Theoretical Psychoanalysis and Literature (2011)
Published in: Interpretations. European Research
Project for Poetics and Hermeneutics Volumes No. 4/5, Edited by Katica
Kjulafkova and Natasha Avramovska, Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Skopje, 2011, 237-263.
Jasna Koteska (Skopje)
THEORETICAL PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERATURE
Key
words: psychoanalysis and literature, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Julia
Kristeva, subject, metaphor, metonymy, the unconscious, symptom.
The second half of the 20th
century was marked by an intensive migration of academic psychoanalysis from
departments of psychology to departments of literature and philosophy. In America and Europe
today, those who would like to read Freud and Lacan enrol in comparative
literature studies. Psychology departments study Freud only as a historical
reference, while the opposite is true of literary studies. Psychoanalysis can
often be found behind the most inventive literary interpretations and is widely
utilized in literature classes. The logic behind this breakthrough of
psychoanalysis into literary studies can hardly be explained solely by the fact
that literature is a product of the mind, for literary works are far more than
merely psychological phenomena. Different disciplines have dominated literary studies
in different epochs: history dominated nineteenth century philology,
linguistics dominated structuralism, etc. The task, then, is to identify which
processes caused this merger of literary studies and psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalysis is a
historically defined discipline. It emerged in the 19th century with
the ever-growing need to analyze the notion of the subject, which is of central importance to literature.1 The notion of the subject is complex and
has different meanings in different disciplines. In philosophy, the subject
denotes either a) the substance of a thing, or b) consciousness, i.e. the
phenomena of thinking and feeling, as opposed to non-consciousness. In logic,
the subject is a constituent of a proposition, while in grammar the subject is
either a noun or a substantive of the verb. Psychoanalysis recognizes the
subject as a sum of signifiers. The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud
(1856–1939), defined the subject in linguistic terms. He understood it not as a
soul, shadow or double, nor as a certain psycho-sphere operating as an armour
for the being, nor as a quality of the order of phantom metaphors (a notion
which Freud found most objectionable in Jung), but as a sum of signifiers. His
most famous follower, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981),
further developed this Freudian line through Ferdinand de Saussure’s scheme of
the sign. Lacan amended Freudian premises on the subject, locating it outside
the dimensions of quantity and measure, outside of Cartesian space. For Lacan,
the subject is constituted as a certain space-interval between perception, as
the lower limit of the subject, and consciousness, as its upper limit (Lacan,
1986, 51–2). According to Lacan, exchanges between perception and consciousness
are subject to causal laws; and these causal laws, without exception are
linguistic laws. Such exchanges occur either in the form of associations from
the axis of synchrony (metonymies), or as analogies through the functions of
contrast and similarity from the axis of diachrony (metaphors) (Lacan, 1986,
52). Thus, on a deeper level, psychoanalysis and literature share more common
qualities than might appear at first glance. In his Seminar from 1954-55, Lacan
claims that if anyone has anything to say about language it is psychoanalysts.
(Lacan, 1991, 119). Psychoanalysis analyzes a patient’s speech; it works with
words and thus has much to say about linguistic creations.
In
his pioneering book, Problems in General
Linguistics, the French linguist, Émile Benveniste shed light on the
paradoxical relationship between the psychoanalyst and speech. Even though
psychoanalysts can avail themselves only of the material which their analysands
convey to them, what the analysands actually say is not of primary importance;
for the hypothesis is that the important material lies not in what has been
said but in what is hidden—actual speech is treated as being little more than
chatter. The subject utilizes speech to affirm itself. But subjects always
self-historize themselves in incomplete and falsified histories; the analyst
discovers a dichotomy between the subject’s speech and the gap in that speech,
and it is in this gap that the analyst discovers another history different to
the one told him by the subject (Benveniste, 1975, 80–82). It is of great
significance to psychoanalysis that the subject cannot be ‘translated’ into
speech, that the subject is in a certain sense a ‘mute subject’ as long as his
or her unconscious has not expressed itself through certain
symptoms: paralysis, slips of the tongue, jokes, dreams. In other words, the
psychoanalyst treats the subject’s speech as a sort of alibi or linguistic
mask, and treatment consists of searching for the unsaid. This combination
(relating unimportant experiences and unintentionally passing over important
experiences) constructs the subject’s fabular behaviour and the psychoanalyst’s
job is to interpret this fabular behaviour and transform it into new speech
which then becomes more important than the subject’s speech. And this is equivalent
to literary exegesis. We need only recall a typical question of literature
classes, ‘What did the writer want to say?’, and we will recognize it as a
question in psychoanalytical register. The most successful interpretations
often involve searching for hidden meanings in texts: not the meaning of what
has been said but the meaning of what has been left unsaid in the text. Such
interpretations go beyond the text to seek out where real textual meanings are
concealed.
Psychoanalysis builds upon the basic
postulate that symptoms manifest in a subject’s behaviour (Freud, 1969b, 145),
symptoms being the mother of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis does not focus on
relatively stable subjects as the centre of its interest, but on extreme states
of the psyche in which symptoms are more manifest, in order to ascertain the
subject’s limits and capacities. (Such an approach has a long history: various
peoples have developed deference for the mentally ill because they ‘bring to
the surface’ the states we all have ‘inside’). Psychoanalysis is constructed
around the observation of the resistance which occurs when the subject attempts
to transform his or her unconscious into conscious articulation. We can only
guess at the contents of the unconscious: we know nothing about it, but these
contents appear as latent in slips of the tongue, dreams, jokes, somatic
paralysis, etc. In other words, neurotic symptoms originate mostly in the
unconscious, which is open to the somatic, and emerge in the form of physical
blocks.
One of the
affinities of psychoanalysis with literature is based on this very postulation
that every speech hides a symptom, and literature exhibits the symptoms around
which a subject’s behaviour is built. This was masterfully demonstrated by
Lacan in his reading of Sophocles’s Antigone
(Lacan, 1997, 270–283). Analyzing Creon’s behaviour, Lacan claims that Creon is
capable of anything: ‘He is never left without resources, whatever he has to
face,’ but ‘death is one thing that Creon does not know how to face.’ (Lacan,
1997, 275). And this is where the main point emerges, expressed by the chorus
and considered by Lacan to be an epochal discovery of the 5th
century BC: Creon fails to reconcile himself to death but invents the ‘amazing
trick’ of finding ‘refuge in an impossible illness’—an illness Creon fabricates
himself. This discovery expresses what psychoanalysis would achieve centuries
later and Lacan finds it astonishing that this notion is expressed in 441 BC as
one of the essential dimensions of humanity (Lacan 1997, 275). Individuals
develop symptoms whenever they cannot face the ultimate questions of their
existence, death being the most ultimate. Psychoanalysis is developed around
these types of ‘illnesses’ which are not in fact illnesses but symptoms.
