychology criticism, which is almost exclusively author-centered.

At the same time, the attention to the text’s strategies as creative of a wish-fulfilling fantasy that is shared by author and reader allowed Ego-psychology criticism to become a form of reader-response criticism (cf. Norman Holland).

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            If classic psychoanalysis relies basically on the interpretation of our conscious personality in the light of an understanding of the unconscious and its workings (cf. Barry, p. 109), the re-interpretation of Freudianism by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) changes radically the focus of attention to the unconscious itself, as “the nucleus of our being.”

Lacan challenges the Cartesian principle of the self-presence of the cogito, the view of the unconscious mind as the essence of our true selfhood, which is concentrated in Descartes’ formula “I think, therefore I am”, and asserts instead the essentially split nature of the self, “the self’s radical eccentricity to itself” (in Lodge, p.101). This radical conclusion that he draws from the Freudian discovery of the unconscious is formulated by Lacan in terms of paradox: “I think where I am not; therefore I am where I think not” (ibid, p.99), which suggests the power of the unconscious to displace what we take as our unified conscious selves.

Lacan’s immense influence on literary and critical theory is due to his highly original synthesis between Freud’s insights and the structuralist tenets of Saussure, Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson. The analogy between the mechanisms of the unconscious and the strategies of the literary text to “disguise” its meanings behind images, symbols, emblems and metaphors has always been obvious. Lacan went further and developed an analogy between the unconscious and language itself. He was inspired by the distinction made by Roman Jacobson between the two principles/faculties that organize any kind of discourse: that of selection and substitution and that of combination and contexture (in Lodge, p.57). These two principles establish relations of similarity and contiguity, respectively, among the elements of discourse, and they correspond to the rhetorical tropes of metaphor and metonymy.[1]

These two principles are used by Lacan (in “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious,” 1957) to represent the constitution of verbal meaning through a double movement of the signifier on two “slopes”: the “horizontal” one, the chain of signifiers, their metonymic relation (which engenders difference), and a “vertical” one, where one signifier replaces another signifier, in a metaphorical process which renders the signified an ever more remote “presence,” since any signified can only be rendered in language by another chain of signifiers. Language acquires thus a certain independence from reality.

Lacan represents the relation between signifier and signified as S/s, where the bar that separates them suggests that, from the point of view of the signifier, the access to the signified is always problematic, and in the chain of discourse there is an incessant “sliding of the signified under the signifier” (in Lodge, p.87). This may be compared to the process of repression described by psychoanalysis: repression will never allow the real object of desire (corresponding to the signified) to be acknowledged by consciousness, but will constantly replace it by another one, which stands for its “signifier.”

This metaphorical “sliding under” points to the abysmal nature of language, which is similar to that of the unconscious. The “bar” that separates the unconscious from the conscious represents the whole system of resistances and defense mechanisms which ensure the obstruction of the message of the unconscious, its distortions, just as rhetorical tropes “distort” a normal expression. Access to the “signified”, i.e. to the “content” of the unconscious, is never granted directly or fully, and for Lacan the double movement of the signifier on the metomymic and metaphoric “slopes” corresponds to the principles which underlie symptom and desire respectively.

The symptom, whose meaning is never accessible to the conscious subject, must always be interpreted as the substitute of something, while desire may be represented as a metonymic movement in search for what is lost, for what is absent. This movement is potentially endless – Lacan speaks of the “indestructibility of unconscious desire” (ibid., p.97), whose objects may change indefinitely, and thus the “narrative” of our lives consists, from a psychoanalytical point of view in this continuous displacement of one substitute by another.

Language is for Lacan, as for Freud, essential in the understanding of the unconscious. Its centrality for psychoanalysis comes from the fact that this science is actually a “verbal” one, since it both uses and examines language; language is both the instrument and the object of analysis. For Lacan, moreover, language is a model for the study of the unconscious, which is not a chaotic entity, but an ordered, complex network, like language. His conclusion is that “what psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious is the whole structure of language” (quoted in Barry, p.111).

Lacan’s conception of the human subject, his deconstruction of the “illusion of the subject,” is closely bound up with this analogy between the unconscious and language. While Freud saw the emergence of the ego as a result of the Oedipal process, Lacan focuses on the role of language. He points out that the child’s discovery of sexual difference coincides with the beginning of language acquisition, which inserts him in the Symbolic Order. During infancy, the most important acquisition of the child had been a sense of selfhood which was the result of his identification with his own image reflected in a mirror. This narcissistic image, which both is and is not himself, is highly gratifying because of the sense of wholeness and integrity of the self that it affords. This is called by Lacan the mirror stage in the development of the human subject, a stage which belongs to the Imaginary Order, when the distinction between subject and object does not operate in the child’s perception of his reflected image (“The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”). This process of misperception and misrecognition will continue even after the entrance into the Symbolic Order, when the ego will constantly seek something in the world to identify with and thus will be able to construct a fictive sense of unitary selfhood.

