L ITERARY T HEORY : P SYCHOANALYSIS

S IGMUND F REUD Freud believed, and many people after him believe, that his theories about how the mind worked uncovered some basic universal truths about how an individual self is formed, and how culture and civilization operate.

P LEASURE P RINCIPLE & R EALITY P RINCIPLE : The Pleasure principle tells us to do whatever feels good; the Reality Principle tells us to subordinate pleasure to what needs to be done, to work. Desires that cannot be fulfilled are packed, or repressed, into a particular place in the mind, which Freud labels the unconscious.

S UBLIMINATION : Taking desires that can’t be fulfilled, or shouldn’t be fulfilled, and turn their energy into something useful and productive. Freud’s example of this focuses on sex: for Freud, sexual pleasure is the model for all forms of pleasure.

W AYS INTO THE UNCONSCIOUS : The unconscious is inaccessible to the conscious mind. The indirect routes into the contents of the unconscious are: Dreams – symbolic fulfilment of wishes that have been repressed. parapraxes – slips of the tongue jokes – indicative of repressed wishes.

T HE U NCONSCIOUS The contents of the unconscious to Freud, is almost always about sex. The contents of the unconscious consist primarily of sexual desires, which have been repressed. Freud says that sexual desires are instinctual. Instincts for food, warmth, and comfort, which have survival value also produce pleasure.

E ROTOGENIC ZONES : Oral, Anal and Phallic. The polymorphously perverse child is pleasure-seeking. It is not yet under the sway of the Reality Principle because it doesn’t have to repress any desires, it has no unconscious. the child has no gender.

T HE P ROJECT OF PSYCHOANALYSIS : How does a polymorphyously perverse being turn into a self? How libidinal desires are channelled into proper forms? How is the gendered and sexual self formed?

O EDIPUS C OMPLEX : The end of the phallic phase, beginning of the latency phase. Freud explains that it is the development that changes a child from incestuous to exogamous (outside the family) desire. Desire is repressed to form the unconscious.

O EDIPUS C OMPLEX : The way that boys and girls make these shifts in erotogenic zones and erotic objects is through the Oedipus Complex.

C OMPLEXES : Freud asserts that the maturation of the sexual self is associated with the idea of the present, or absent sexual organ. Because the penis is external, he claims that creates a power struggle between males and females called penis envy.

T HE C ONSCIOUS & T HE U NCONSCIOUS : Freud introduces that the human self, or subject, as radically split, divided between the two realms of consciousness and unconsciousness.

T HE R EAL, THE I MAGINARY, AND THE S YMBOLIC : These are the three fields in which human beings develop. All language is symbolic. Humans must enter into the Symbolic in order to become a ‘self’. Development from child to Adult entails loss of an original unity, a non-differentiation, an unselfhood.

This is the state of nature, which has to be broken up in order for culture to be formed. A child must separate from its mother, in order to enter into civilization. This separation entails some kind of loss.

Lacan says language is always about loss or absence: you only need words when the object you want isn’t present. Like Plato, the Real is always beyond language, unrepresentable in language, and therefore irretrievably lost when one enters into language.

“W E A RE Y OUNG ” BY F.U.N. My lover, she’s waiting for me just across the bar/my seat’s been taken by some sunglasses asking ‘bout a scar and/I know I gave it to you months ago/I know you’re trying to forget/But between the drinks and subtle things/The holes in my apologies, you know/I’m trying hard to take it back. So if by the time the bar closes/And you feel like falling down/I’ll carry you home tonight. We are young/So let’s set the world on fire/We can burn brighter than the sun