Psychoanalysis
begins with the idea that ‘words can heal’, a thesis of the first patient of
psychoanalysis, Bertha Pappenheim, a well-known Austrian writer and feminist
whose therapy was conducted under the pseudonym Anna O. Her neurotic symptoms
were treated in the course of two years between 1880 and 1882 by Sigmund
Freud’s teacher, the Austrian doctor Joseph Breuer (1842–1925). The clinical
material produced during the treatment of Anna O served as a basis for the
first ever written psychoanalytic study of hysteria, co-authored by Breuer and
Freud. During one session, in order to explain the verbal exchange and free
associations accruing between herself and her analyst, Bertha Pappenheim
introduced the term ‘talking cure’, which Freud later adopted and developed
into what we today know as psychoanalysis. Bertha Pappenheim was the first to
observe that physical (somatic) problems can be cured with words, with speech.
It should be noted that the brilliancy and eloquence of Freud’s first
patients—Anna O, Dora, and others—contributed towards the establishment of
psychoanalysis as an efficient method. Elisabeth Grosz says that, in a certain
manner, psychoanalysis is derived from the female desire to articulate its own
fantasies, yearnings and hopes and from Freud’s desire to hear them (Grosz,
1990, 6). The advantages of this exchange, however, were not equally
distributed, women deriving significantly less from this exchange than
psychoanalysis itself. Still, psychoanalysis remains one of the rare branches
of the humanities offering active insight into female identity, libido and
subjectivity, which is something that cannot be attributed to other social
studies trapped in their patriarchal norms.
Prior to Freud, in
the 19th century, neurosis was treated with techniques devised by
the controversial Parisian neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893). He
treated hysteria with rough methods, showing his female patients in public
during his lectures in medical amphitheatres. He was also a passionate
collector of photographs of hysterical bodies and considered the look in a
patient’s eyes as a primary medium for obtaining knowledge. Freud’s intuition
told him the opposite: that neuroses can be treated more efficiently if a
patient’s look is replaced by speech, i.e. that neuroses manifests itself more
obviously if the patient is left to speak and articulate their desires. Freud
was the first to say that neuroses had unconscious functions and that the
unconscious played a significant role. Even though dream interpretation had a
long tradition among many peoples before the advent of psychoanalysis, Freud
abandoned the traditional approach to dreams and their symbols and offered a
systematic insight into the signifying function of dreams.
By 1885, Freud had
published his first findings about neurosis emerging through speech and dreams.
And by 1889 he had completely substituted hypnosis—a very popular tool at the
time—with verbal techniques: he left his patients to speak in free
associations, himself always seated outside the patient’s field of vision,
eliminating the look (as a privileged sense) in favour of speech as a preferred
medium, thus making speech central to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis
‘complicates’ speech, burdens it with meanings, so that complication allows for
the emergence of the problem, so that the problem acquires generic structures
which condition the truth for the subject.
The relationship between literature
and psychoanalysis was inherent in the very beginnings of psychoanalysis, and
this disciplinary coupling began with the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund
Freud, who wrote extensively about literature, mostly in the manner of the
classical German tradition.2 From
Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, Freud
derived his central theory about the Oedipal complex. According to Freud, the
Oedipal complex occurs between the third and fifth year of a child’s life,
during what Freud calls the phallic stage, the last of the three developmental
stages—oral, anal and phallic—when the child first chooses his mother as an
object of his desires but, fearing his father’s anger and fantasizing that his
father will castrate him, relinquishes his desire for his mother. With this act
the child accepts that, in order to be able to function in the world, he will
have to adopt the rules of his father’s order; that is, he has to enter a
symbolic order governed by rules, laws and institutions. This is how the child
develops a super ego.
Freud developed a
theory of a three tier structure of the psyche. According to Freud, the psyche
consists of the super ego, the ego and the id. Freud was the first neurologist
to take persecution mania seriously and, on the basis of clinical research on
paranoia, he arrived at the conclusion that patients rightfully complain about
being stalked by unknown forces telling them what to do. This was common to all
people, but some consciously separated it from their self and this is what
Freud called the super ego. The function of the super ego is to be the
conscience. This conscience, however, has little to do with the principle of
morality which, according to Freud, is only a periodical phenomenon for the
super ego. The super ego is characterized by strictness and cruelty, with a
parental function developed in close relation to the Oedipal complex. And even
though we admire the ego as the conscious part of the human personality, the
ego is much weaker than the super ego in the sense of dynamics and has to
follow the super ego’s orders. The ego is also weaker than the third part, the
id, characterized by amorality and in constant search of libidinal, unlimited
pleasures. Crucified between the shameless libidinal id and the limitations of
the super ego, the conscious ego is in constant tension and often suffers
failures in its equilibration between the two, making people complain that life
is hard.
In his most widely
read study, Civilization and Its
Discontents (1930), Freud introduced two principles: the principle of
pleasure and the principle of reality. For Freud, reality is characterized by
de-sexualisation. Even though all the subject wants is pleasure, this drive for
pleasure must constantly be tamed, since civilization is asexual and demands
the sacrifice of individual desires, and demands compromises so that life
becomes more bearable for all. This is why the subject is forced to trade off,
to calculate possible losses against possible gains with the aim of maximizing
pleasure and minimizing pain. In Freud’s words, the ego mostly trades off with
reality in favour of the id (Freud, 1969b, 168).
Freud considered the
narrative of the Oedipal complex as a nucleus behind all human creation: behind
myths, literature, religion and philosophy. Freud’s central theory of
sublimation arose from his insights into literary creation. Owing to cultural
inhibitions which prevent the subject from fully expressing his or her erotic
energy, the psyche adopts various defence mechanisms in the battle waged
between its own tension-ridden psychic structures (the ego crucified between
the id and the super ego, whereby the id pulls the ego towards pleasures and
the supper ego towards punishments). These processes are called sublimation.
The best sublimating mechanism, according to Freud, is art, which transforms
the libido into a socially acceptable activity. Freud was also the first to
establish a crucial method of psychoanalysis: to utilize literary examples to
illustrate psychoanalytical theories. Freud treated texts as a kind of dream
and wrote that the unconscious of the writer and the reader recognize each
other through shared neuroses. On the other hand, Freud was not interested in
aesthetics as much as he was interested in the psychology and psychopathology
of creativity; his literary essays resemble detective stories in which he
reconstructs the psyche of great authors with the aim of discovering the enigma
of their creativity. In his essays on Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, for
example, Freud describes creativity as an adult continuation of the child’s
curiosity about sexuality. This approach later led to a proliferation of psycho-biographies by post-Freudians.
