Week 6: Of subtext and mimesis and natural (in)sanity

Freud

I’ve been waiting to actually study Freud for quite a long time now, since he’s worked his way into popular culture so much. I keep thinking back to watching this one episode of The Simpsons as a kid where Marge goes to a therapist in order to overcome her fear of flying. By analyzing her dreams and memories, her therapist discovers that her manifest fear of flying is masking her true, latent problem – her shame of her father being a stewardess (as a kid he had always told her he was a pilot, and in a traumatic moment of discovery she walks onto a plane and sees him serving the passengers, whilst wearing an apron). This is how we learn about Freud these days, through popular comedy. Where I was surprised not to learn about Freud was in a psychology class I took a couple years ago. (He may have come up briefly, but we didn’t really study him at all, as far as I can recall.)

Overcoming the stewardess complex.

I always found that surprising. Really, today Freud is much more often seen as a joke than a psychologist, and yet, despite the reasons for this, we really do have a lot to thank him for. I found it very interesting when we analyzed the Peale and Bellelli paintings in class, and the “punch line” was revealed – the Bellelli painting was influenced by Freud’s theories. It really blew me away, because I really did find myself drawn much more to the Bellelli painting, and I didn’t know why. But that’s it – the subtext. And that’s what we have to thank Freud for: subtext, the whole idea of the subconscious. It’s really crazy to see how that’s impacted not just psychology, but art. Subtext in art is one of the most important things…in fact, this makes me want to jump ahead a little to Iser, and his point about the concept of “blanks” – letting things be latent, letting them be filled in by the reader, I believe, is what makes art so powerful. Probably the number one thing that makes it so powerful.

And therein lies Freud’s greatest theory and contribution. “But just as all neurotic symptoms, and for that matter, dreams, are capable of being ‘over-interpreted’ and indeed need to be, if they are to be fully understood, so all genuinely creative writings are the product of more than a single motive and more than a single impulse in the poet’s mind, and are open to more than a single interpretation” (Freud 818). The idea that things need to be “over-interpreted” is quite a statement, and although in true psychology this might have reasons to be criticized, it’s an excellent method for literary analysis. Interpretation is really all we have. (But again, I’ll get to that more later with reader-response…)

Now, when it comes to the Oedipus Complex and castration anxiety, I must say I prefer to take a much more metaphoric view, or really something a little more along the lines of…

Lacan

The interesting thing about Lacan is I had no idea his theories had anything to do with Freud when I was first introduced to him. That was last semester in a creative writing class I took with Prof. Haake. She has this great way of explaining Lacan by combining his dimensions of the psyche with his concept of the Mirror Stage along with his idea of castration. Although, the term she always uses is not “castration” but “the suture,” which is really Lacan’s concept of “Spaltung,” that splitting. Although, as Prof. Haake says, she uses the term “suture,” because it’s not just a splitting, it’s also a healing simultaneously. This is why I never realized Lacan was inspired by Freud, because Prof. Haake really intentionally leaves him out, his specific terms and such, and I think that’s smart.

Because the key to Lacan is language. Freud as metaphor for Saussure, you could say. Like a lot of theorists, he does something I love: he combines psychology and literature, discussing the psychology of how we use language…or more how language uses us (starting to sound like Heidegger here). I don’t know how much of my views on this have been influenced by Prof. Haake, and possibly, because she always discusses him in relation to Lacan, Derrida, but this is how I see his theories. Having now re-read him a few times, I think the thing I appreciate about him most is both how he relates humans to the natural world, and how he’s very big on something I find overwhelmingly important in psychology: mental illness as really just normal human psychology to an extreme. “The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis are for us a schooling in the passions of the soul,” Lacan states, and this is really his entire point in everything he says (1169). We are never whole, we are always pulled apart by language, the ways we interact with the world symbolically. Unlike Freud, who says children must overcome the Oedipus complex to become psychology healthy adults, Lacan doesn’t believe that we ever overcome our “castration,” because it’s natural to us. This is why Prof. Haake calls it “the suture,” because it’s not simply a negative phenomenon, it’s also positive because it’s our way of naturally interacting with the world.

Something else that stood out to me much more on my second reading is how Lacan cites evidence of similar behavior in other animals to the human’s Mirror Stage, both for pigeons and locusts, who must see either other members of their species, or their behavior, in order to fully develop (Lacan 1165). In this way, it seems we’re not so different really from other animals, just that for us our “mirroring” of things needed for development (or, to use another familiar term, mimesis) tends to be much more symbolic, or entirely symbolic. Even though Lacan seems to think our tendencies towards symbolism separate us a lot from other creatures of nature, I appreciate that he brought up other animals’ similar tendencies, which seem to indicate to me that, although they are more literal and less symbolic, that we really aren’t much different at all. The idea that mimesis is natural to the animal world, that animals learn through mimicking, is a simple, yet profound truth. (Seems Lacan is Aristotle all over again, but taking it a whole step further into deeper psychology. Which I love.)