Introduction to Literary Theory Part 6: Psychoanalytic Literary Theory

This is the sixth part of our survey on literary theory loosely based on Paul Fry’s Open Yale course. Last time we talked about deconstruction. Today we’re moving on to psychoanalytic literary theory.

You can find the rest of this series here:
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 0: What am I talking about?
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 1: What is Literary Theory?
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 2: The Hermeneutic Circle
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 3: Formalism
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 4: Structuralism
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 5: Deconstruction
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 6: Psychoanalytic Literary Theory

Psychoanalytic literary theory is a big jump for us. The theories we’ve been discussing until now have felt somewhat academic. They’re certainly important even for amateur analysis and discussion of popular media – things like close readings and genre are definitely real concepts that you’ve encountered before – but I don’t know how much of us have ever had a discussion with friends on some book, film, or whatever from a “formalist” or “structuralist” perspective.

Psychoanalytic theory gives us something that feels a bit more holistic. I don’t know how to even begin discussing something like Blade Runner without approaching it from a primarily psychoanalytic perspective. It might even be fair to say that the majority of popular analysis of narrative is more-or-less psychoanalytic. This… feels both natural and completely bizarre to me: I’m torn. On the one hand, treating novels and films as dreams – full of symbolism and latent meaning – just makes sense. On the other hand, a lot of Freud’s theory isn’t really applied these days, and it’s not obvious that techniques for analyzing the unconscious should also apply to literature. Plus, a lot of what we’re going to discuss as being part of psychoanalytic theory is really just another way of discussing metaphor and symbolism. So, does it actually make sense to discuss literature from a psychoanalytic perspective?

What is psychoanalysis?

Basically, psychoanalytic literary theory is just applying psychoanalytic techniques for analyzing dreams and the unconscious to works of art, particularly to narrative works like novels and film.

You’ve definitely done this, at least to some extent. When discussing a narrative, how often do you wonder what something really means? There’s a natural assumption that various facets of a story mean multiple things and that there’s likely some hidden message beneath the apparent material. Perhaps you interpret this latent content as it relates to you or perhaps you wonder what issues the artist was working through when they made it. Either way, this is the exact observation that Freud had regarding dreams and the unconscious.

Let’s talk about psychoanalysis on its own for a while, then loop back around to how it applies to literature.

Before we get into specifics, I want to quickly discuss Freud’s current reputation. If your knowledge of modern psychology is only about as good as mine, then you’ve probably heard – vaguely – that much of Freud’s work isn’t really used anymore and that there may even be some scandalous aspects to him, but nothing more specific than that. Let’s make sure we’re all on the same page.

What’s Freud’s reputation today and what does this mean for us?

So, Freud was just a massively influential figure. You could spend quite a long time on a Wikipedia dive starting on his page. You’re almost certainly at least somewhat aware of psychoanalysis; of the id, ego, and super-ego; the Oedipus complex; penis envy; castration anxiety; free association; etc.

He was also wrong sometimes and his methods weren’t always as scientific as you’d think.

You don’t need to read the entirety of Freud’s Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy on Little Hans to see that Freud’s scientific rigor wasn’t always good. Freud didn’t examine Herbert “Little Hans” directly, but relied on his father’s notes. His father was a fan of Freud’s and was just obviously reading things into his son’s words. I mean, it’s kind of comical how silly this investigation was. Herbert gained a phobia of horses – particularly that they’d fall down – when he was little. Perhaps this has something to do with horse penises, “sexual over-excitement caused by his mother’s caresses”, and not understanding where babies come from. Or, you know, maybe it has something to do with the horse carrying a heavy cart dropping dead near Herbert when he was very little. This is one of only a handful of case studies that Freud published, which makes it all the more surprising how poor the academic and scientific rigor was: this was what met the bar for publishing for Freud. On first read, it kind of feels like Freud was just making shit up and didn’t want to publish too much of his work or else he’d be found out.

On the other hand, Freud himself was quick to suggest that maybe Herbert’s father was a bit too focused on penises. He looked into anxiety over a new sister not just in relation to the fear of horses itself, but in how this fear spiraled out of control until Herbert was afraid to go outside at all. That’s not crazy at all. What’s more, you can definitely see that Freud made at least some effort to call out uncertainty in his observations and to protect the confidentiality of his clients with more sensitive matters (being afraid of horses for a while isn’t nearly as scandalous as many of Freud’s other patients, I’m sure.) I doubt that Freud’s methods would still hold up today, but the more of his work I read, the more I become convinced that he really was trying to be honest and straightforward in his pursuit of knowledge, I don’t really get the impression that he was just a sloppy con-artist. He was wrong sometimes, but he also proved willing to abandon bad ideas even when they were his own. Take a look at seduction theory for an example: He published the paper, tried to follow up on it, failed to come up with convincing evidence, and abandoned it.

Well, now we need to be balanced again, because although Freud showed some degree of intellectual honesty in admitting mistakes, he didn’t seem to be all that concerned with whether his work caused real people real problems. He also just really struggled to apply any of his work to women at all.

In fairness to Freud, some of the feminist criticism of his work – that it’s patriarchal and heteronormative – seems to miss that Freud’s theories of the unconscious were descriptive, not prescriptive. He wasn’t saying that women should feel penis envy, just that some women did. As Freud was attempting to analyze the unconscious of people living in a patriarchal and heteronormative society, it’s perfectly reasonable that what he observed would reflect that society. I tend to agree that Freud’s theories don’t apply so well outside of such a society (and probably not to everyone living within it, of course), and it would thus be dangerous to assume that they do or to try to force the unconscious to take that shape, but acknowledging a symptom does not equate to endorsing it.