The influence of neuroses on artists was discussed by the likes of Otto Rank,
Carl Gustav Jung, Erich Fromm, Ernest Jones and Theodor Reik, who focused on
the mysteries of creation in the works of Dostoyevsky, Swift, Kafka and others.
All Freud’s disciples were passionate readers of literature. One of Freud’s
most famous followers, Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) combined his literary
interests with Claude Levi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, leading to the
development of an entire field of myth criticism and the identification of
archetypes. Otto Rank (1884–1939) developed a theory about ‘The Trauma of
Birth’ (1924) which helped him explain all psychological and psychopathological
conduct. Unlike Freud, who believed that the key to all human creation was to
be found in the Oedipal complex, Otto Rank was the first to introduce the
notion of a pre-Oedipal stage and believed that human creations had their
source in the earliest childhood stage, a line later followed by Melanie Klein
and Julia Kristeva.
In contemporary psychoanalysis,
Lacanians appear to be the most numerous. Lacan himself made numerous literary
references to Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Camus, Poe and others; and
Lacan’s literary style of argumentation, sophisticated erudition and literary
passages in his well known Seminars
(lasting for 26 years, uninterrupted, from 1956), he contributed significantly
towards the mutual development of literature and psychoanalysis. Lacan’s
observation that ‘the unconscious is structured as a language’ generated
numerous complex narrative and poetic analyses of literary works and thus led
to a partial abandonment of the dubious practice of speculations in
psycho-biographies. His writing style influenced contemporary psychoanalysis in
such a manner that it now often resembles literary theories. Lacan turned
psychoanalysis into a valid tool in the fields of linguistics, literary theory,
sociology, philosophy and feminism. The Gothic quality of his style (unlike the
systematic, patient and careful Freud, who positioned himself in psychoanalysis
as a physician and was inclined to consider psychoanalysis a science most
closely related to medicine) led to a greater application of psychoanalysis in
the humanities. Lacan does not renounce Freud in any key areas, but differences
between them do exist. Lacan is an extreme Freudian, a commentator on the most
radical and often passed-over places in Freud’s works, and this led to
separation of psychoanalysis from Freud’s biologism. Lacan is a structuralist
and a linguist and in his texts he overcomes Freud’s obsolete concepts of penis
envy, female castration, etc. Lacan understood psychoanalysis as a textual
study which needs to be separate from the actual living patient. Thus he transformed
psychoanalysis into a philological discipline and here lies the key to its
association with literary studies. At the same time, Lacan did not parasitize
on Freud in the sense that there was nothing new in his work, as claimed by
Grosz (Grosz, 1990, 9). Rather, Lacan took over Freud’s most radical aspects
which then paradoxically saved Freud from his own followers. Lacan was the
first to suggest reading Freud’s work as symptoms.
Lacan expands the Freudian triple
structure of the psyche—the super ego, ego and id—into a theory of three
planes: imaginary, symbolic and real. The
imaginary is non-linguistic according to Lacan and the subject lives in it
before becoming a speaking subject, before mastering language, i.e. up to the
second year of life. (Kristeva terms this stage the semiotic). The symbolic plane is communal and is characterized
by rules and norms of behaviour, but it is also imaginary because there are no
real things in it, only their replacements (language does not consist of real
things, only their representation). The hard core of the real constantly
escapes symbolization. And since speech does not ‘carry’ the true nature of
things but is barely their representation, it is ambivalent and makes people
unable to oblige themselves to always and fully respect the promises they have
made. This implies that speech is false (Plato’s dialogue Cratylus treats the same issue of the ‘truthfulness’ of language)
and, according to Lacan, every speech should be treated as ‘empty speech’.
Lacan develops his concept of the symbolic in one of his seminars from 1953 and
in it he defines the symbolic as a law which regulates desire but is separate
from both biology and social reality. The symbolic position of the father, for
example, must not be confused with the life of an actual father. Lacan’s term symbolic does not directly relate to the
long tradition of the terms symbol and symbolism in literary theory. The term symbol, derived form the Greek
‘symbolon’—‘a document, a sign of recognition or legitimization’ in its
original meaning—is closely related to the symbolic
as a place of recognition, signifying, and univocality; but this term in
Lacan’s works is not related to Neo-Platonist philosophy where the symbol is a
sign which originates in the metaphysical world and becomes visible in the
material world. For Lacan, the symbolic does not have religious or metaphysical
connotations, only cultural and psychoanalytical. It is more likely derived
from the aesthetics of modern times, where the term symbol is associated with
language as a system and literary theory accepts it as such and utilizes it as
a term for a stylistic figure and also to denote a literary movement from the
end of the 19th century. Lacan’s symbolic was most harshly
criticized by feminist critics: Judith Butler attacked Lacan’s symbolic as
quasi-timeless, asserting that there was no difference between the symbolic and
the social law as the symbolic is a sedimentation of social practices (Butler
Lacan was a great
compiler of psychoanalysis and linguistics (mostly referring to Saussure) and
he is one of the psychoanalysts most influential in the breakthrough of
psychoanalysis in literature and humanities departments. Many books have been
written about the relation between literature and psychoanalysis, and according
to the editors of the anthology Literature
and Psychoanalysis (1983) a common feature of all these relations is that
they do not share a common feature (Kurzweil & Phillips, 1983, 2). In the
course of the 20th century, writers’ interest in psychoanalysis was
also on the rise (one of the first great writers to show interest was Thomas
Mann), as was the interest of feminism. Julia Kristeva (1941), Luce Irigaray
(1932) and Hélène Cixous (1937) are only a few of the French theoreticians who
combine literature and psychoanalysis.
The most obvious relation between
psychoanalytical and literary interpretation can be discovered in the analysis
of dreams as a realm where the unconscious is manifested. The unconscious is
one of the great themes of psychoanalysis and is Freud’s greatest discovery.
Even though the existence of the unconscious was noted in psychological
literature preceding Freud, it was with him that the unconscious obtained a
concrete form. ‘What is in the unconscious?’ asked Freud, and answered that,
while its contents are unrealized, this does not imply they are unreal. When Freud
discusses the gap in the unconscious, he uses the metaphor ‘a navel of dreams’
as a symbol of the anatomic gap in the human soul (Lacan, 1986, 29). That gap
is daemonic, yet the Freudian unconscious is not mystical but linguistic. Lacan
wrote that Freud was one of the few, if not the only one, to attempt to embody
psychic reality without its substantialization (Lacan, 1986, 81). Freud never
describes the unconscious, and describes its content as unavailable in time
(and in space); but the unconscious has both logical and grammatical time.
