Jacques Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage As Formative” discusses this stage that we go through as babies in which he refers to this as the “mirror stage” and how this stage can carry on throughout adulthood. He first starts off by using what he calls “comparative psychology” and he does this by comparing the intellect of a child to the intellect of a chimp. For instance he says, “The child, at an age when he is for a time, however short, outdone, by the chimpanzee in instrumental intelligence, can nevertheless already recognize as such his own image in a mirror. This recognition is indicated in the illuminative mimicry of the Aha-Erlebnis, which Kohler sees as the expression of situational apperception, an essential stage of the act of intelligence.” (1164) He then points out this sense of nature vs. nurture thing where animals, such as the monkey, imitate the reflection of images around it which in this case is nature, kind of something like an animal instinct that carries on through their adulthood as full-grown monkeys. Whereas the child will learn through the what they are taught and through experience rather than natural instinct because once upon a time we were all babies and as children we learned through a reflection of what we see around us and what we were taught which does carry on with us through our adult lives. This is where I can see why this is referred or being compared to a mirror because through life we see a reflection of ourselves not always knowing what others may see us as. From birth we are taught to be a certain kind of way and we learn through what our parents taught us and through experience rather than this natural instinct like the monkey. And that’s why I can also see how Lacan is tying this notion together with using the example of a child looking at its reflection in the mirror because babies look at this reflection trying to figure out the image in front them and the emotions behind and kind of lack this sense of self as he explains in his analysis. They lose this sense of self because they do not know how to interpret this reflection of themselves and this carries into adulthood because we continue to see images of thing and even look in the mirror today and not know what is going on and try to figure out this world surrounding us. Unlike the chimp, we have this perception of ourselves and we know that others have this perception of us and its natural human instinct to wonder what that is and the chimp does not have a clue nor really wonder what another’s perspective is of themselves. Finally, this is what Lacan is trying to convey to us we have and still go through this mirror stage where we look at ourselves and reflect on what we are and the image we see in the mirror.

Obviously, I am no psychologist or even a psych major for that matter so my opinion is not an educated one but I think Freud’s theory is… odd. Freud’s theory on fetishism is confusing to be honest. To me, it seems really far-fetched but I can’t pretend to understand such deep psychological issues as these.

Freud addresses the shoe as a sexual object of fetishism in his essay in which he defines a fetish as “a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and—for reasons familiar to us—does not want to give up”. Freud continues to more specifically address the shoe as an object of fetishism and he says “…the foot or shoe owes its preference as a fetish—or a part of it—to the circumstance that the inquisitive boy peered at the woman’s genitals from below, from her legs up, fur and velvet—as has long been suspected—are a fixation of the sight of the pubic hair, which should have been followed by the longed-for sight of the female member; pieces of underclothing, which are so often chosen as a fetish, crystallize the moment of undressing, the last moment in which the woman could still be regarded as phallic”. Ergo, according to Freud, the shoe is fetishized by young males from an early age in order to justify the mother’s lack of penis in a male dominated society. However, if this was truly case even the most beat up pair of crusty flip flops would be fetishized so long as they provided a reminder of that first glimpse of the mother’s lack of penis.

Freud makes a valid observation: “fetish is recognized by its adherents as an abnormality, it is seldom felt by them as the symptom of an ailment accompanied by suffering. Usually they are quite satisfied with it, or even praise the way in which it eases their erotic life.” I think this statement is valid for all things and interests that can be considered peculiar or “other” in the way that society often tends to ignore them but it doesn’t change the fact that they exist and people find pleasure and often joy from these things, regardless of whether they are ignored or not. Thus, Freud found that the fetish “made its appearance in analysis as a subsidiary finding.”

Freud did not bother to discuss fetishism in women, he discusses only fetishism in men. He claims that it is derived from a man’s fantasy from when he was a boy that his mom had had a penis but that it had been cut off, which leads to men’s apparent universal fear of castration. This results in a woman’s vagina becoming an object of fear and horror, which “normal” men see as an object of desire. But for some men, being able to see the vagina as such is impossible and in an effort to overcome this, the male psyche has to find some kind of substitute, which Freud suggests is fetishism. I am certain feminists have criticized this theory because of the way Freud implies that the female body is the one that is lacking, but I don’t feel that it is really all that surprising considering that Freud wrote this in the 1920s when gender roles were totally different.