Lacan returns to Freud’s earlier writings on narcissism in order to account for ego-formation, reaching the conclusion that human consciousness is formed through the interaction with the desire of the Other.  One’s desire to be recognized and ultimately to be desired, which is essential to man’s identity, takes first this form of imaginary identification with one’s own body as an Other. In this “fantasy of wholeness” (Dean, p.50), the self is constituted paradoxically through self-alienation.

Entrance into the Symbolic Order marks the constitution of the unconscious, this “child of language” (Wright, p.111). The unconscious is indeed an effect of language, because it is at the moment of entrance into the Symbolic Order, i. e. in language, that we become “a prey to desire”..

There may be drawn an analogy between kinds of literary texts and the various stages in the evolution of the human subject as conceived by Lacan. Realistic narratives, for instance, which are “conservative” in form, which offer us versions of unified, coherent selves and of ultimate harmony between the ego and the world, re-enact for the reader the Imaginary Order, since we tend to “misrecognize” ourselves in the idealized image, which is highly gratifying. Modernist texts, on the other hand, arouse the reader’s critical awareness of aspects of reality, which are rendered shockingly unfamiliar and compel us to admit that the unity of the self is an ideological illusion. Moreover, Julia Kristeva conceives of a pre-Oedipal stage, which she calls the semiotic and which is seen to correspond to some of the symbolist and avant-garde writings. Residues of the semiotic stage are detectable in language in a variety of pulsional pressures, such as a certain tone, rhythm, the “material” quality of language, but also in the presence of contradiction, disruption, meaninglessness. “Semiotic” texts aim at undermining the Symbolic Order, at splitting and negating received social meanings, throwing into confusion all the divisions and binary oppositions by which civilization survives: masculine/feminine, proper/improper, norm/deviation, sane/mad, authority/obedience. Kristeva’s writings are highly illustrative of the alliance between “political criticism” and psychoanalytical theories.

Lacan’s most outstanding contribution to literary criticism as such is his analysis of Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter”, which he examined in a series of seminars for the trainee analysts. His approach is radically different from that of the conventional Freudian criticism, as he is not interested, like Marie Bonaparte foe instance, in author or character psychology, but attempts to find some key elements in the story which are made to throw light on matters of psychoanalytical interest. Thus, the fact that there is no mention of the content of the stolen letter in the story makes it for Lacan a symbol for both the unconscious and the workings of language. Just as the content of the letter can only be speculated upon and deduced on the basis of the effects it produces, of the anxiety that it generates (cf. Barry, p.117), so the unconscious is practically unknowable, but it affects everything we do. This absence of specified content of the letter is also suggestive of the Lacanian view of language, in which, as Derrida also was to point out, there are no signifieds properly speaking, only signifiers. Like the letter, the signifiers “envelop a signified which is always an absence. The detective’s investigation, his search for the stolen letter enacts, for Lacan, the very process of psychoanalysis, in which the analyst draws also on strategies of repetition and substitution in order to restore the distorted message of the unconscious to its original, intelligible form, just as, after a staged repetition of the theft and substitution of the letter with a false one, the detective returns the letter to its original destination, restoring a balance among the characters.

The amazing intricacy of Lacan’s analysis provoked a whole series of replies (by Derrida, Barbara Johnson, Shoshana Felman), which complicated the arguments even further. Lacan’s structuralist approach to the unconscious as text/language has thus opened the way to the poststructuralist view of the text/language as unconscious, and the series of analyses that his own reading triggered is a confirmation of the abysmal quality of textuality if it is approached in this way. Lacan’s reading is clearly deconstructive in its strategy of blurring the distance between the text of theory and the literary text. Anticipating the great literary deconstructors, Lacan does not use theory as an instrument for the elucidation of the literary text, but places theory and literature in such a relationship that they throw equal light on each other.

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[1] Jakobson sees various kinds of literary discourse as dominated by one or the other of the two tropes (e.g. romanticism and symbolism rely on the metaphorical process, while realistic prose is essentially metonymic in organization. He points out, however, that in ordinary, normal discourse, both processes are “continually operative” (ibid., p.58). In a psychoanalytic context, one may see the operation described by Freud as condensation to be equivalent to the workings of metaphor, while the displacement that is performed in the dreamwork corresponds to metonymy.