This, however does not imply that literature can be equated with dreams; above
all because literary creation requires a conscious effort which cannot be said
of dreams (Eagleton, 2000, 188). One operational similarity could be that, in
dreams, desires are either condensed in one single image (which is the same
operation as that of the metaphor) or transformed—that is to say, the meaning
of one desire is dislocated from one object onto another (the same operation as
that of metonymy). The acts of condensing and dislocating meaning match the two
basic operations of human language: metaphor (as an operation of similarity)
and metonymy (as an operation of contiguity) as explained by Roman Jakobson
(Eagleton, 200, 166). It is general knowledge that the literary text in which
the fictional universe is generated has its own special rules adopted from
linguistics; but these same linguistic rules apply in the psychoanalytical
interpretation of symptoms, jokes, slips of the tongue and, above all, dreams
as places where the unconscious emerges. Thus these two great domains can be of
mutual advantage to each other. In his analysis of the relations between
psychoanalysis and literature, Terry Eagleton claims that the best way to carry
out a textual and formal analysis of literary works is when psychoanalysis is
engaged in detecting a text within the text through reading the ‘symptomatic’
places of ambiguity where the author avoids or consciously overemphasizes a
given topic. These places can be termed ‘the unconscious’ of the work itself;
they are the unsaid and ‘suppressed’ places in the text. (Eagleton, 2000,
187–188). However, at the same time, one must be careful when applying Freudian
dream interpretations in literature, especially if one takes into account
Freud’s thesis in his The Interpretation
of Dreams that dreams do not express categories…that dreams ignore ‘no’.
Emile Benveniste warned against such epistemology, observing that there is no
language in which one term expresses simultaneously both the thing and its
opposite: ‘If there is a language in which both large and small are expressed
in the same manner, that would be a language in which the differentiation
between large and small would make no sense and where the category of dimension
would not exist.’ (Benveniste, 1975, 88) Yet Benveniste did not completely deny
the possibility of interpreting the unconscious linguistically. Lacan, as a
‘radical Freud’, put forward the thesis that the unconscious was structured
like a language. On the basis of this assertion, Benveniste later developed his
theory about the unconscious manifested as both infra-linguistic and
supra-linguistic. It is infra-linguistic because it is deeper than the place
where the linguistic mechanism is established (according to Benveniste, the
unconscious is more a style than a language) and at the same time the
unconscious is supra-linguistic because it utilizes condensed signs, equivalent
to large units of speech rather than minimal linguistic units. (Benveniste,
1975, 90).
The unconscious is the main reason
why psychoanalysis faced so much resistance from its very beginnings and why
the attribute ‘scandalous’ has followed psychoanalysis to the present day.
Throughout all his years of analytical and therapeutic activity, Freud
complained of the ‘amazing isolation’ of his work. In the course of time, he
also lost the sympathies of his closest associates, such as Fliess, Abraham,
Jung, Rank, Adler and Breuer. (Some abandoned him for the sake of creating
their own version of psychoanalysis, such as Jung.) The most widespread
rejection of psychoanalysis is owed not to the usual belief that people
objected to sexuality in Freud’s elaborations, nor to his insistence that all
human motives are sexual (where Freud is concerned, this topic is most often
exploited by the media and Hollywood), but to Freud’s hypothesis that the
unconscious is completely inaccessible to consciousness, that the subject is
radically unable to know oneself. This finding, and not sexuality, was the main
reason behind resistance to psychoanalysis. It does not shock us that Freud
discovered that all our motives are sexual but that he discovered something far
more catastrophic for humanity: that the subject is not responsible for himself
or herself! Prior to Freud, the most prominent interpreter of the subject was
René Descartes, known for his doctrine of scepticism. Descartes believed that
the subject can doubt everything: the existence of the world, history, other
people, even himself; but as long as the subjects doubts, he thinks, and if he
thinks, than he exists (cogito, ergo sum).
Thinking thus becomes the only guarantee of existence. Freud threw an
unpleasant light on Descartes’s consolation, proclaiming Descartes’s ‘I think’
as inconceivable. Freud claimed: Yes, I certainly think, but in the background
of my thinking lies an enormous unconscious which is the largest constituent of
my ‘I exist’. Hence, thinking becomes irrelevant to one’s certainty (Lacan,
1986, 164). This led to essential epistemological shifts concerning the
subject’s certainty. If the unconscious consists of erasing signifiers, then
the subject cannot guarantee itself through thinking. In order for the self to
exist, there must exist a guarantee on the outside which would guarantee the
subject, and this can happen only through the gaze of the other. At this point,
Freud’s successor, Lacan, positioned his well known thesis that, in order for
the ‘I’ to exist, there must also exist the Other which confirms the ‘I’. Lacan
says: ‘I can only suggest the amazing consequence of this placement of the
truth in the hands of the Other, a perfect god in this case, whose job is the
truth, because, whatever he wished to say, everything would be true, even if he
said that two and two is five, that would also be the truth.’ (Lacan, 1985, 42)
If psychoanalysis is asymmetric to Cartesian thought, it is so because
psychoanalysis finds the transfer between the subject and the Other important.
The Other becomes the only measure of the subject’s certainty, and from this
premise Lacan arrived at his most famous thesis that the subject’s desire is
the desire of the Other! (Lacan, 1986, 44). This superiority of the Other over
the subject is a direct result of the unconscious as the largest constituent of
the content of the psyche.
Both literature and psychoanalysis
are obsessed with the issue of motivation. Freud searched for the first and
original motivation which would explain how the subject developed trauma and
identify which impulse first set in motion the original morbid, pathological
process; for this process will become clearer once the past point has been
reached. Motivation is important in literary studies not only as a tool for
analyzing characters but also as a tool to differentiate among stylistic
formations (let us recall the difference which Roman Jakobson established
between romantic and realistic discourse in his 1921 essay On Realism in Art: motivation in romantic discourse is delayed,
obscured, unclear or annulled, while in the realistic discourse the entire
narration can often be reduced to the issue of motivation—as in Dostoyevsky’s
novel Crime and Punishment of 1866
whose entire narration is a broad explication of the philosophical, social,
psychological and familial motives behind Raskolnikov’s crime). But its meaning
can become more complex. If we ask ourselves the obvious question as to why
Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915)
wakes up one morning as a bug, we shall find that Kafka’ text lacks the initial
motivation—the text does not offer any explanation for the metamorphosis.
Psychoanalysis, however, can offer alternative readings which discover in the
text what the text itself has passed over, omitted. One of the psychoanalytic
explanations is that the father and son are constantly rotating around the
emptied position of the patriarch, and when the father retires, Gregor Samsa
must work hard to become the father instead of his father; but owing to the
great efforts of the task, Samsa retreats, which psychoanalysis explains as an
infantile attitude of the subject toward the patriarchal world. That is why
Samsa ‘adopts’ the logic of a bug and, as a bug, unconsciously carries out a
terrorist attack on the generational change. Only as a bug can he fully
eliminate this patriarchal rotation and make future procreation impossible. In
other words, Samsa’s metamorphosis, one of the greatest literary puzzles of the
20th century, obtains its plausible explanation only through
psychoanalysis.