Look, I’m really not sure how to sum up Freud quickly, and that’s not really the point here. I imagine that psychology has moved on and that much of the popular conception of Freud’s theories is probably bogus, but this is true of pretty much any science that was cutting edge a century ago.

What is important here is whether we can still productively talk about Freud’s work as it applies to literature, and I think that we can. We just need to be careful to look at the general structures rather than the specific examples. This criticism of Freud also comes out in some of his successors, such as Lacan who’s on our reading list. There’s nothing wrong with taking Freud’s abstract theories on how the unconscious is structured but more-or-less dropping all the weird stuff about dicks.

Alright, with that out of the way, let’s get back to psychoanalysis itself.

What is psychoanalysis and how is the unconscious structured?

In Jacques Lacan’s words, “the unconscious is structured like a language.” Lacan is, in some ways, a successor to Freud and a driver of psychoanalytic literary theory: we don’t need to focus solely on Freud today.

Psychoanalysis is basically just the practice of applying theory of the unconscious to therapy meant to help with psychological issues. We all know at least something about this: lie down on the couch and let’s try to get a look at that achy unconscious of yours.

This theory is rooted in the idea that the unconscious is separate from the mind you’re aware of and it’s full of latent meaning. Analyzing the unconscious directly is impossible, but you get glimpses of it indirectly via its impact on more manifest things. Our emotions and behaviors aren’t always as rational as we believe and thus attempting to fix issues in our emotions and behavior aren’t always productive, at least, not until we figure out the root cause. Just telling someone to “get better” isn’t all that helpful: the goal of psychological therapy is to figure out more productive ways to help psychological issues.

If you’ve participated in therapy in the last few decades, you probably didn’t spend too much time talking about dreams – at least, unless dreams specifically related to your reason for seeking therapy. You probably dealt more with something like cognitive behavioral therapy. But, we’re still trying to figure things out, and we weren’t as far in the early 1900s as we are today: back then, there’s a good chance that you’d need to go into free association or a description of your dreams.

The idea here seems practical enough. We can’t get a direct look at your unconscious, but we can see it indirectly in how it shapes your thoughts when your consciousness isn’t driving things.

Basically, what we can see is manifest, but we believe that there’s a bulk of latent content deeper down in you. In your dreams, the process of moving content from the latent to the manifest is the “dream work.” Freud saw dreams as one of the best ways to get a look at the unconscious.

The process of dream work isn’t a simple translation though, the unconscious thoughts are transformed along the way. In Freud’s words: “Yet, in spite of all this ambiguity, it is fair to say that the productions of the dream-work, which, it must be remembered, are not made with the intention of being understood, present no greater difficulties to their translators than do the ancient hieroglyphic scripts to those who seek to read them.”

Condensation and Displacement

Condensation and displacement are two of the primary ways in which unconscious thoughts are transformed, both in dreams and in the fantasies of neurotics. These names are pretty intuitive, actually, as they pretty much mean what they say.

Condensation is when latent thoughts are compressed such that a single idea in the dream or fantasy represents (dare I say “signifies?”) multiple latent ideas. I’m not sure whether I agree with Freud’s theory to explain why condensation happens, but it totally does. I mean, we’ve all had dreams where something was also something else, right? Have you ever tried to explain a dream like this to someone else? As you try to put it together, it starts to feel like you’re describing two parallel dreams that were laid on top of each other. The funny thing is that I often feel like I’m talking nonsense, but my wife generally seems to completely understand. It’s bizarre, but we’re all familiar with this. “Sure, you were at work but it was also college and you had a big exam but your teeth were falling out and you couldn’t find your pants, it sounds like you’re really stressed about the quarterly release and it’s reminding you of exam stress.” (Side-note, I have never once had a bad dream in which I was naked – I don’t understand this trope at all. I frequently dream about my teeth falling out or having an exam that I didn’t prepare for, but if I’m naked in a dream, it’s generally a good thing.)

Displacement is when something is swapped out for something else. This feels kind of similar to condensation, but it’s not quite the same. In displacement, it’s not that meaning is overloaded, but more like something is referenced indirectly. Ever had a dream where you didn’t realize until after you woke up that someone in the dream was actually someone else? Not that they were two people at once, but that they were secretly something else that only made sense after the dream was over? Or, maybe you knew who they were in the dream, but they looked and acted completely different, like someone else was just filling in for that person’s role? We also get this in waking fantasies and in our emotions. Sexual fetishism is probably the easiest example of this: rather than lusting over something that’s directly sexual, some of this emotion is displaced on to something closely related, like a particular garment, body part, or non-sexual action. Angry outbursts are another good example: you’re mad at your boss, but you can’t tell them to go to hell, so instead you’re a jerk to your friends or family.

The pleasure principle and the death drive

The pleasure principle and the death drive aren’t merely ways to interpreting dreams, but are how Freud broadly saw human behavior.

The pleasure principle is the driving force of the id: it is our instinct to seek pleasure and avoid pain. This is pretty simple, but it’s clearly not the only force motivating us. You could try to make an argument that any behavior that isn’t chasing short-term pleasure is just an attempt to gain more pleasure later: you pass up on ice cream and head to the gym so you’ll feel better tomorrow. But… this still falls short of explaining human behavior, what about behavior that’s unlikely to ever bring us pleasure? What about responsibility or self-sacrifice?

