Humans would like to think that we define ourselves through rational thinking and reason. This is where Sigmund Freud says no. In Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, he explains that our dreams play a bigger role in our identity than we think. Freud explains that every child’s first object of sexual desire is their opposite- sex parent. Although this may sound farfetched, Freud explains that these feelings of incest lead to a repressive psyche in a human because as we grow older we clearly do not want to have these feelings. Freud interpreted that this repression could lead to homosexuality,neurosis, and/or pedophilia. This is where the concept known as the Oedipus Complex arises from. In the play Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles. Oedipus ends up killing his father and marrying his mother. Freud says that this story still resonates with us today “only because it might have been ours- because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him” (816). Freud explains that in order to interpret our minds deepest impulses we must acknowledge the latent content of our dreams. This is what the interpreter of the dream should pay attention to. Before there was latent content, all interpretation was seen through the manifest content, which is what we could remember from our dreams. Latent content is the most essential information to understand the unconscious details of our dreams. This is our “true desire”. Sometimes humans can not handle the intensity of our wants and we want to condense and displace the content of our dream. Condensation is a method where the repressed part of the dream returns in hidden ways. In dreams, multiple dream-thoughts are often combined into a single element of the manifest dream. According to Freud, every dream seems to be put together out of two or more impressions or experiences. According to Freud, displacement is the principle means used in the dream- distortion to which the dream thoughts must submit under the influence of the censorship. An example of displacement could be if a man is angry with his boss at work, but he cannot express this anger properly, so he goes home and hits his wife. The wife in turn hits one of the children, possibly disguising this as a punishment. Displacement almost is a reminder of the line in the movie Few Good Men, “you can’t handle the truth”.

In Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, he explains that every child’s first object of sexual desire is their opposite-sex parent.  Around the same time of this discovery, they will start resenting their same-sex parent.  However, seeing that incest is a taboo topic, most people have to repress that sexual craving, which, according to Freud, might lead to neurosis, homosexuality, and pedophilia.  He coined this concept as the Oedipus complex, after the play Oedipus Rex, written by Sophocles around 429 BCE.  In the play, Oedipus kills his father and unknowingly marries his mother.  Freud claims that Oedipus Rex is a story that still moves us today “only because it might have been ours – because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him” (816).  He goes on to say that Shakespeare’s Hamlet “has its roots in the same soil as Oedipus Rex,” meaning that Hamlet experiences the same incestuous desires as Oedipus (817).  The difference, however, is that Hamlet is aware of his desire for his mother, which Oedipus was oblivious of.  Hamlet is forced to repress his forbidden desires, and the resulting neurosis he experiences are what Freud calls the “inhibiting consequences” of that repression.  Another reason for Hamlet keeping his desire hidden is that it was written within a much different society than Oedipus Rex, during the time of “the secular advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind” (817).  

In an attempt to “interpret the deepest layer of impulses” within the mind, Freud presents the new idea of latent content as what the interpreter of dreams should focus on.  Up until that point, all dream interpretation was through the manifest content, that is, the censored content of the dreams we remember.  Latent content, on the other hand, is what lies beneath the surface of manifest content.  It is the unconscious, a void which we can only know through its effects.  Our true desires are in the form of latent content, or ‘dream thoughts.’  However, our ego can’t always handle the truth of our wants.  In that case, the mind transcribes our dream thoughts into dream content through a process of condensation and displacement.  An example might be that we desire to murder our friend, but since murder is not an acceptable behavior or thought in our society, we might displace the image of wanting to see him dead in our dream with seeing a dead dog.  

Freud’s ideas about the unconscious were certainly revolutionary for his time, and though many of his theories have been debunked, he is credited with getting people to look below what is on the surface.

Foucault’s History of Sexuality was written during the age of the sexual revolution. A time of sexual expression and liberation that prompted Foucault to challenge the mentality of this movement, questioning if they were truly ever sexually oppressed in the first place. He refers 18th century Victorian era where he produces his “repressive hypothesis” that claims since the rise of the bourgeoise, any time spent on purely recreational activities were disapproved. This meant that sex was dealt as a private and intimate encounter that only serves a purpose of reproduction. Anything beyond the intention of sexual reproduction or the congregation two people of the same sex was condemned. Since sex was privatized and demonized in the eyes of the public, the “repressive hypothesis” began to establish outlets for “improper” and “unconventional” sexual ventures that would allow people to express their desires and fear. This includes mental hospitals, brothels, and psychotherapy. Foucault develops the repressive hypothesis in order to develop his notion of productive power.

