Repression essential to civilization, the conversion of animal instinct into civil behaviorrepression creates what might be called a second self, a stranger within, a place where allthat cannot for one reason or another be expressed or realized in civil life takes upresidence. This, for Freud, explains why people experience what he calls "uncanny” feelings of doubleness that consist of a sense that something strange coexists with what is most familiar inside ourselves.

The Uncanny• Das Unheimliche• A very emotional affect, whatever its quality, is

transformed by repression into morbid anxiety, then among such cases of anxiety there must be a class in which the anxiety can be shown to come from something repressed which recurs. This class of morbid anxiety would then be no other than the uncanny.

• The uncanny is nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old. It is established in the mind and it has been estranged only by the process of repression, which ought to have been kept concealed, but which has nevertheless come to light.

Interpretation of Dreams

MANIFEST CONTENT “dream-content” script of dream-content, transcript of dream thought

Judgment of manifest content

Interpretation of dreams

Judgment of manifest content

Interpretation of dreams

LATENT CONTENTDream-thought

condensation

Displacement Displacement

Displacement- the process of dream-formation, and it is as a result of these that the difference between the text of the dream-content and that of the dream-thoughts comes about. They must escape the censorship imposed by resistance

Condensation-condensation is brought about by omission: that is, that the dream is not a faithful translation or a point-for-point projection of the dream-thoughts, but a highly incomplete and fragmentary version of them. a few elements from the dream-thoughts find their way into the dream-content

Dream 3: I saw before me as though it were half written and half printed. The word was "erzefilisch,"

- “raw material” in the Latent content: Sexual emotion based on a talk with the governess about prostitution the day before

- The dream- thought: my talk [erzahlung], educational [erzieherisch] to the governess [erzieherin] taken from the latent as fear of “poisoning effect” [syphilis]

- Through condensation and final version of displacement the dream- content is transformed into “erzefilisch”. Censorship is avoided and thus brought up to the conscious.

Ss

Signifier, metonym/word-to-word/ conscious

Signified is variable: the Signifiers within the signified are not equalized, the occulted is present through the manifested signifier Metaphor, unconscious

Saussure’s algorithm used by Lacan

Barrier resisting signification Verdichtung or “ condensation” – superimposition of the signified- usage of metaphor just like in poetryVerschiebung or “displacement” – used just like in the consciousness to avoid censorship, replacing one signifier with another

Interpretation of Dreams by Lacan

Dream-work application to literary theory

• Like the dream, the work of literature takes certain 'raw materials’ ways of perceiving the world and transforms them by certain techniques into a product. The techniques by which this production is carried out are the various devices we know as 'literary form'.

• Norman N. Holland, following Freud, sees works of literature as setting in motion in the reader an interplay of unconscious fantasies and conscious defences against them. The work is enjoyable because by devious formal means it transforms our deepest anxieties and desires into socially acceptable meanings. If it did not 'soften' these desires by its form and language, allowing us sufficient mastery of and defence against them, it would prove unacceptable; but so would it if it merely reinforced our repressions

• Literary theory and the Oedipal complex

• poetry in terms of the Oedipus complex. Poets live anxiously in the shadow of a 'strong' poet who came before them, as sons are oppressed by their fathers; and any particular poem can be read as an attempt to escape this 'anxiety of influence' by its systematic remolding of a previous poem. The poet, locked in Oedipal rivalry with his castrating 'precursor', will seek to disarm that strength by entering it from within, writing in a way which revises, displaces and recasts the precursor poem; the pattern of classical narrative is that an original settlement is disrupted and ultimately restored.

• From this viewpoint, narrative is a source of consolation: lost objects are a cause of anxiety to us, symbolizing certain deeper unconscious losses (of birth, the faces, the mother), and it is always pleasurable to find them put securely back in place. Something must be lost or absent in any narrative for it to unfold: if everything stayed in place there would be no story to tell. This loss is distressing, but exciting as well.

The Oedipal Complex

Only the father's intervention, separating mother from the male child, prevents incest. Instead, he identifies with the father (instead of desiring to be the father with his mother) the child learns to desire other women than the mother.