“In the Interpretation of Dreams” by Sigmund Freud he makes an important contrast between the conscious and the unconscious mind. According to Freud, our dreams play a major role in understanding the root of our problems that we can’t face when we are awake. The manifest content also known as dream content is the actual events that occur in a dream. The latent content also known as dream thoughts is the hidden but genuine meaning of a dream. Freud believed that the subconscious can suppress the latent content as a way to protect us from the true meanings of the dreams. This happens because the dream content may be hard for some people to come to terms with. Freud believed that if he could reveal or get to the latent content of someone’s personal conflict, then he could diagnose the problem and fix their conflict. I find myself having dreams thoughts more than dream content. So maybe I might have something lingering in my subconscious that I might not be able to deal with. In class a student brought up a great point – What would Freud consider a person that doesn’t have dreams? But you (the professor) quickly pointed out that Freud doesn’t exactly address this in the piece that we were reading. I was a bit disappointed because it would be interesting to see Freud’s opinion on this. When reading the piece by Freud that was a question that quickly popped up in my mind because I think we all have experienced nights where we just don’t have dreams at all. So, Freud opinions on this will remain in oblivion.

Freud goes on to explain condensation, displacement, and the means of representation. Condensation is when a dream elements all combine into one. Displacement is the game of replacing one thing for another. The means of representation in dreams is the transformation of thoughts into images. Condensation and displacement seems to overlap in the text. Displacement can be seen more as complete while condensation seems almost more of as a contingency. Correct me if I’m wrong.

According to Freud, our childhood experiences also play a significant part in our unconscious mind. Freud points out that the children that don’t develop normally display “on a magnified scale feelings of love and hatred to their parents which occur less obviously and less intensely in the minds of most children (814).” Parents are very influential in a child’s development. The relationship with the parents is the first relationship that the child encounters so it is quite understandable that the parents play such a significant role on how the child develops. An example can be a child that has racist parents. The child wasn’t born with racist tendencies and prejudices but, that behavior was instilled in the child. The relationship will cause the child to trust the parents’ judgements and in turn damaging the child’s state of mind. Freud uses the play Oedipus Rex by Sophocles as an example.  For Freud, the play Oedipus Rex can be seen as the manifest content of a dream that both hides and exposes the latent Oedipus complex. Let’s introduce Nietzsche to the party. This also can relate to our study of Nietzsche when he said that humans don’t know anything about themselves. So, if grown adults don’t know anything about ourselves what are our children supposed to know? We learn whats right and wrong from our parents so we act according to that.

Now, let’s introduce Françoise Meltzer to the party. At first when I saw Meltzer on the syllabus I thought that I was going to be reading another piece by a man. When I figured out that it was a woman I was instantly like yeah, girl power. So how about it professor, let’s get some more ladies on the syllabus. Reading Meltzer’s essay can help you understand Freud in more as well. In Meltzer’s “Unconscious” she starts her essay by differentiating between “The Unconscious” and the fact of being unconscious. Meltzer points out that many people argue that the term “unconscious” can only be used as an adjective. Unconscious is not a thing or place but an activity of which we are largely not aware of. Unconscious activity is hard to determine because it is interpreted from events in life which do not require consciousness. For example dreams, slips of the tongue, and puns. Unconscious activity must be inferred from that which is observable, and described and understood from within the realm and rules of “consciousness.” So before you venture into unconsciousness you have to describe what exactly consciousness is and go from there. The unknown is forever doomed to being described in terms of the known. Because of this Freud has to describe the unconscious through analogies, metaphors, similes, etymological play, and anecdotes.

Meltzer finishes by suggesting the unconscious is the way we imagine the unknown and its concealed components. When we talk about the unconscious, we confess more about the human will to search and describe that which is unknowable, hoping that the way we contemplate about the unknown will reveal to us about the patterns of the psyche.

The two primary interpreting lenses established by Freud and Lacan, imply a resolution upon the puzzle of the ego. Freud invests in the singular deconstruction of the object-object relations within the subplot, or latent-content (p.818), of the patient’s manifest content of the dream; while Lacan focuses on the subsequent relation dynamics from subplot to subplot (Unconscious p.160). The connotative value of a singular subplot, according to Freud, upon subsequent stories, is obscured, or censored (p.820), by the endopsychic defenses, by acts of displacement. On the other hand, Lacan views these acts of displacement, not as a hindrance, but a hint into what has changed from the patient’s subsequent dream stories (Unconscious p.160). Who is right in their psychoanalytical approach? Can we find resolution when we’ve solved the puzzle, or rebus, as Freud would say?