Steven Marcus referred to the purveyors of these places as “Other Victorians”. These people were able to escape the repressive sexual discourse by creating their own sources for sexual liberation. Foucault gives credit to Freud for having assisted in the concept of the “sexuality possible” but it’s discourse remained within the academic and medical field, leaving it unable to fully impact the mainstream culture. Foucault adds that sexual repression must be discussed because of our history that allows any liberal discourse on sexuality to be misunderstood as a matter of political liberation rather than an intellectual analysis. The “repressive analysis” was a concept that Foucault was able to utilize to grant revolutionary importance on the discourse of sexuality. This makes the repressive analysis seem defiant and integral to our personal liberation.

He touches upon the emerging sexualization of children and the identities of homosexuals. Foucault touches upon the linkage of sexuality to truth, making sexuality a sort of indicator of identity. Sexuality became a category much like ethnic or racial categories that norms had perpetuates. His argument was that homosexuality was not discovered but produced through a dialectical exchange. This led to the classification of homosexuality that invited people to suppress and regulate them. It also led to the demonization of sexualities that were viewed as “unproductive” which links to the capitalistic means of reproduction.

The ontological categorization of homosexualities makes me question how people who were born intersex were treated. Intersexuality involves people who were born with ambiguous genitalia and or secondary sexual characteristics that do not fit into the dimorphic platonic binary. The ontological regulation that intersex people face is immediate within their lives starting at birth. Many people born intersex had parents who were persuaded by doctors to perform gender reassignment surgery. Doctors viewed intersexuality as a genetic mutation or a mistake that could be corrected with their medical assistance. Parents of intersex children would be overwhelmed with the medical jargon that their doctors would spew and end up consenting to the surgery even though their children were perfectly healthy. Parents often consented to the surgery in fear the lives of their child was at jeopardy or sheer ignorance. This left many children to be brought up as genders they weren’t originally assigned and perpetuates the existence of happy go lucky heterosexuals. This is indicative how social norms and means of reproduction hindered the lives of children to fit into a dimorphic mold. These children often suffered emotionally and ended up abandoning their genders into adulthood.
The definition of intersex are people who do not fit into the binary of gender. This means that they cannot be categorized due to their ambiguous genitalia and secondary sex organs. But due to the preconceived notions of gender being heavily influenced in our lives before we’re even born (sex reveal parties, baby showers, etc) society thinks it acceptable to identify people through their gender even if their gender is ambiguous. This leads to powers such as traditional intellectuals and juridical powers to identify and or correct a person’s gender so they can align with the means of reproduction.
It also brings up the discourse of queer people who are also in an ambiguous part of the spectrum of sexuality by refusing to fit into the binary as well. They refuse to even be involved with gender and therefore denounce being identified by it completely. Even though they identify as queer they are still subscribing to a label or categorization that attends to a certain social group and attributes. Even though it’s a unique social group, no one can escape the norm. Queer is supposed to challenge and reject the notion of social norms but by doing so, they are still in relation to the norm. As a social group they’re aligning themselves with other groups which allows competition, comparisons, expectations, and goals to arise.
Foucault claims that sex has never been a taboo in Western culture and therefore never repressed. His focus on how and why sexuality was made an object of discussion goes beyond sexuality itself and towards the power we find in knowledge. In search for this answer, the theory of power becomes foundational for this concept. Knowledge is power in which it allows you to understand your stance and position in the world in relation to others. Power is used for social control of the individual and the social body (i.e. the Victorian era establishing social norms around sex). In reality, sex is not actually repressed because it spawned a network of platforms used to talk about sex. The economy discourse of sed proves that a prohibition produces more of something. Power not only prohibits but produces more of something. The more hidden sex became, the more time people spent searching for ways to avoid talking about sex or frequent the platforms of sexual expression (psychiatry, brothels, mental wards, etc). The idea of knowledge producing power an hegemony caused the two type of powers to form: Juridical and Normative.
Juridical power has to do with the law. Foucault refers to this as a “Right to Death” which operates through prohibition laws and punishments. This type of power takes things away by force as punishment which is exercised over the public in order to demand obedience. This type of power is found in official institutions like legislative bodies, police, government, etc. Juridical power is something that is scarce that is exercised over people that allows power to be given or taken away.  Normative power aka “Power over life” involved the distribution of the norm. Power of life operates through the micromanaging of life so that more life is produced. This power therefore works through multiplication and is neither good or bad power. This power isn’t located in official institutions and can’t be rid of. It is inside and outside us and has no center. This power is part of a larger dynamic of power relations.