That’s where the death drive comes in. I feel like this point is actually really misunderstood in the popular view of Freud’s work. This makes sense, as Freud wasn’t all that consistent about it himself and his successors took it in different directions. Overall, I think there are two main versions. The version I was taught in school was that the death drive – or “Thanatos” – was the complement of “Eros” in the id. Where Eros wants sex, survival, and creativity, the death drive is aggressive and craves destruction. This definition is certainly the primary one in Freud’s work, but there’s another interpretation that Freud hints at and is picked up more directly by his successors.

In this other interpretation, the death drive isn’t a desire for death or destruction, but a desire to die in the right way: to take control over our own fate. In this interpretation, it’s not merely the complement to Eros, but something that counterbalances it. At its worst, it’s the force that causes us to flip over a board rather than lose the game, but at its best it’s the force that gives us the strength to sacrifice or be patient in order to achieve the end we want.

There’s a lot more to psychoanalysis and Freud, but that should be sufficient to move on to how this applies to literature.

What is psychoanalytic literary theory?

Lacan said “the unconscious is structured like a language,” but Fry specifies “he means, to put it as precisely as possible, that the unconscious is structured like a semiotic system.”

If we want to keep this fairly high-level, then we kind of just need to accept this as part of the theory. I’m honestly not sure whether I fully buy that the unconscious is a semiotic system, but it sure seems like there’s at least something to this.

If we accept that the unconscious is structured like a semiotic system, then we can talk about it in terms similar to everything else we’ve discussed in this series. On this level, we can apply literary theory to the unconscious. Now… I really want to say that we can also, therefore, apply this the other way around: if psychoanalysis works on the unconscious, and the unconscious is structured like a semiotic system, then we can apply psychoanalysis to literature. The only problem is that this doesn’t actually follow logically, provided that we actually don’t have great evidence that psychoanalysis works on the unconscious and even if we did we wouldn’t necessarily know whether it works solely because the unconscious is a semiotic system or for some other reason. But, we do have the sense that the unconscious’s structures are likely similar to that of other semiotic systems, such as literature.

Fortunately, Freud already gave us a separate reason to think that psychoanalysis can apply to art: In Freud’s view, artists are all neurotics and their art is an expression of their neuropathy. I… really don’t buy this, at least not entirely. What I do buy is that artistic expression is generated by emotions stemming from the unconscious and that this process shares at least some of the process that forms dreams.

To be perfectly honest, I actually get the impression that psychoanalysis makes more sense when applied to art. Again, I’m not a psychologist, but I really don’t buy that dreams work the way that Freud thought that they work. Personally, I think that Freud’s free association was absolute nonsense for interpreting dreams, but it makes perfect sense when applied to intentionally created art.

Isn’t it the default assumption of any story that the manifest narration also contains latent meaning? It’s never just about what’s happening on screen. At the very least it’s a coming of age story, or a religious metaphor. If a story is deep then maybe it has a bunch of latent meaning.

I should also point out that there are a few ways to apply psychoanalysis to a story: apply it to the entire story as though it were a dream, apply it to individual characters as though they were real people we’re analyzing, or apply it to the author to determine what they meant by their work. Any of these could work, but if we’re applying it very specifically to the author then we’re starting to head more towards historicism. We can apply it to the characters, but given that the characters are merely pieces of the story, this seems a bit limited to me: not necessarily bad, but I wouldn’t really stop at just psychoanalyzing a character. Overall, I’m going to focus on looking at the entire story using the techniques of psychoanalysis.

Condensation and Displacement

Let’s talk about condensation and displacement again. Hopefully these two psychoanalytic concepts reminded you a bit of our previous discussions on metaphor and metonym; combination and selection; the syntagmatic axis and the paradigmatic axis.

Both Brooks and Lacan talk about this in today’s readings. Much of what they say is just a review of Saussure, which you can get by heading back to the post on Structuralism.

Condensation is the layering of metaphor on top of the narration. It lies in the combination of pieces and binds the narration together by making additional connections beyond what’s there on the surface. Jurassic Park isn’t just a story about one arrogant man building a really terrible park, it’s a story about the hubris of science and engineering. It’s about not having appropriate respect and fear for nature. Malcolm pretty much just comes out and explains this during the dinner scene in the film (I’m just talking about the film here, I haven’t read the book in like fifteen years.) We see Nedry’s betrayal, but was it even necessary? The dinosaurs were already breeding due to the unexpected resilience of nature. The storm is what really caused much of the disaster. When you think about it, such a disaster was inevitable: the enclosures were based on electric fences on an island. Even if the park had been planned better (you know, like a real zoo), we still would’ve recognized that it had to fail the moment someone started talking about playing God, or when the lawyer made it all about money. Really note how the layered meaning doesn’t confuse the narration, it actually binds it together more tightly. As the story works on multiple levels, there are more connections to remember about it. Jurassic Park isn’t even a particularly psychological film, but this is present in basically any story. Here’s Ron Swanson talking about the complete lack of metaphor in his favorite book.

For something a bit more interesting, take a look at something like Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers or Robocop. These movies are, on the surface, action shlock. Pro-cops and pro-military. Starship Troopers, in particular, did this so well that a fair bit of the audience probably took it completely as-is. But, the constant reminders how how terrible things are under a militaristic or police state creates a whole other message and story woven into the surface level narrative. The juxtaposition between the triumphant manifest plot and the sardonic commentary on how terrible this triumph really is creates the sort of tension and metaphor that we talked about with Formalism and Structuralism, but through the lens of psychoanalysis, they also feel dreamlike. “I was a badass soldier in an epic war against aliens, but it was also an episode of 90210 and I think we were invading a nation of subhuman monsters with a much weaker military than ours as though they were an existential threat?” “I was a super robot cop killing a bunch of bad guys, but I was also at a BLM protest and the cops were doing all the rioting to justify buying a super tank?”