Oedipal Complex in a Boy 1. A boy is attached to his mother and becomes

charged with sexual nuance.2. His father turns into a rival for his mother’s love.

Therefore, the boy wishes to replace his father.3. The child fantasizes taking his father’s penis (castrating or murdering him).4. The boy experience retaliation fears the paternal

castration caused by his desire to replace him.5. Conflict between boy’s self-love and his love for his

mother (keep his penis and body integrity/ avoid castration).

Oedipal Complex in a Boy6. Repression of boy’s incestuous desires followed by

submitting to his father and detaching from his mother and denying his feelings towards her.

7. The child identifies with his father

8. A new psychic integration appears. The boy ego’s is modified and transformed by introducing paternal prohibitions (formation of superego) overpassing the Oedipal Complex.

The Oedipal Complex in a GirlThe female child experiences an early desire for the father which takes the form of a simultaneous desire to take her mother’s place as the father's sexual object. Nevertheless, she also learns to relinquish that desire, to identify with her mother and finally to seek other objects outside the family.

THE OEDIPAL COMPLEX in a Girl

1. The girl turns in disillusionment to the project of seducing her father since she perceives inferiority (“castration”).

2. The child returns reluctantly to her mother, she identifies with her and assume her feminine gender role.

Consequences of the Oedipal Complex

* Allows the Configuration of the relations by which we come to be men and women.

* Marks the point in which we are produced and constituted as subjects.

* Transition from pleasure principle to reality principle.* The human subject’s mind is split into:ID: Unconscious desire.Ego: Individual identity/particular place in sexual, family

and social networks.SuperEgo: Conscience punitive voice.

Pre-Oedipal Gender Configuration

• It is an interpretation of the Oedipal complex which emphasizes on the differentiation of relational capacities of boys and girls in relation to parental care.

• Freud thought the object-relation configurations of the feminine and masculine Oedipus complexes were completely symmetrical.

The Pre-Oedipal Mother-Daughter Relationship

• Being the same gender, mothers tend not to feel their infant daughters as separate from them. Mothers experience a sense of oneness and continuity with their female infant.

• This mother-daughter relationship lasts longer than the one with a male son.

• Mothers experience daughters as an extension or double.

Pre-Oedipal Mother-Son Relationships

• The mother experiences the son as a male opposite.

• Sons tend to be experienced as differentiated from their mothers and the mothers push this differentiation. The maternal behavior helps their sons to initiate their sexualized, genitally toned relationship that eventually draws them into triangular conflicts (mother-son-father).

The Pleasure PrincipalHuman beings repress some tendencies of pleasure and gratification (pleasure principle) because of our need of labour ( reality principle).Humans are willing to defer an immediate pleasure, but they we will compensate it in the end. We will put up with repression as long as we see that there is something in it for us. Nevertheless, if there is too much to be demanded from us we are likely to fall sick.

Beyond the Pleasure PrincipalFreud sees three different cases of pleasure principle being repressed. As a result it is turned into the reality principle by means of repetitive actions such as: •Ultimate extinction …. Child game•Neurosis….. A patient being asked to recall experiences buried into the unconscious by therapeutic transferring. •Bad Fate: claimed “repetitive fatality” due to unpleasant infantile experiences which; however, have been pleasant at some point.

Negro and PsychopathologyThe study of neurotic reactions among certain groups in certain areas of civilization.Ex: The man of color An individual of color manifests anxiety of inferiority due to collective consciousness (retrospection) of the colonization times and repression.

Negro and Psychopathology

Causes•Residues of emotional experiences or psychic traumas.•Individual character linked to traumatic scenes or multiple traumas analogous and repeated (pathogenic memories).

Negro and PsychopathologyConsequences * Trauma is unsuccessfully “expelled” from the consciousness and the memory of patient, as it still remains as repressed desire within the unconscious (apparently patient is safe from suffering).•Repressed desire, then, disguised. Therefore, unrecognizable. In other words, the repressed thought is replaced in the consciousness by a surrogate thought. This new thought surrounds itself with feelings of uneasiness supposedly eluded by repression.