The dichotomy of these schools of power indicated that Foucault believed we must go further below the surface to exercise power. He was able to indicate and recognize how these powers manifest within these two concepts (bio/political powers) to depict how power knowledge controls us.

In Unconscious, by Françoise Meltzer, the writer discusses different opinions regarding psychoanalytic theory, mainly those of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Telling us the different ways in which our thinkers conceive of the unconscious, we are told that Freud first created a topographic model of the mind, in which consciousness and the unconscious are separated by a repression barrier that keeps us from accessing the latter. Freud also sees it through “hydraulic” metaphors, in which the unconscious, burdened by tension, needs to “’leak through’” or “’seek outlets’”(Meltzer 151). When he finally revises his model into the tripartite model, in which he creates the categories of id, ego, and superego, Lacan and other French psychoanalysts begin to disagree with him, believing that the topographic model is more correct. Our writer tells us that “one can see that the choice of models for the mind, and therefore the choice of metaphors and rhetorical devices used to describe psychic activity, are highly politicized in subsequent psychoanalytic theory”(Meltzer 152).

But, Meltzer says this relates to something else: the study of literature. We argue about and discuss literature not only over basic plot and narration, but we pay extra attention to the smallest of details; we look at those same “slips of the tongue, puns, jokes, and ‘gaps’”(Meltzer 157) in narratives as a psychoanalyst would look at in a person. We expect these to have deeper meaning than what our narrators tell us directly. Like those who believe in the unconscious, readers and critics believe there is much more information underneath the surface.

Even Freud, in trying to explain his theories, analyzes Oedipus and Hamlet, great literary characters. However, Freud’s psychoanalytic theory comes into a problem when it runs into literature. Although a lover of narratives himself, he takes stories and explains them away using his theories, specifically “The Uncanny” by E. T. A. Hoffmann, in which a man named Nathaniel is terrified of the Sandman, whom he believes will gouge out his eyes. Eventually killing himself because he believes one of the “sandmen” wants him to jump off a tower, the story ends quite tragically.

Meltzer tells us that Freud explains this using the idea of Fetishism, in which the protagonist’s fear is not of having his eyes gouged out, but of castration, and that the fear narrated in the book is just a product of repression and displacement. By attempting to give a diagnosis to the protagonist, however, Freud seems to “solve” the book like a math equation, something scary for literature lovers everywhere.

Lacan, in his conception of psychoanalytic theory, draws heavily from the ideas of Saussure and Jakobson. Using their ideas on linguistics to parallel the ideas of the conscious and unconscious, he tells us that the unconscious is “structured like a language”(Meltzer 159), even using metonymy to explain the displacement of desire within the mind.

As Meltzer says, “there is something in the reader-critic who would like to keep some texts uncanny, and that resists the notion that any discipline (especially one outside of literary studies) can claim to “decipher” the “real” meaning of the text”(Meltzer 155). Literature (and most subjects within the humanities), is complex and unquantifiable. The reason we continue to study the same texts over and over is exactly for this reason. If we can suddenly “solve” the narratives we truly love, what is the point of continuing to study it?

However, a straight rejection of Freud’s theory cannot be made without raising another. By creating a barrier between psychoanalytic theory and literature, we can no longer use literature to help explain other fields either. We also must decide what else falls outside of the literary realm, and what falls within it. When we build a wall, we must decide who and what to keep out, and also where to put it. If one really wants to get at the “truth”, of literature, shouldn’t all answers be accepted and considered?

As I said before, literature is something that cannot be quantified. Especially today, with technology allowing us to write publically whenever we like, and when we have films, news and art in wide availability, everything is literature and everything can be analyzed. By creating boundaries and saying that some theories and ideas fall outside of literature, we constrict our ability to look at the field in different ways. If we want to discover a little bit more about the workings of the human mind, both within psychoanalytic theory and literature, it is necessary to take into account the thoughts surrounding them that aren’t considered “literary” in the traditional sense.