· the dominance of the pleasure principle:
"What decides the purpose of life is simply the program of the pleasure
principle. What do people demand of life and wish to achieve in it? The answer
to this can hardly be in doubt. They want to become happy and to remain
so" (lines 10 and ff.).
· the sexual and aggressive nature of pleasure: pleasure in
its truest sense comes from erotic sensation (a daring look at childhood and
bodily functions) and mastery over others (210-220).
· Civilization and its discontents: society
cannot allow us to go running around enacting the fantasies of our pleasure
principles, so it invents something called "civilization," which
comes equipped with all kinds of prohibitions to keep the beasts at bay;
religion and etiquette are good examples.
· the tripartite identity: at the level of the individual,
this conflict between the desire for pleasure and civilized disapproval results
in a war of consciousness, with the ego (our waking sense of who we are)
mediating a continuous warfare between the realm of the pleasure principle—id
(or libido)-- and the force of societal censure: the super-ego
· psychoanalysis: is what Freud hoped would be a scientific method of
charting the intricate negotiations among the three forces of the tripartite
identity; the method especially centers on ways of evoking the unconscious,
where the primal, libidinal urges censured by the societal super-ego reside.
See The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).
· repression and sublimation : these two terms are testimony to the power of the societal superego
and its prohibition of desire. When the pleasure principle cannot express
itself, it must bury (repress) or transfer (sublimate) its
desire. But the re-circulated content of unconscious desire plays a powerful
role in the psychological life of the individual: he or she may sublimate it
in socially approved ways (reading Playboy or watching professional
wrestling or reading Harlequin romances) OR act it out in neurotic behaviors that society disapproves of (rape
and violence against others) OR repress
it completely, which often leads to madness.
Patterns of repression and their cloaked expression are of great
professional interest to psychoanalysts and a whole host of cultural critics.
The excerpt in Fiero lists four questionable
sublimations of raw desire:
1.
intoxication (67ff): a too obviously
inadequate solution, but a powerful demonstration of Freud's thesis
2.
religion (151ff): which, "by forcibly fixing [people] in
a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into mass delusion, . . .
succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis."
3.
intellectual and academic "work"(110ff): "shifting
the instinctual aims in such a way that they cannot come up against frustration
from the external world."
4.
creating works of art: Freud is ambiguous
here; see below and make your own notes
II. Some Freudian Applications
1. the
challenge to traditional understandings of morality and philosophy
2. the poetics of memory: Proust and the spiritual
autobiography. The idea of the
redemptive power of exploring and recreating one’s past actually places Freud,
on this score at least, firmly within
the humanist tradition: remember
Wordsworth and Whitman and other Romantic songs of self. But Freudian followers in the 20th
century so concentrated on this idea of introspection and self-analysis that we
have one critic has termed the “culture of narcissism” or what could be called
the Woody Allen complex, in which the intellectual is obsessed, even paralyzed,
by his morbid preoccupations with his own past.
Past Present Future
________________________________________________{stasis /neuroses}→ ?
Unconscious
3. as a modernist movement
· Social Commentary: Freud’s
emphasis on the instinctually aggressive nature of mankind finds tragic demonstration
in the never before witnessed violence of the World Wars (and how are we doing
today?). His talking cure, asking
victims of trauma to explore their past experiences, also proved therapeutic in
curing victims of shell-shock during World War I.
·
Formal Innovation:
a. Joyce, Woolf, and
the stream of consciousness: "a succession of images and ideas
connected by free association rather than by logical argument or narrative
sequence" (33).
b. “surrealist” and
nightmare fiction (Kafka): outraging the
mimetic tradition (literature as a representation of empirical reality) to get
at the dark truths haunting the human psyche
c. e.e.cummings
and other who explore human sexuality in franker terms than before
d. Stanislavsky and
method acting