Displacement is also just rampant in literature and film, even in the Freudian sense of displacement occurring as a form of censorship to avoid directly thinking about something unpleasant. Going back to our discussion of structuralism, this would be a form of metonym or of selection. Within the combinatorial structure of the narration, some signs are swapped for another selection: something that’s somehow adjacent to it, such that the structure of the combination still works but one specific sign is changed. Sometimes this is literally used as a form of censorship. Ever watch any old anime or read any older manga? The panty shot was just ridiculously overdone as a cheap way to add in gratuitous sex without actually showing anything. It’s voyeuristic and a bit creepy, but there’s no need to worry: Tenchi or Keitarō get pummeled on our behalf, so it’s fine.

More interestingly, this is also used to make political commentary. Ever watched Star Trek? Talking about discrimination, race, fascism, sexism, etc. is uncomfortable when we’re looking at ourselves, so just make up some space racists, space fascists, space sexists, etc. Deep Space Nine sometimes rode this line close with episodes like Far beyond the Stars, in which Sisko is a science fiction writer in the 50s who can’t get a story published if the captain is black. At one point, the alien xenophobic supremacists Dukat and Weyoun – in the form of 1950s officers – beat Sisko while appearing in both their alien and visionary human forms. I wonder if there’s a topical political message in this story about racist aliens.

Of course, displacement can also be used for other artistic aims, such as simply making something more unexpected, or to disguise some personal symbol.

The pleasure principle and the death drive

Okay, so, we could just apply these very directly to characters in a story, but this is actually really interesting when we apply the pleasure principle and the death drive to the overall pacing of a story.

Have you ever read or watched a story where you just couldn’t wait for something to happen? One character’s perspective drops off just when it was about to get good. Shōnen anime does this all the time: the main character has some huge breakthrough that they’re just about to get, but it takes forever to actually see it. Same deal with romance novels: will they or won’t they? Well, this feels a lot like the pleasure principle, doesn’t it? You want something awesome to happen and you want it right now.

Well, what if you actually got it right away? Right on episode one, Goku goes SSJ3, Naruto unseals his fox, and that weird guy pops out of Ichigo’s sword and explains what the hell he’s supposed to be. Right after Inuyasha wakes up, he has a long conversation with Kikyo, then marries Kagome and stops trying to become a full demon. They will, and do. This would suck, right?

From “Freud’s Masterplot”, Brooks states: “The desire of the text (the desire of reading) is hence desire for the end, but desire for the end reached only through the at least minimally complicated detour, the intentional deviance, in tension, which is the plot of narrative.”

In other words, we desire the awesome ending right away, but if we want it to be satisfying, we need the story to take some detours first. The awesome moment needs to be earned. The story needs to end in the right way. This is the second interpretation of the death drive that we discussed earlier. Note, again, that this definition isn’t really what Freud meant in his original conception of the death drive, but it’s been picked up by successors like Brooks and Lacan and it fits really well for literature.

Where do we go from here?

So, psychoanalysis applies to literature… at least, mostly, and it differs a bit based on the version of psychoanalysis we’re looking at.

I gave a quick outline of Freud above – maybe not a “defense” but at least an argument that we can hear him out – but we don’t need to stop with him. This is already a pretty long post, so I’m not going to dig into all of today’s readings, but I’d recommend at least skimming my notes below, or maybe picking up one of the essays. Psychoanalysis has continued to advance since Freud, particularly as it relates to literature and cultural criticism. These concepts are also influential for other forms of criticism. Feminist criticism might not agree with Freud, but it’s certainly aware of his work.

I also want to reiterate that this perspective on analyzing literature and film is a very common one. Granted, symbolism and metaphor are much more general than psychoanalysis, but treating the analysis of a work of art like the analysis of a dream, or else treating the author as a neurotic and criticizing their work through the lens of their neurosis is pretty intuitive.

With that, we’ve covered psychoanalytic literary theory!

Fry’s course continues on towards a collection of social theories: new historicism, classical feminism, African-American criticism, post-colonial criticism, queer theory, etc. I plan on reading through these sections myself, but I don’t plan on writing blog posts for them. Frankly, I don’t feel as though I could responsibly provide this sort of overview for theories with more of a social charge to them without spending more time than I’d like. I might come back to them in the future, but my next posts will be on something a bit less academic, probably the Wheel of Time books.