Before we go further, allow me to preface the similar nature of ego and id. So, clinically and in literature, psychotherapeutic theories certainly matters, in the same sense as deconstruction (deMan p.1375) has, when concluding that most “great” fictional written stories, are unstable, which is not a put down, but a gesture of it’s virtuosity. In other words, it appears that the ego and id, Hegelian-speaking, is the master to the id’s slave and vice-versa (Unconscious p.157), ultimately arriving to the truth: that the self, is objectively unstable, metaphorically & metonymically (Unconscious p.160).

At best, in a clinical sense, regarding neurosis (p.844), for instance, the patient, through a “successful” therapeutic session, may realize his egocentric habits, which again is unstable to begin with, and can begin to e/sy-mpathize with external surroundings: thus engaging in an anxious-free play with the environment, never feeling subsumed with himself, as is Hamlet (p.817) Apollonian (Nietzsche p.774) over-intellectualizing, via moralizing, to the point of yielding, against murderous intent.

But whose to say the anxious-free environment isn’t unstable itself? So then, it’s fair to claim that neurosis objectively has no moral basis of right or wrong. Certainly, psychoanalytical assessments are relative to a societal norm (knowing or unknowingly) exercised by a majority within that society. Therefore, neurosis is only viewed in bad light, because the majority isn’t neurotic; or rather that it ranges closer to “a glance at the mirror”, than “accidentally leaning too far into the pond”.

So then, the universal therapeutic purpose, is about, I presume, how can we all get along in society? Of course, it depends on the patient’s tolerance of their day-to-day mental activity, which motivates their psychotherapeutic visit. But who’s to say: that initial cause for a visit, isn’t the only known problem, or perhaps the most pertinent. I do believe, that the assumption of a resolution is overall beneficial, and could cast a wider net upon hidden problems in the id, than the initial cause of the visitation.

How does a therapist discover these pertinent problems? Freud explains that the id reveals itself thru gaps (Unconscious p.149) like a Freudian slip-of-the-tongue, memory lapse, etc. through the fallible nature of casual conversation—if the therapist creates a safe ambience in the room. And whether the id is ready to aquatically leak thru a repressive “dam” (p.151), or is in dire need of filling an ego Lacanian lack or psychological desire (p.157), something should reveal itself, thru revealing more than intended. And concluding, strategically, if there can be equal attention on the latent dream & the dynamics of it’s fragmented compositional relationships, in synthesizing the two psychoanalytical approaches of Freud and Lacan, then I believe a therapist can get closer to resolving the mental ailments, that the patient asked to be resolved and possibly more. We can worry about universal purposes for another time.

Damaris Dedes

ENG 306

J. Allred

Blog Post

What’s your Fetish?

Sigmund Freud is known for his psychoanalytical discipline which he often uses to base his other theories. Freud’s Fetishism explains the origin of sexual fetishes. According to Freud sexual fetishes emerge when a young man realizes that his mother does not share the same genitalia as him, the penis. This difference as explained by Freud implants the fear of castration. After a man realizes his mother and him do not share that aspect a “fetish” is then created as a substitute for the penis. Sigmund Fred stated, “When I announce that the fetish is a substitute for the penis, I shall certainly create disappointment…but for a particular and quite special penis that had been extremely important in early childhood but had later been lost”, in this portion of the article he is alluding to the fact that some sort of trauma in a young man’s life led to the fetish. He also brings up two important concepts that go hand in hand. The first when a man decides to ‘disavow’ their fear. The fetishist’s need to ‘disavow’ the fear while embracing the fetish. The man renarrates the trauma within the fetish. The second concept was ‘Scotomization’ which in terms means that the perception of the traumatizing memory is completely obliterated. This process is necessary when a man believes that his mother is in danger of not having a penis. In this case the man substitutes things like the shine of a woman’s nose to make up for the lack of penis. After Scotomization has occurred the man believes that the woman has got a penis. Freud states, “We can now see what the fetish achieves and what is it that maintains it. It remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and protection against it”, in this portion of the text it is clear that these men have a castration complex which fetishes can cure and also keep them from becoming homosexuals.

Sigmund Freud point is an interesting and quite funny one but it is also fairly sexists to define a woman’s body based on the eyes of a man. It has been noted that Freud believes that women’s genitalia is s form of castration and he dedicated most of his work to avoid going between woman’s legs. Freud does not speak on the woman’s body.