Freud’s most famous theory is that
concerning the unconscious, while Lacan’s most famous autonomous concept is his
theory of the mirror stage, developed c.1936. According to Lacan’s theory,
newborn babies, around the sixth month of their life, while held in their
mother’s arms, see their reflection in the mirror and for the first time
automatically get an idea of themselves. Their psyche still weak and
vulnerable, in this ‘starry spectacle’ babies perceive their stable, complete
and unique reflections in the mirror which will later turn into ideals to be
achieved for the rest of their lives. The I
remains divided between itself and the image of itself in the mirror.
Eagleton has discovered a symmetry between Lacan’s mirror stage and Saussure’s
sign structure. The meaning of I
develops as the first in the line of all possible meanings in the world: the
mirror in which the child reflects functions as the signifier (something
capable of giving meaning), and the image in the mirror is the signified. The
moment the child enters the symbolic order through the mirror stage is marked
by two principles of central importance to language: the first is the principle of exclusion (the child must
not be its mother’s lover), the second is the principle of absence (the child must cut its bond with the mother’s
body). The child’s formation as a subject is related to the establishment of
relationships of difference and similarity with the other subjects around it.
(Eagleton, 2000, 176). This is identical to the processes on the basis of which
language operates. Objects are absent from the language which denotes them, but
words gain their meaning through processes of exclusion and the absence of
other signs. Language is a realm in which we are excluded from reality; for
reality exists outside language. In search of the object from which we have
been excluded and to which we can never return (the mother’s body), we, as
subjects, satisfy ourselves with a number of objects which Lacan called objects petit a. By object petit a Lacan denotes the imaginary elements of fantasy
which are preferred and which emerge in the primitive separation. Lacan cites
the example of envy to show how the object
petit a operates. Envy is triggered by the image of someone in possession
of a good which, though it may be of no use to me, makes me pale at the thought
of someone else having it instead of me. The object petit a is separated from me as if belonging to the other,
and that is why, according to Lacan, the object
petit a is the eternal missing object, the presence of absence itself.
Eagleton associates Lacan’s object petit
a with the discursive nature of linguistics. According to Eagleton, we move
along from replacements towards replacements of replacements, from metaphors
towards metaphors of metaphors, unable to renew our own pure (albeit fictitious)
identity (Eagleton, 2000, 177). In psychoanalysis, the moment when the child
adopts language concurs with the moment when the child enters the Oedipal
stage. This entails that the discovery of language is associated with becoming
aware that the sign involves the absence of
the object it signifies. Our language replaces objects: in a very clear way,
language is completely ‘metaphorical’ because it functions as a replacement for
certain non-verbal objects—that is, it performs verbal possession of those objects (Eagleton, 200, 175).
Tzvetan Todorov answers the question
as to why we know nothing about the song of the Sirens with the claim that the
song of the Sirens does not actually exist, that the sirens only told Odysseus
one thing—that they sing; in other words, instead of a song, they offered him
only a self-referential commentary that they sing, and that that is all their
song consists of. According to Todorov, this was done to avoid the Sirens being
closely related to death, bearing in mind that the Sirens had to kill anyone
who heard their song. If they failed to seduce their prey, they were forced to
commit suicide. To avoid death, either in the form of murder or suicide, the
Sirens consciously give up the song. In other words, in order for the poetry to
exist, life must disappear. The Sirens here denote the world before its
symbolization, before the possibility of singing (which differentiates them
from the Muses, for example, who have retained the memory of the creative
process). The Sirens are a metaphor of the traumatic world without memory and,
according to psychoanalysis, it is this type of memory that constitutes the
traumatic subject: the subject always returns to the trauma of the past but can
never grasp this trauma with words—words always fail to articulate the meaning.
And while the Muses help forget the trauma so that the creative process can
start, the Sirens denote the Lacanian Real,
the world before articulation, before symbolization. In other words,
psychoanalysis is interested in the same type of signifying practices which
make literature possible: the world which avoids the traumatic song (of the
Sirens) in order to make the song of the Muses possible, the world of
symbolization. In his later life, Lacan was completely preoccupied with these
problems of writing: what the conditions were for its appearance and existence;
what the world was like before symbolization; and mostly, what the status of
writing was in literary history.
Eagleton drew a parallel between the
laws of the literary text and the well- known Freudian anecdote about fort-da. We may refer here to Tzvetan
Todorov’s theory that an ‘ideal text’ would be one in which the initial balance
is disturbed by a dynamic motif, followed by descent into disorder and, once
troubles are eliminated, the contract restored and harmony established anew,
the new balance is never the same as the first. This is similar to Freud’s fort-da narrative. What does it consist
of? Freud noticed once that his grandson was playing in his perambulator by
throwing the toy out of the perambulator and saying ‘fort’ (‘gone’ in German)
and then puling it back by its string and saying ‘da’ (‘here’ in German). Freud
analyzed this fort-da game as a
symbolic mastering of the absence of the mother, this being the stage of the
first announcements of narrativeness. Eagleton says that Fort-da is probably the shortest story we could invent: it is a
story of the object lost and then found. However, even the most complicated
narrations can be read as variants of this model: the model of classic
narration consists of an expression whose initial balance is disturbed and then
re-established (Eagleton, 2000, 194). In other words, every story progresses as
a search for something lost. On the basis of his analysis of Russian magical
folk tales, the Russian formalist Vladimir Propp reached the same conclusion.
In his book The Morphology of Folk Tales (1928),
he demonstrated that all tales are variants of one general theme which moves
from one initial harmony towards descent into a disharmony which initiates a
search that is the main motif of the progression of the story, ending with the
restoration of harmony.