Readings

1. Brooks, Peter. “Freud’s Masterplot.” Published 1984. In The Critical Tradition.
   • Brooks has a lot to say in this essay, but the broad takeaway is that Freud’s theories on dreams can also be applied to literature. This essay gives several examples of this and discusses some of them at depth.
   • “We undertake, then, to read Beyond the Pleasure Principle as an essay about the dynamic interrelationship of ends and beginnings, and the kind of processes that constitute the middle. The enterprise may find a general sort of legitimization in the fact that Beyond the Pleasure Principle is in some sense Freud’s own masterplot, the text in which he most fully lays out a total scheme of how life proceeds from beginning to end, and how each individual life in its own way repeats the masterplot.”
   • Brooks comments on the role of metaphor and representation in both dreams and literature. That Freud’s concepts of condensation and displacement can be applied to literature seems obvious after reading it: Brooks makes a good case for this.
   • “We emerge from reading Beyond the Pleasure Principle with a dynamic model which effectively structures ends (death, quiescence, non-narratability) against beginnings (Eros, stimulation into tension, the desire of narrative) in a manner that necessitates the middle as detour, as struggle toward the end under the compulsion of imposed delay, as arabesque in the dilatory space of the text.”
   • There’s a great analysis in here of how the drive to “die the right death” from Beyond the Pleasure Principle applies to literature. In Freud’s theory, this drive is to die well, having done the right things, and it opposes the hedonistic pleasure principle. Brooks demonstrates how this also applies to the flow of a story. There’s a balance between having the protagonist accomplish their goals – something the reader is generally hungry for – but only in the right way, with an appropriate arc.
   • “The desire of the text (the desire of reading) is hence desire for the end, but desire for the end reached only through the at least minimally complicated detour, the intentional deviance, in tension, which is the plot of narrative.”
   • Brooks brings up repetition repeatedly (most of the quotes I highlighted in my reading discuss repetition in literature.)
     • “Repetition in all its literary manifestations may in fact work as a “binding,” a binding of textual energies that allows them to be mastered by putting them into serviceable form within the energetic economy of the narrative. Serviceable form must in this case mean perceptible form: repetition, repeat, recall, symmetry, al these journeys back in the text, returns to and returns of, that allow us to bind one textual moment to another in terms of similarity or substitution rather than mere contiguity.”
     • “Repetition, remembering, reenactment are the ways in which we replay time, so that it may not be lost. We are thus always trying to work back through time to that transcendent home, knowing of course that we cannot. All we can do is subvert or, perhaps better, pervert time: which is what narrative does.”
2. Freud, Sigmund. “The Dream-Work.” Published in 1899 in The Interpretation of Dreams. In The Critical Tradition.
   • Great quick look at Freud’s theory for the interpretation of dreams. What’s really interesting here to me is that I’m not sure how well this actually applies to dreams, but most everything here can clearly be applied productively to literature. I’m honestly curious whether this theory actually applies to literature better than it does to dreams. I’d love to get into the current views on Freud, but I don’t have time to dig that deep right now.
   • The stand-out concepts here, at least to me, are those of condensation and displacement, which feel very familiar to our previous discussions of metaphor and metonym or the axis of combination vs selection.
   • “It is from these dream-thoughts and not from a dream’s manifest content that we disentangle its meaning.”
   • “The dream-thoughts and the dream-content are presented to us like two versions of the same subject-matter in two different languages. Or, more properly, the dream-content seems like a transcript of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, whose characters and syntactic laws it is our business to discover by comparing the original and the translation.”
   • I found this quote particularly… interesting, as it really seems like an excuse to just free-associate on dream analysis without ever looping back around to whether the analysis is correct: “It is no doubt true that some trains of thought arise for the first time during the analysis. But one can convince oneself in all such cases that these new connections are only set up between thoughts which were already linked in some other way in the dream-thoughts.”
   • “It thus seems plausible to suppose that in the dream-work a psychical force is operating which on the one hand strips the elements which have a high psychical value of their intensity, and on the other hand, by means of overdetermination, creates from elements of low psychical value new values, which afterwards find their way into the dream content. If that is so, a transference and a displacement of psychical intensities occurs in 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 ream-thoughts comes about. The process which we are here presuming is nothing less than the essential portion of the dreamwork; and it deserves to be described as “dream-displacement.” Dream-displacement and dream-condensation are the two governing factors to whose activity we may in essence ascribe the form assumed by dreams.”
3. Lacan, Jacques. “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud.” Published 1966 in Écrits. In The Critical Tradition.
   • Goddamnit, the writing style here is about as bad as Derrida’s. It’s still worth reading, as there’s a lot of great stuff here, but… here are the first two paragraphs as a sample of what I had to deal with here:
     “Although the nature of this contribution was determined by the theme of the third volume of La Psychanalyse, I owe to what will be found there to insert it at a point somewhere between writing (l`ecrit) and speech – it will be half-way between the two.
     Writing is distinguished by a prevalence of the text in a sense that this factor of discourse will assume in this essay a factor that makes possible the kind of tightening up that I like in order to leave the reader no other way out than the way in, which I prefer to be difficult., In that sense, then, this will not be writing.”
   • “[W]hat the psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious is the whole structure of language.” This quote really sums up the key position of this essay: the subconscious is structured like a language and can thus be analyzed similar to literature (and vice versa.)
   • Lacan spends a fair bit of time discussing the axes of combination and selection as they apply in linguistics (and as we discussed while covering Saussure) but applying them to the subconscious. “There is in effect no signifying chain that does not have, as if attached to the punctuation of each of its units, a whole articulation of relevant contexts suspended “vertically,” as it were, from that point.”
   • “Freud shows us in every possible way that the value of the image as signifier has nothing whatever to do with its signification” – Lacan then provides an example of Egyptian hieroglyphics: seeing an image of a bird sometimes has a purely grammatical meaning – one of combination – with absolutely no relevance as a selection of actual birds.
