Psychoanalysis: the disease of which it purports to be the cure

    Sigmund Freud is an extremely influential explainer of the modern age. He is much despised now, but his writings still contain power, especially when considered through all those writers who've channeled him. Freud finds an analogue to his systems in psychoanalysis in Oedipus Rex because  "the action of the play consists in nothing other than the process of revealing, with cunning delays and ever-mounting excitement." (Freud 815) In defining what most of us know as the fundamental tenant of Freud, he says "It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father." (Freud 816) The theory is still fascinating, despite all of its opposers, because it rests on fundamental conditions - human beings come inlaid with certain equipment,  and learn how to operate that equipment in correspondence to their parents. Dreams of having sex with one's mother might be eerie, but Freud stresses them as a simulation, and the horror of encountering that simulation creates a slew of other difficulties. Harold Bloom talks about Freud as a great translator of Shakespeare, and Freud is fascinating in that regard as well, making the interesting comparison that hamlet is to children and parents as macbeth is to childlessness. Of Hamlet's repression, he says "we only learn of its existence from its inhibiting consequences." (Freud 817) Hamlet, who is a rhetorical genius and extraordinarily capable, isn't prone to inaction as we see when he sends his two guards to die in his place. Therefore, Freud makes the statement that "Hamlet is able to do anything--except take vengeance on the man who did away with his father and took that father's place with his mother,' (Freud 817) this precondition carried from youth being the one thing that his mind cannot negate. The extraordinarily capable Hamlet hates this grand limitation, and fights against it: "the distaste for sexuality expressed by Hamlet in his conversation with Ophelia fits in very well with this." (Freud 818) Of Freud's literary probing, he only seeks to find the "deepest layers of impulse," (Freud 818) making Freud no more reductive than Frye, whose archetypes might be said to be consistent images or shapes of that impulse.  

    Of dreams and dream-thoughts, Freud stresses latent content, telling us that "the dream-content seems like a transcript of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression." (Freud 819) Dreams are a double work of condensation and displacement.  Of condensation: "dreams are brief, meagre, and laconic in comparison with the range and wealth of the dream-thoughts' (Freud 819) and "it is impossible to determine the amount of condensation." (Freud 819) Of Displacement, Freud tells us 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 over-determination, creates from elements of low psychical value new values, which afterwards find their way into the dream content...a transference and displacement of psychical intensities occurs." (Freud 820) Dream thoughts are of the subconscious and attempt to manifest its shape and so "must escape the censorship imposed by resistance." (Freud 821) The fundamental logic of dreams is either/or and 

" 'No' seems not to exist as far as dreams are concerned." (Freud 824) In effect, dreams collapse binaries. 

     

    Lacan is a french psychoanalyst who is a great translator of Freud's but adds a weighted sense of language. He breaks down understanding into the imaginary, symbolic, and real - the real what we can never have access to, the imaginary arising from the mirror stage and constituting our love for form, and the symbolic being a structure of relations that translates us. His mirror stage is at odds with Descartes, and he describes "It is an experience that leads us to oppose any philosophy directly issuing from the Cogito.' (Lacan 1164)  Looking in the mirror seems to Lacan to exhibit "the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject.' (Lacan 1164) The wholeness that is intuited there, and that movement of the mind that acknowledges that wholeness as ourselves yet still a separate entity,  "situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone." (Lacan 1165) This wholeness is described as gestalt, which "symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination (Lacan 1165) Having deeply studied the paranoiac, Lacan sees all our desires and union-seeking impulses to be "the effect in man of an organic insufficiency in his natural reality." (Lacan 1166) Thus, we are always only trying to find that other perfect half (illusion) of ourselves when we posit wholeness at all, because "the moment in which the mirror-stage comes to an end inaugurates, by the identification with the imago of the counterpart and the drama of primordial jealousy, the dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations. (Lacan 1167) This outlook strongly explains Lacan's skepticism about existentialism. However, Lacan, the ever romantic frenchman, cannot give in that easily and finds salvation in that instinct of preserving others as well as our selves, undercutting the kingship of the 'I' as "this knot of imaginary servitude that love must always undo again, or sever." (Lacan 1169)

       Lacan sees in the signifier a giant, well, phallus, noting that "the signifier has an active function in determining certain effects in which the signifiable appears as submitting to its mark, by becoming through that passion the signified. (Lacan 1184) The Other, or that which is fundamentally alien to us, can only be probed with our words, and the words we use to describe it become part and parcel of our own psycho-geographies: it is in the Other "that the subject, by means of a logic anterior to any awakening of the signified, finds its signifying place." (Lacan 1185) Language always constitutes another place, whichever is employing it, and so subjects are fundamentally split by language. Language is fundamentally ruled by demand, and  "It is demand of a presence or of an absence--which is what is manifested in the primordial relation to the mother, pregnant with that Other to be situated within the needs that it can satisfy." (Lacan 1186) Our words are daggers that we cut up nature with, even to our own shame, when the signifier misses its mark and 'then becomes the bar which, at the hands of this demon, strikes the signified, marking it as the bastard offspring of this signifying concatenation.' (Lacan 1187) Making this conception even lonelier is the sentiment of individuality achieved simply by naming many things as Other, when "the subject designates his being only by barring everything he signifies.' (Lacan 1187) Tying it back to Freud's conception of the castrated woman, Lacan posits an impossible scenario: "here is signified the conjunction of desire, in that the phallic signifier is its mark, with the threat or nostalgia of lacking it.' (Lacan 1188)

 Freud "The Interpretation of Dreams." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print. 

 Lacan "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.

 Lacan "The Signification of the Phallus." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.