In his eleventh seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis (1973), Lacan attacked the classical interpretation of the fort-da narration. It is misguided to
believe—says Lacan—that in this case the subject establishes its function of
mastery. If the young subject can surrender to the fort-da game, it is precisely because the child does not actually
surrender, since no subject can reach such radical articulation (Lacan 1986,
255). The child can surrender to this radical game only with the help of the object petit a. The child cannot
endlessly repeat a game in which it loses—and then wins again—its own mother,
because such repetition would cause a traumatisation of the subject which no
child can tolerate. This is why, according to Lacan, the child does not play at
the level of fort-da but only at the
level of fort. This is not a game of
the symbolic loss of the desired object (the mother). What the subject
alienates is exclusively ‘parts’ of itself. The child is radically dependent on
the other, on the mother, who guarantees the child. If the mother disappears
(the other), the child also disappears radically. The child can play this game
only at the level of a symbolic departure of parts which constitute I: now, this part of me will go, but I
am still here, now this other part of me will go, but I am still here, etc. In
the endlessness of the game, the child understands that I am despite the periodic shake-ups of stability, i.e. the child
learns that a stable subject does not exist. These symbolic disappearances of
parts of me are bearable precisely because the guarantee that I exist has not
disappeared; the other who guarantees me has not disappeared. The other is the
one I must not lose. In psychoanalysis, Ernest Jones introduced the term aphanasis (αφανασισ) to denote the subject which loses
itself constantly in a symbolic sense but still sees itself in the field of the
other (Lacan, 1986, 233). Since the other is also a subject in relation to some
other signifier, a circular relationship develops between the subject and the
other— but this is an asymmetrical relationship. The chain of signifiers on
which the subject depends is positioned in the other, who in turn is a subject
who depends on some other-other. This state leads to the effect of a subject
being lost—to Jones’s aphanasis—and it is this lesson the child learns in the
fort-da game when it observes the symbolic I constantly disappearing in this
circular relationship of certainty towards the other while this certainty is
nevertheless here, precisely because it is always guaranteed by the other. When
the child asks why, it does not ask
because of its hunger for knowledge or for any specific reason, says Lacan
(1986, 229). All children’s whys are
temptations of the adult. What the child is asking is ‘are they going to lose
me’, says Lacan. This type of phantasm of death is born owing to the fact that
the loss of the other is simultaneously a loss of my certainty. Lacan’s
revision dealt an essential blow to misogynous literary theory and helped establish
significant new readings against the disjointed and muted mother as a
precondition for narrativeness.
Lacan helped revise Freud’s hard
gender narrative. Freud was a typical representative of ‘male society’, as
confirmed in his study ‘Femininity’ (1933) in which he equated the processes of
Oedipalization in little girls with what he called ‘penis envy’. By applying
Saussure’s concepts of the signifier and the signified, in his study ‘The
Meaning of the Phallus’ (1958), Lacan discovered a discursive error in Freud’s
study and thus corrected the misogyny of Freud’s theory. Instead of ‘penis’ (as
denoted in the original), Lacan introduced the term phallus (as a signifier).
The phallus is a signifier of the absence and the main body of desire, but since
the phallus is the signifier and not the signified, neither men nor women have
it and both genders are destined to search after this unattainable phallus. In
this game, the man always pretends to ‘have’ the phallus, while the woman
pretends to ‘be’ it. Post-Lacanians later attacked Freud’s Oedipalization of
men, claiming that he contributed towards a homogenization of the idea of
masculinity, thus producing a non-existent and false image of uniform male
identity. Despite being revisionist with respect to Freud, deconstructivist
with respect to male identity, and bearing the potential to include the female
identity and explain the process of female subjectivization, Lacan’s symbolic
order theory remains phallocentric at its core.
Feminist discourse of the 20th
century shed light on this painful subject in literary studies: the female
extremism which characterizes both male literary criticism and female
meta-criticism itself. Each of the female authors proclaimed herself the
firstborn, without any predecessors, thus committing a matricide identical to
Zeus’s when he devoured Athena’s mother, Metis, and Athena was later born
straight out of his head. Miglena Nikolčina offered an exceptionally good
insight into the meaning of matricide in literary history in her book Matricide in Language (2000), where she
psychoanalytically explained the eternal drama of the mother and daughter in
the literary patriarchate. This idea of the first female author started as
early as with Mary Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (‘the first of the new
kind’). And even though Virginia Woolf describes two metaphors of female
silence in her essay A Room of One’s Own (1929),
inventing Shakespeare’s silent sister and citing the example of the Domestic
Angel (as a metaphor of the voiceless Victorian woman), Woolf’s own opinion of
Mary Carmichael’s work is negative because, according to Woolf, she lacks the
richness of language which characterizes Thackeray. The very same ‘matricide’
was repeated in literary theory when Virginia Woolf herself was subjected to
the analysis of Julia Kristeva, in whose opinion Woolf lacks the quality of
wordplay present in Joyce’s works. And thus the parallel is drawn: just as Carmichael is not Thackeray’s equal, Woolf herself is not
Joyce’s equal (according to Kristeva). Both of them are only silent sisters—the
first Thackeray’s, the second Joyce’s.
However, Julia Kristeva’s work has
contributed greatly to reversing this silence. In her works she combines
psychoanalysis and literary theory. For the first time, Kristeva manages to
legitimize femininity as a value per se.
In her book Powers of Horror (1980),
Kristeva describes the symbolic as a place which excludes femininity because of
the fear of the female’s power to give birth (‘The fear of the archaic mother
appears to be in its essence a fear of the female power to give birth.’ says
Kristeva). This fear is manifested in the male reduction of the woman to her
pre-linguistic powers, to the power which the mother has over the subject
before it enters the Oedipal triangle. In Sophocles’s plays, Orestes’ patricide
is punished with his expulsion from the city, while his matricide in Oresteia
achieves the opposite—matricide enables his return from exile. The Eumenides
(as proponents of the new patriarchal order), together with Athena’s vote (the
goddess born out of Zeus’s head) rule in favour of Orestes (the mother killer).
Kristeva is an important interpreter of the pre-Oedipal stage and discusses the
subject of the mother who, albeit a symbolizing and speaking subject, becomes a
kind of entry, a passage from nature to culture. Kristeva’s key thesis about
motherhood is that it signifies a reunion of the woman-mother with the body of
her own mother (Kristeva, 1980, 237-270). Thus Kristeva arrives at the thesis
that motherhood is an instance of the semiotic encroaching on the symbolic.
Namely, what Lacan terms the imaginary stage becomes semiotic in Kristeva’s
work. Kristeva focuses on the interspaces where the first (semiotic) stage
penetrates into the second (symbolic) stage. Kristeva terms those passages
thetic. The thetic is a territory where the subject-object dichotomy is
unsettled. One of the most renowned thetic phenomena was termed abject by Kristeva. She defines the
abject as a line between the su-bject
and the o-bject, instead of between
the subconscious and the conscious, where, at the same time and place, the
internal and external (instincts and external phenomena) meet, where the
archaic and contemporary (animal and cultural) suddenly touch.
On the basis of the work of Melanie
Klein, best known for her object theory and as the first analyst to apply
psychoanalysis to children (unlike Freud, who developed his theory on the
sexuality of children exclusively on the basis of his interviews with adult
patients), Kristeva develops her theory of the pre-Oedipal child who cannot
differentiate between the subject and the object, for whom its own and its
mother’s body are one and the same. The differentiation begins when the child
becomes aware that the mother’s body is not a limitless source of ultimate
pleasures, that some parts of the mother’s body can offer limitless
satisfaction (i.e. the mother’s breasts), while others do not offer such
pleasure. Moreover, the good parts are also not available to the libidinal
child at all times; the parts of the mother’s body come and go, as do the waves
of pleasure and ascesis. At the moment when the child begins dividing the
mother’s body into good and bad objects, it objectivises the mother. On the
basis of this, Kristeva arrives at the premise that the objectification of the
mother is a precondition for all subjectivisations. I becomes a subject when it transforms the mother into an object.