   • “Entstellung, translated as “distortion” or “transposition,” is what Freud shows to be the general precondition for the functioning of the dram, and it is what I designated above, following Saussure, as the sliding of the signified under the signifier, which is always active in discourse (it’s action, let us note, is unconscious.)”
   • “Verdichtung, or “condensation,” is the structure of the superimposition of the signifiers, which metaphor takes as its field, and whose name, condensing in itself the word Dichtung, shows how the mechanism is connatural with poetry to the point that it envelops the traditional function proper to poetry.”
   • “It is the abyss opened up at the thought that a thought should make itself heard in the abyss that provoked resistance to psychoanalysis from the outset. And not, as is commonly said, the emphasis on man’s sexuality. This latter has after all been the dominant object in literature throughout the ages.”
   • Alright, I’ll admit that I enjoyed the prose here: “At a time when psychoanalysts are busy remodeling psychoanalysis into a right-thinking movement whose crowning expression is the sociological poem of the autonomous ego, I would like to say, to all those who are listening to me, how they can recognize bad psychoanalysts; this is by the word they use to deprecate all technical or theoretical research that carries forward the Freudian experience along its authentic lines. That word is “intellectualization” – execrable to all those who, living in fear of being tried and found wanting by the wine of truth, spit on the bread of men, although their slavor can no longer have any effect other than that of leavening.”
   • “[I]t is with the appearance of language that the dimension of truth emerges.”
   • “[I]f I am to rouse you to indignation over the fact that, after so many centuries of religious hypocrisy and philosophical bravado, nothing has yet been validly articulated as to what links metaphor to the question of being and metonymy to its lack, there must be an object there to answer to that indignation both as its instigator and its victim: that object is humanistic man and the credit, hopelessly affirmed, which he has drawn over his intentions.”
4. Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Published 1919. In The Critical Tradition.
   • Oh thank christ that we have an essay written by an actual writer, this was some of the most pleasant reading I’ve come across in this project. It doesn’t say as much as some of the other readings, but I only had to read it once to understand it, which felt great.
   • The thesis here is on influence, particularly on poetry. Eliot’s stance is that poetry comes from influence and tradition. Good poetry comes from an intentionally found tradition and not from a particular poet’s personality. It might seem odd to include this in the psychoanalytic theory post, but Fry did, and I agree that it’s relevant: influence and tradition build up much of the language of our unconscious, which is – in the psychoanalytic view – where literature comes from.
   • “We have a “tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavor to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity.”
   • “[Tradition] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.”
   • “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.”
   • “The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe – the mind of his own country – a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than hi own private mind – is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draftsmen.”
   • “[T]he difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show.”
   • “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”
   • “[T]he mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of “personality,” not being necessarily more interesting, or having “more to say,” but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.”
   • “[T]he poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.”
   • “The emotion in his [the poet’s] poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him.”
   • “Of course, this is not quite the whole story. There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him “personal.” Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”
5. Bloom, Harold. “A Meditation upon Priority.” Published 1973 in The Anxiety of Influence. In The Critical Tradition.
   • A lot of the stuff here seemed kind of irrelevant (Fry threw out the six revisionary ratios in his lecture, for example.) However, it’s a good counter-point to both Eliot and Lacan. Reading this directly after Eliot’s essay makes it feel like almost a direct response: Bloom sees good poets as far more egotistical and disruptive, rather than as inheritors and curators of tradition. Bloom mentions misreading of established work and authors as an important – perhaps even critical – facet of writing poetry. In Bloom’s view, a strong poet takes existing work and misreads – or reinterprets – it to say something new. Interestingly, I’m a bit torn on whether to consider this a rebuttal or an affirmation of Eliot’s points about tradition. Misreading a work requires being familiar with it, of course. They’re both saying that good poets are aware of historical work and use them to influence their new work. The difference, to the extent that there is a difference, is in how involved the poets own ego and personality are – or should be – involved.
   • “Poetic history, in this book’s argument, is held to be indistinguishable from poetic influence, since strong poets make that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves.”
   • “My concern is only with strong poets, major figures with the persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death. Weaker talents idealize; figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves. But nothing is got for nothing, and self-appropriation involves the immense anxieties of indebtedness, for what strong maker desires the realization that he has failed to create himself?”
   • “[P]oetic influence need not make poets less original; as often it makes them more original, though not therefore necessarily better.”
   • “For every poet begins (however “unconsciously”) by rebelling more strongly against the consciousness of death’s necessity than all other men and women do.”
   • “The death of poetry will not be hastened by any reader’s broodings, yet it seems just to assume that poetry in our tradition, when it dies, will be self-slain, murdered by its own past strength. An implied anguish throughout this book is that Romanticism, for all its glories, may have been a vast visionary tragedy, the self-baffled enterprise not of Prometheus but of blinded Oedipus, who did not know that the Sphinx was his Muse.”
6. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. “Introduction: Rhizome.” Published 1980 in A Thousand Plateaus. In The Critical Tradition.
   • Hoo-boy, this reading was fucking weird. The writing style is intentionally absolutely bizarre, frenetic. Similar to Derrida, the authors here felt it best to make their point with their point by making their writing style. It was really entertaining, but frankly, I don’t think that they hit the mark here at all. Still, it’s really interesting stuff – I might go check out the full book, as this reading is only the first chapter.