In the text “Unconscious by Francoise Meltzer there was one section that stood out to me more than others. “In other words the irony is that the unconscious can only be described in, understood in, the realm and the rules of consciousness. “Or to put it another way: the unknowable is forever condemned to being described in terms of the of the known. I found that quote to be very interesting. What I took from that is that although we are aware that there are hidden facets of the human kind.  We are blocked from fully understanding or describing them because our consciousness is limited and can’t go beyond are reach. Many people argue that the term “unconscious” is only be used as an adjective, I don’t think that it is not a thing or place but an activity that we don’t even know about. If we think about it, mental activity is a matter of conscious experience,   Funny enough a lot nineteenth-century German and British people refer to something unconscious, without even saying it! I However another writer, Freud took that term that was popular and made it to be sexual. It’s hard to define the nature of unconscious activity because it must be diagnosed by a doctor from by examples  in life which don’t seem moved by the conscious, such as dreams, slips of the tongue, puns, amnesia, compulsions to repeat, denials, and literature. Meltzer concludes by suggesting the unconscious is the way we imagine the unknowable and its hidden works. When we talk about the unconscious, we show more about the human will to explore and explain the unknown, hoping that the way we think about the unknown will tell us in itself about the structures and patterns of the human soul.

Sigmund Freud states that “although the details of each individual dream are particular to the dreamer there are some dreams that occur widely and point to the existence of universal desires”(817). Incest and its prohibition are at the core of Freud’s theory of “unconscious desire.” In his work, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud uses Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex as a form of evidence of the theory he is trying to convey. For Freud, literature is the human evidence that when deciphered and analyzed unveils the true desires of human beings. In the play, Oedipus is warned by an oracle that he will kill his father and marry his mother, in an attempt to avoid this fate, Oedipus leaves his home, only to kill a man and marry a woman who turn out to be his biological parents(who had left him as an infant to avoid that particular fate as well). For Freud, this play was so popular because it conveyed something universally fascinating and repressed(incestal physical relationships). The truth told by the oracle corresponds to unconscious desire, fulfilling itself despite the efforts to avoid it. Also Oedipus’ reluctance to learn his true identity is parallel to a patient’s resistance to unconscious knowledge. Freud also uses Hamlet to point out that Hamlet only delayed the revenge of his father’s death because his uncle had carried out a murder that he himself had wanted to do (Hamlet desired Gertrude, his Mom). By using two popular works of  literature, Freud, is not only changing the way people view these stories, but he is also making his argument relatable since these are stories most people know so well. It is a good strategy to discuss a topic as taboo as incest through familiar works of literature, it shows that incest does interest people even if they don’t outright admit it or know it.
Freud also states that dreams are capable of being “over-interpreted” and indeed need to be, if they are to be fully understood (818). This is important because before this people did not really bother to analyze the meaning of their dreams. Freud opened up the door to interpretation in an area that most people did not give much thought to. It puts into question many aspects of one’s own dreams. I think Freud was correct to believe dreams reveal one’s unconscious thoughts because I think about the dreams one has when one is hungry. One’s stomach is uncomfortable and almost in pain, begging for attention, when one is hungry. In order for the body to convey this to the sleeping mind it does it through a dream. For example, the few times I have dreamed of being stabbed or shot in the stomach, I woke up only to realize that I was in some sort of pain. It turns out I was really hungry and my body desperately needed food. Point being, if dreams and the body can deliver this idea of hunger to each other then I am sure it can deliver other ideas as well (some that we may have not even realized we knew/thought of).

Edina Schaefer

November 5, 2017

Blog Post 5

The Interpretation of Dreams

Sigmund Freud opens this essay by saying, ‘In my experience, which is already extensive, the chief part in the mental lives of all children who later become psychoneurotics is played by their parents’ (814). His term Oedipus complex states that a child’s first sexual ambition is their same opposite sex parent, which in turn leads them to passionately hate their same sex parent. He then goes on to say, ‘Being in love with the one parent and hating the other are among the essential constituents of the stock of psychical impulses which is formed at that time and which is of such importance in determining the symptoms of the later neurosis’ (814). An example that he uses that makes it interesting for the audience is Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. Freud’s argument is that Hamlet is a man of inaction when it comes to carrying out the ghost’s wishes because in a sense he is happy that his father has died. He is able to get his revenge on anyone who has wronged him, but it can be interpreted that Claudius actually helped him out. Claudius brought Hamlet’s repressed desires to life. This stems back to the Oedipus complex. Hamlet experiences incestuous ambitions towards his mother, but he is forced to repress those desires. He states, ‘In Hamlet it remains repressed; and- just as in the case of neurosis- we only learn of its existence from its inhibiting consequences’ (817).