The passage into culture, language and meaning is marked by the image of an
incomplete woman. However, even though the child becomes a subject and enters
the order of laws, language and meaning, the subject never forgets its
pre-subject stage. What will remain unforgotten is the abject itself. According
to Kristeva, the abject operates in four areas: taboo, sin, food and
uncleanliness (Kristeva, 1982, 1–31). In her theory, the prototype of all
losses in narrations is the loss of the bond with the mother’s body. Kristeva’s
theory is focused on the position of the mother as central to linguistics,
poetics, history of literature, psychoanalysis and semiotics. The position of
the mother/ female subject in the signifying practice is conceptualized as a
position of exclusion from the signifying chain. Only through understanding the
position of the excluded mother can the secrets of syntax and logic be
discovered, as well as those of text and the production of the text. Terry
Eagleton, who has made an effort to merge Kristeva’s premises with literature
and with the perception of the text as literariness, sums up Kristeva’s
semiotic in the following manner. He states that it is important to understand
that the semiotic is not an alternative to the symbolic order, that it is not a
language which could be spoken against ‘normal’ discourses, but a process which
occurs within our conventional sign systems, a process which questions and
violates their limitations. (Eagleton, 2000, 199).
Eagleton has suggested a division of
psychoanalytical criticism into four types according to the aspect upon which
the criticism is focused: on the author; on the content of the literary work;
on the formal organization of the text; or on the reader (Eagleton, 2000, 188).
All psychoanalytical criticism to date has been of the first two types (the
author and the content), which are in fact ‘the most limited and problematic’.
Nevertheless, Eagleton does not exclude the possibility of psychoanalysis
offering well-founded theories in this sphere. One such theory, Eagleton
reminds us, is that of Harold Bloom, who reads literary history as a
substitution and battle of fathers and sons in the patriarchate. Bloom reads
the changing of stylistic formations in literature through the lens of Freud’s
concept of rotation of the father and son around the position of authority, the
battle for the symbolic position of the paterfamilias.
Literary history is most often generated as a relationship of filiations, as a
son’s bond with literary ancestors. That is why we often read about Homer’s
sons or Dostoyevsky’s sons. Bloom says that the meeting of Laius and Oedipus at
the crossroads is the most adequate metaphor of literary history; it
demonstrates that history is a substitution and domination of powerful
individuals in the father-son relationship. This theory later proved valid in
gynocriticism, which identified that, while the ‘fear of influences’ is
characteristic of male authors and literary fatherhood, women in literature suffer
from ‘fear of authorship’. This term was introduced by the American theorists
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. In a situation in which the main literary
authorities for women are male authors who preceded them, women can overcome
their fear of authorship only by detaching themselves from the dominant canon
and creating palimpsest texts. Gilbert and Gubar belong to a wave of
gynocriticism which is focused on the effects of reading experiences on the
female author. If the literary tradition is 90 percent male, and if it repeats
the stereotypes of the woman-angel and the woman-monster, then, they say, the
retroactive influence of reading on authors is of great importance. (Gilbert
& Gubar, 1984).
Finally, we should refer to one of the most important
branches of contemporary psychoanalysis, schizoanalysis
(the term is not directly related to the illness of schizophrenia), put forward
in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. They do not criticize Lacan
directly. Indeed, as Elizabeth Wright notes, they extol Lacan for having
brought the Oedipal conflict to a point of self-criticism, demonstrating that
Oedipus, who loves his mother and hates his father, is an imagination of the
conditioned structures of society (Wright, 1988, 623). In their manifesto against
psychoanalysis, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari criticize psychoanalysis as a
discipline which has helped capitalism derive desire from absence and reduce
desire to passivity, though paradoxically so because there are no missing
objects; what is missing is the fixed subject. However, more to the point is
that Deleuze and Guattari were the first to provoke a serious debate about some
of the most scandalous moments in the short history of practical
psychoanalysis, such as its losing itself in bizarre naturalization. But, most
astutely (and at the same time most painfully) they perform their criticism on
Melanie Klein’s work, demanding more revolt against the Oedipalization of
modern civilization, in the interpretations of art and in everyday life.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, Melanie Klein wrote: ‘The first
time Dick came to me ... he manifested no sort of affect when his nurse handed
him over to me. When I showed him the toys I had put ready, he looked at them
without the faintest interest. I took a big train and put it beside a smaller
one and called them 'Daddy-train' and 'Dick-train.' Thereupon he picked
up the train I called 'Dick' and made it roll to the window and said 'Station.'
I explained: 'The station is mummy; Dick is going into mummy.' He left
the train, ran into the space between the outer and inner doors of the room,
shutting himself in, saying 'dark,' and ran out again directly. He went through
this performance several times. I explained to him: 'It is dark inside
mummy. Dick is inside dark mummy.' Meantime he picked up the train again, but
soon ran back into the space between the doors. While I was saying that he was
going into dark mummy, he said twice in a questioning way: 'Nurse?' . . . As
his analysis progressed . . . Dick had also discovered the wash-basin as
symbolizing the mother's body, and he displayed an extraordinary dread of being
wetted with water.’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1990, 37, the italics are those of the
authors). In their explanation of this scandalous violence by one of the
leading psychoanalysts of the 19th century, Deleuze and Guattari add
the following: ‘Say that it's Oedipus, or you'll get a slap in the face.
The psychoanalyst no longer says to the patient: "Tell me a little bit about
your desiring-machines, won't you?" Instead he screams: "Answer
daddy-and-mommy when I speak to you! Even Melanie Klein […]". When the
break between Freud and Jung is discussed, the modest and practical point of
disagreement that marked the beginning of their differences is too often
forgotten: Jung remarked that in the process of transference the psychoanalyst
frequently appeared in the guise of a devil, a god, or a sorcerer, and that the
roles he assumed in the patient's eyes went far beyond any sort of parental
images. They eventually came to a total parting of the ways, yet Jung's initial
reservation was a telling one. The same remark holds true of children's games.
A child never confines himself to playing house, to playing only at being
daddy-and-mommy. He also plays at being a magician, a cowboy, a cop or a
robber, a train, a little car. The train is not necessarily daddy, nor is the
train station necessarily mommy.’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1990, 37).
This radical
departure from classical psychoanalytical images inherited from Freud, this
abandonment of a sanitary interpretation of Freudian symbols, proved to be one
of the most fruitful starting points for the application of psychoanalysis in
literary criticism. Some of the best criticism that the psychoanalytical school
had to offer in the field of literary studies came from Deleuze and Guattari.