   • Basically, the goal of this chapter is to define “rhizome” as a logical or philosophical concept. A rhizome in botany is basically just an underground stem that sends out roots and shoots from nodes. The key point for the philosophical concept is that rhizomes are a way for a plant to grow horizontally. In the philosophical concept being defined here, rhizome refers to systems without clear starts or ends. The authors push this concept pretty far – too far, in my view – but there are some interesting ideas here. In particular, a rhizome is held up as an alternative to a tree. Rather than looking at a system, such as language, as a rigidly structured hierarchy, it can be viewed rhizomatically as something far more organic and free. This is similar to the notion of free-play that we discussed with deconstruction, but it goes even further. This concept is demonstrated in the structure – or lack thereof – of this chapter: it skips around and says everything all at once without much structure. Emotion is woven in alongside logical rhetoric and definition. It’s interesting… but, as I see it, it’s basically just a way to ensure that any reader will need to read the chapter multiple times to figure it out.
   • “A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds. To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations. It is to fabricate a beneficent God to explain geological movements.”
   • “There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made. Therefore a book also has no object. As an assemblage, a book has only itself, in connection with other assemblages and in relation to other bodies without organs. We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and only trough the outside and on the outside.”
   • “Literature is an assemblage. It has nothing to do with ideology. There is no ideology and never has been.”
   • “Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come.”
   • “Binary logic is the spiritual reality of the root-tree.” As a software engineer, I did like this sentence.
   • “Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.” (Emphasis mine – this bit is crucial.)
   • “The linguistic tree on the Chomsky model still begins at a point S and proceeds by dichotomy. On the contrary, not every trait in a rhizome is necessarily linked to a linguistic feature: semiotic chains of every nature are connected to very diverse modes of coding (biological, political, economic, etc.) that bring into play not only different regimes of signs but also states of things of different status. Collective assemblages of enunciation function directly within machinic assemblages; it is not impossible to make a radical break between regimes of signs and their objects. Even when linguistics claims to confine itself to what is explicit and to make no presuppositions about language, it is still in the sphere of a discourse implying particular modes of assemblage and types of social power. Chomsky’s grammatically, the categorical S symbol that dominates every sentence, is more fundamentally a marker of power than a syntactic marker: you will construct grammatically correct sentences, you will divide each statement into a noun phrase and a verb phrase (first dichotomy…). Our criticism of these linguistic models is not that they are too abstract but, on the contrary, that they are not abstract enough, that they do no reach the abstract machine that connects a language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to collective assemblages of enunciation, to a whole micropolitics of the social field.”
   • “It is always possible to break a language down into internal structural elements, an undertaking not fundamentally different from a search for roots. There is always something genealogical about a tree. It is not a method for the people. A method of the rhizome type, on the contrary, can analyze language only be decentering it onto other dimensions and other registers. A language is never closed upon itself, except as a function of impotence.”
   • “Short-term memory includes forgetting as a process; it merges not with the instant but instead with the nervous, temporal, and collective rhizome. Long-term memory (family, race, society, or civilization) traces and translates, but what it translates continues to act in it, from a distance, off beat, in an “untimely” way, not instantaneously.”
   • “Take psychoanalysis as an example again: it subjects the unconscious to arborescent structures, hierarchical graphs, recapitulatory memories, central organs, the phallus, the phallus-tree – not only in its theory but also in its practice of calculation and treatment. Psychoanalysis cannot change its method in this regard: it bases its own dictatorial power upon a dictatorial conception of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis’s margin of maneuverability is therefore very limited. In both psychoanalysis and its object, there is always a general, always a leader (General Freud). Schizoanalysis, on the other hand, treats the unconscious as an acentered system, in other words, as a machinic network of finite automata (a rhizome), and thus arrives at an entirely different state of the unconscious. These same remarks apply to linguistics; Rosenstiehl and Petitot are right to bring up the possibility of an “acentered organization of the society of words.” For both statements and desires, the issue is never to reduce the unconscious or to interpret it or to make it signify according to a tree model. The issue is to produce the unconscious, and with it new statements, different desires: the rhizome is precisely this production of the unconscious.”
   • “We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus. We have given it a circular form, but only for laughs. Each morning we would wake up, and each of us would ask himself what plateau he was going to tackle, writing five lines here, then there. We had hallucinatory experiences, we watched lines leave one plateau and proceed to another like columns of tiny ants.”
7. Žižek, Slavoj. “Courtly Love.” Published 1994. In The Critical Tradition.
   • Alright, so, this essay doesn’t feel as relevant as some of the other essays here, but it’s a great example of applying some psychoanalytic criticism to some actual, relatively recent films. Žižek analyzes both The Crying Game and M. Butterfly primarily through the lens of gender expression and the trope of treating women as inhuman in “courtly love.”
   • There’s a great deal of overlap with Brooks’ discussion of detour as a necessary delaying of the pleasure principle in a narrative’s plot. In a courtly love story, the protagonist wants to get the lady, but the narrative wouldn’t work if this just happened right away: that’s just pornography. For it to be a story of courtly love, there must be a series of challenges to overcome. Actually attaining the lady isn’t the interesting part and if it comes too quickly then this can actually ruin the whole romance. This has some obvious similarity with Freud and Lacan’s work on the pleasure principle and the wish for the “right” death. The protagonist is torn between wanting to quickly satisfy their lust for the lady, but it has to come about in the right way or the whole arc is lackluster.
   • “The impression that courtly love is out of date, long superseded by modern manners, is a lure blinding us to how the logic of courtly love still defines the parameters within which the two sexes relate to each other. This claim, however, in no way implies an evolutionary model through which courtly love would provide the elementary matrix out of which we generate its later, more complex variations.”