The second part of this essay focuses on dreams and how they work. There are two categories of dream thought, one being manifest content and the other being latent content. Manifest content is the censored part of the dream that we remember while latent content is what lies beneath the surface, what the deeper meaning of the dream is. Our true dreams lie within the latent content but as Nietzsche stated in his essay ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, humans are prone to limit the truths that we hear, discuss and believe. Because of this, the mind changes our dream thoughts through processes such as displacement, condensation and representation. The mind uses different objects to parallel with what is really going on in our mind, but this parallel makes the dream more acceptable.

Sigmund Freud’s theories are still relevant today although many of them have been proven wrong. He has left a long lasting impact in the world of psychology and English, allowing his audience to better understand the human mind and how it works.

What hides within the depths of our minds? Our readings in this class have displayed that things are often not as they seem on the surface. In language and in society, deep analysis reveals a complex web of relations that determine the structure of these systems; a web that is not apparent at first glance. In Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, we are presented with a similar web that Freud reveals as he delves into the human mind (specifically, into the content of our dreams).

Freud uses dream interpretation to analyze the methods by which the unconscious functions. First, he considers the case of Oedipus, a protagonist of Greek mythology who killed his father and had sexual intercourse with his mother. The style of narrative which this play by Sophocles engenders is called Oedipus Rex. While some attribute the appeal of such a narrative to its message about destiny, for Freud, Oedipus Rex is compelling because of its reflection of unconscious impulses that are latent in every individual. Freud also finds such impulses in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, although Hamlet was written in an era of greater repression than Oedipus Rex, and therefore the impulses that drive the protagonist are apparent only through implication, rather than being made explicit and manifest.

His interpretation of these texts unveils Freud’s new method for interpreting dreams, in which he observes not only the “manifest content,” or that which is directly presented, but also the “latent content,” or that which must be inferred through processes of interpretation. The former is also referred to as “dream-content,” while the latter is comprised of “dream-thoughts.” For Freud, the error of all dream interpretation before him was that it did not attempt to interpret these dream-thoughts, but rather satisfied itself with merely the surface level dream-content.

In attempting to analyze the unconscious, through its activity as dream-thoughts, we must first acknowledge that these dream thoughts are incomprehensible, and so they represent themselves through translation into the “pictographic script” (819) of dream-content. This transformation from dream-thoughts to dream-content involves various modes of translation, namely condensation and displacement.

According to the principle of condensation, we can assume that each symbol in the dream-content holds within it a multitude of dream-thoughts. Dreams are very short, and yet they are rife with meaning. In attempting to translate this dream-content back into the complex dream-thoughts, “it is impossible to determine the level of condensation,” (819) and so the translation of a dream is indefinite. A dream can always be interpreted further. The other mode of translation from dream-thoughts to dream-content is called displacement. Displacement in dreams is the substitution of one thing for another. This substitution, like metaphor, is indirect and symbolic. Its purpose is for the dispersion of psychical intensity when moving from dream-thoughts to dream-content, for the raw dream-thoughts themselves are too intense for our conscious mind, and must be filtered by the censoring apparatus of displacement.

Throughout these processes of translation, what happens to logical structures? Dreams are unfit to represent logical connections, and so they reconfigure these connections in various ways. One method is that “they reproduce logical connection by simultaneity in time” (822), and so when two things are logically connected as dream-thoughts, this connection will be represented in dream-content as simultaneity. Causal relations in dream-thoughts are represented by a sequence in the dream-content; although the order of this causality may be reversed during this representation. Lastly, ‘either-or’ relations are represented by ‘and’ relations. “’No’ seems not to exist as far as dreams are concerned” (824), and so dream-content does not represent negation. Instead, the two objects that oppose each other on the level of dream-thoughts are presented as interchangeable on the level of dream-content.

As is of interest to our class, Freuds methods for dream interpretation can likewise be applied to the interpretation of literature. This is evidenced by Freud himself, as he begins his argument by applying his techniques to literary criticism. Through these new techniques, a student of literature is armed with a slew of new tools with which to interpret a text. Also, Freuds work presents a new subject of study for the student, namely, the unconscious (of both the characters and the author). However, Freud’s methods can be dangerous. In his own use of these techniques, Freud presents his interpretations as the “correct” interpretations, discrediting those who consider the Sophocles’ myth of Oedipus as referent of anything but the character’s unconscious impulses, and likewise closing-off interpretation of Hamlet to any other than his understanding of the protagonist’s motives. Although Freud admits that dream interpretation is infinite, he seems to lack this ideal in his application of his techniques to literature.