They wrote important books on Kafka, Proust and others, and suggested that
literature should be read as a ‘rhizome’: an abandonment of the
master-signifier, so that, in the rhizome, each segment of the literary work
can be associated with any other, thus opposing the Aristotelian logic of
division into genres, types and binary categories in the analysis of literary
texts. According to Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka plays games with Oedipus,
turning him into a comic entity. Kafka, according to Deleuze and Guattari,
constantly produces bureaucratic triangles and associates them with family
triangles, and vice versa. In Deleuze and Guattari’s words, all those figures
are very complex in Kafka’s work. When the family triangle is initial, as in Metamorphosis, it is later joined or
replaced by other members: the office-manager comes from behind Gregor’s door
and is introduced into the family. At other places, like the beginning of The Trial, there is no family triangle
given in advance (the father is dead, the mother is far away), but first the
one and then the second member are introduced to function as a couple, only to
be organized as a triangle by the introduction of the third member, the
supervisor. This non-familial triangle is then transformed into a bureaucratic
triangle of bankers, then into a triangle of voyeur neighbours, and into an
erotic triangle (Deleuze & Guattari, 1998, 96). Deleuze and Guattari’s work,
though, did not pass uncriticised. The most significant defence of
psychoanalysis in literature came with Slavoj Zizek’s book Organs without Bodies (2004), a playful parody of one of the most
important of Deleuze’s works, Bodies
without Organs. Zizek attacks Deleuze’s concept of anti-Oedipus as
reductionist, condensed into a simple rhetorical figure, while Freud envisaged
it as a complex network of social intensities, as an expression of the
impossibility of reducing subjective complexity to the I-Daddy-Mummy matrix
(Zizek, 2004, 81-83).
Slavoj Zizek, the eminent
contemporary psychoanalyst, is also one of the greatest contemporary compilers
of psychoanalysis, literature, media culture and the radical political left.
His extensive opus, still in progress, includes more than 30 books and
thousands of articles. He has also attracted a large following both inside and
outside academic circles. Zizek has linked psychoanalysis to literature,
philosophy, politics, and cultural studies through his style of argumentation,
which is to a great extent related to psychoanalytical practice itself: Zizek
introduces free associations in his lectures with various oscillations and
contradictions in the theses, while the numerous references and ambivalent
theses cited from books are utilized in a manner which resembles the
psychoanalyst’s approach of rounding up his patient’s free associations with a
contradictory speech.3
In one of his books, The Fright of Real Tears (2001), Zizek
recounts an anecdote about his contribution to a round-table discussion about
art, when he was asked what he thought of a painting which he saw for the first
time. He had no idea what to say and started bluffing, which went along the
lines of: the frame of the painting before us is not a real frame; the structure
of the painting implies another, invisible frame; the two frames do not match
but are divided by an invisible gap; the central content of the painting is not
expressed in its visible part but is located in the space between the two
frames. Are we, today, in our post-modern madness, still able to decipher the
traces of this gap?... To his surprise, the short intervention met with great
approval and many of the participants later referred to the dimension
between-the-two-frames, elevating it to a term. Zizek was considerably saddened
by his success. He felt that he had witnessed not only the effectiveness of
bluffing, but also the radical apathy at the heart of contemporary cultural
studies (Zizek, 2001, 5-6). These melancholic lines of his should certainly be
read psychoanalytically; that is, we should search for the symptom they
conceal. The anecdote does not expose psychoanalytical hermeneutics as
potentially manipulative and bluffing, because it obviously proved itself as
functional, attractive and useful. Ultimately, even though we do not know
whether Zizek offered a barely failed interpretation, we certainly do know that
this interpretation of his met with prompt identification on the part of the
audience. This anecdote, however, warns us that the relationship between
psychoanalysis and literature/art should be built with care: Is literature/art
reducible to a symptom?; Has Oedipalization brought anything good to literary
studies?; Does psychoanalysis allow for possible manipulations of interpretations?;
and, finally, Has the association of psychoanalysis and literature brought any
benefits to the former discipline or to the latter, to both or to neither? One
of these dangers is quite obvious - the excessive psychologization of the
literary process does not always explain the complexity of the literary work
(aesthetics, for instance, is regularly absent from psychoanalytical
interpretations). In other words, like any other literary criticism,
psychoanalysis not only has advantages that have led to real breakthroughs and
revolutionary theories in some spheres of literary interpretation, but also
limitations which have led to dramatic disappointments and failures in others.
Translated from
Macedonian by Marija Jones
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1 In his renowned Manifeste pour la philosophie, the French
philosopher Alain Badiou identified four major themes of the modern age: art,
politics, mathematics and love. According to Badiou, psychoanalysis is the only
modern science about love.
2 The famous psychoanalyst Anna Freud (1895-1982),
Sigmund Freud’s daughter, writes the following in one of her letters, answering
the question as to which qualities are necessary in an analyst: ‘The
psychoanalyst must have... interests... outside the medical field.... must be a
great reader and must know the literature of many countries and cultures. Great
literary works have characters who know human nature as much as the
psychiatrists and psychologists.’
3 See the short analysis of Zizek’s style on the website
of the famous collector and publisher of all Zizek’s production on the Internet,
Mariborcan. Mariborcan has remained anonymous to the academic public, even
though his impact on the dissemination of Zizek’s work outside academic circles
is significant. http://mariborcan.com/how-to-read-zizek/
Professor Jasna Koteska (University of Ss. Cyril and
Methodius, Skopje, Macedonia)
Theoretical Psychoanalysis and Literature
Summary
The pairing of psychoanalysis and literature
started with the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, who wrote extensively
about literature, mainly in the manner of the German classical tradition and
was a passionate reader of literature. In his essays he attempted to
reconstruct the psyche of great authors in order to discover the enigma of
their creativity. This paper analyzes the effects of the 150-year existence of
psychoanalysis on literary studies, and vice versa, the influence of literary
studies on psychoanalysis.
Through
a historical review of the concepts of some more significant psychoanalysts
(Breuer, Freud, Jung, Rank, Lacan, Klein, Kristeva, Deleuze and Guattari,
Zizek), this text assesses the impact of the concept of the unconscious, the
Oedipal complex, the sublimation object
petit a, the abject, on the analysis of literary texts. Most psychoanalysts
were passionate readers of literature and great compilers of literature,
linguistics and psychoanalysis. They availed themselves of numerous literary
references and their epistemology most often resembles that of literary theory.
At
a deeper level, literary studies and psychoanalysis share the notion of the
subject as the focus of their interest and interpret it in linguistic terms. In
the analysis of the unconscious, psychoanalysis utilizes the concepts of
condensation and dislocation of meaning, operations which resemble the two
basic operations of language: metaphor and metonymy. These are central to any
explanation of literary texts.
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