   • “The first trap to be avoided apropos of courtly love is the erroneous notion of the Lady as the sublime object”
   • “The Lady [in courtly love poetry] is thus as far as possible from any kind of purified spirituality: she functions as an inhuman partner in the sense of a radical Otherness which is wholly incommensurable with our needs and desires; as such, she is simultaneously a kind of automaton, a machine which utters meaningless demands at random.”
   • “This coincidence of absolute, inscrutable Otherness and pure machine is what confers on the Lady her uncanny, monstrous character – the Lady is the Other which is not our “fellow creature”; that is to say, she is someone with whom no relationship of empathy is possible.”
   • “The nature of the masochistic theater is therefore thoroughly “non-psychological”: the surrealistic passionate masochistic game, which suspends social reality, none the less fits easily into that everyday reality. For this reason, the phenomenon of masochism exemplifies in its purest form what Lacan had in mind when he insisted again and again that psychoanalysis is not psychology.”
   • “What the paradox of the Lady in courtly love ultimately amounts to is thus the paradox of detour: our “official” desire is that we want to sleep with the Lady; whereas in truth, there is nothing we fear more than a Lady who might generously yield to this wish of ours – what we truly expect and want from the Lady is simply yet another new ordeal, yet one more postponement.”
   • (via Wikipedia) “In the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, objet petit a stands for the unattainable object of desire. It is sometimes called the object cause of desire. Lacan always insisted that the term should remain untranslated, “thus acquiring the status of an algebraic sign” (Écrits). “
   • “The definitive version of courtly love in recent decades, of course, arrives in the figure of the femme fatele in film noir, the traumatic woman-thing who, through her greedy and capricious demands, brings ruin tot he hard-boiled hero, The key role is played here by the third person (as a rule the gangster boss) to whom the femme fatele “legally” belongs: his presence renders her inaccessible and thus confers on the hero’s relationship with her the mark of transgression. By means of his involvement with her, the hero betrays the paternal figure who is also his boss (in The Gladd Key, The Killers, Criss-Cross, Out of the Past, etc.) This link between the courtly Lady and the femme fatale from the noir universe may appear surprising: is not the femme fatale in film noir the very opposite of the noble sovereign Lady to whome the knight vows service? Is not the hard-boiled hero ashamed of the attraction he feels for her; doesn’t he hate her (and himself) for loving her; doesn’t he experience his love for her as a betrayal of his true self? However, if we bear in mind the original traumatic impact of the Lady, not its secondary idealization, the connection is clear: like the Lady, the femme fatale is an “inhuman partner,” a traumatic Object with whom no relationship is possible, an apathetic void imposing senseless, arbitrary ordeals.”
   • “Films that transpose the noir matrix into another genre (science fiction, musical comedy, etc.) often exhibit some crucial ingredient of the noir universe more patently than the noir proper. When, for example, in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Jessica Rabbit, a cartoon character, answers the reproach of her corruption with “I’m not bad, I was just drawn that way,” she thereby displays the truth about femme fatale as a male fantasy – that is, as a creature whose contours are drawn by man.”
   • “How, then, are we to interpret this perserverance of the matrix of courtly love? It bears witness to a certain deadlock in contemporary feminism. True, the courtly image of man serving his Lady is a semblance that conceals the actuality of male domination; true, the masochist’s theater is a private mise en scene designed to recompense the guilt contracted by man’s social domination; true, the elevation of woman to the sublime object of love equals her debasement into the passive stuff or screen for the narcissistic projection of the male ego-ideal, and so on. Lacan himself points out how, in the very epoch of courtly love, the actual social standing of women as objects of exchange in male power-plays was probably at its lowest. However, this very semblance of man serving his Lady provides women with the fantasy-substance of their identity whose effects are real: it provides them with all the features that constitute so-called “femininity” and define woman not as she is in her jouissance feminine, but as she refers to herself with regard to her *potential) relationship to man, as an object of his desire. From this fantasy-structure springs the near-panic reaction – not only of men, but also of many a woman – to a feminism that wants to deprive woman of her very “femininity.” By opposing “patriarchal domination,” women simultaneously undermine the fantasy-support of their own “feminine” identity. The problem is that once the relationship between the two sexes is conceived of as a symmetrical, reciprocal, voluntary partnership or contract, the fantasy matrix which first emerged in courtly love remains in power. Why? In so far as sexual difference is a Real that resists symbolization, the sexual relationship is condemned to remain an asymmetrical, non-relationship in which the Other, our partner, prior to being a subject, is a Thing, an “inhuman partner”; as such, the sexual relationship cannot be transposed into a symmetrical relationship between pure subjects. The bourgeois principle of contract between equal subjects can be applied to sexuality only in the form of the *perverse* – masochistic – contract in which, paradoxically, the very form of balanced contract serves to establish a relationship of domination. It is no accident that in the so-called alternative sexual practices (“soda-masochistic” lesbian and gay couples) the Master-and-Slave relationship re-emerges with a vengeance, including all the ingredients of the masochistic theater. In other words, we are far from inventing a new “formula” capable of replacing the matrix of courtly love. For that reason, it is misleading to read The Crying Game as an anti-political tale of escape into privacy – that is to say, as a variation on the theme of a revolutionary who, disillusioned by the cruelty of the political power-play, discovers sexual love as the sole field of personal realization, of authentic existential fulfillment. Politically, the film remains faithful to the Irish cause, which functions as its inherent back-ground. The paradox is that in the very sphere of privacy where the hero hoped to find a safe haven, he is compelled to accomplish an even more vertiginous revolution in his most intimate personal attitudes. Thus The Crying Game eludes the usual ideological dilemma of “privacy as the island of authenticity, exempt from political power-play” versus “sexuality as yet another domain of political activity”: it renders visible the antagonistic complicity between public political activity and personal sexual subversion, the antagonism that is already at work in Sade, who demanded a sexual revolution as the ultimate accomplishment of the political revolution. In short, the subtitle of The Crying Game could have been “Irishmen, yet another effort, if you want to become republicans!”