Negro and PsychopathologyCollective Unconscious In colonized countries a drama is enacted everyday. A Negro going to Sorbonne to become a teacher is on guard before any conflictive situation has showed up.The professor authority figure represents the authority symbol of the (white) master. In the collective group this symbol enacts as the person that repressed the “African Spirit” in the black consciousness.

Negro and Psychopathology

Collective Catharsis: every society has a channel or outlet through which forces accumulated in the form of aggression can be released.

Ex: periodicals, magazines

MIRROR STAGE:Causes :• Self vs Symbolic order • cogito ( I think therefore I am )• Loss

MIRROR-STAGE PROCESS • 6-18th months the infant is fascinated by its image in a mirror with the biological

fact of its physiological prematurity.• The child sees his or her own image as an“alienated one” – the ideal I( ego) and

in this way initiates the misrecogintion process. The reflection of the infant into the mirror is the ego in the world of fiction prior to social determination /language and culture/- at this stage it gives the completeness of the inner-self

• The infant’s ego is formed through a series of identifications with the other over the course of early development – dyadic intersubjective relationship- the infant locates his/her own image in the other and conversely locates the other in the image of his/her own self

• The child finds the consoling reality through the realization of the desire of the other ( the child’s self)- libidinal dynamism. And it lasts a lifetime, passing through the Oedipus complex. As a grown up the child moves from looking into the mirror (the specular I) to social I , which in the Symbolic order becomes the desire of another. This is the “compensation” for the lost unity, for the loss after realizing that the Ideal I is gone and substituted with the social I of the Symbolic order.

• The infant experiences itself as fragmented, for which Lacan calls it “orthopedic” ( and which later on in mature life would appear in dreams as disjointed limbs – in schizoid and spasmodic symptoms of hysteria)

• Gestalt, that is to say, in an exteriority in which this form is certainly more constituent than constituted /unified whole/: symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination; it is still pregnant with the correspondences that unite the I with the statue in which man projects himself.

• Gestalt - capable of formative effects in animal species• 1)The formative effect may be obtained merely by placing the individual within reach of the field of

reflection of a mirror –for the maturation of the gonad of the female pigeon it should see another member of its species of either sex.

• 2) the migratory locust, the transition within a generation from the solitary to the gregarious form can be obtained by exposing the individual, at a certain stage, to the exclusively visual action of a similar image, provided it is animated by movements of a style sufficiently close to that characteristic of the species. Such facts are inscribed in an order of homeomorphic identification

• imago, which is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality--or, as they say, between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt.

• However in people this is a bit more difficult and discordant due to the anatomical incompleteness or the presence of certain humoral residues of the maternal organism - specific prematurity of birth in man.

• the formation of the I is symbolized in dreams by a fortress, or a stadium, its inner arena and enclosure, surrounded by marshes and rubbish-tips, dividing it into two opposed fields of contest where the subject flounders in quest of the lofty, remote inner castle whose form (sometimes juxtaposed in the same scenario) symbolizes the id in a quite startling way.

• the perfect unity/ gestalt/ is not achieved as we are subdued to the id.

The mirror stage according to Lacan in terms of Saussure’s algorithm

• the small child contemplating itself in the mirror is the “signifier”. It can bestow meaning

• The reflexed child’s image in the mirror is the “signified”. • Just like in Saussure’ sign ( signifier and signified), the

signifier and signified are harmoniously united ( given that they are present before the child has entered the Symbolic order)

• The mirror situation can be considered as metaphor ( one signifier presents another as the former is present through the latter) – one item ( the child) discovers a likeliness of itself in another ( the reflection)

The concept of ideology according to Althusser: in terms of Lacan’s ‘imaginery’

• Just like in the infant’s case, the human subject sees unified image of selfhood by identifying with an object which reflects this image back to it in a closed, narcissistic circle. The human subject involves (ideological) misrecognition, since it idealizes his own real (social) situation.

• Ideology is the set of beliefs and practices which binds the human subject to the social structure and lends it a sense of coherent purpose of identity