The Unconscious
Antony Easthope
p. 1999 by Routledge
0-415-19209-9
remember to look back at initial dissertation plan for different ideas, mood incongruence and other articles i have got
\Chapters included in this book:
Is there an unconscious?
The unconscious in Fried and Lacan
The unconsious and the 'I'
\The unconscious and sexuallity
The unconscious and the text
The unconscious and history
Concluision: giving it all away
preface
"we need the concept of the unconscious today because it addresses questions of human happiness and unhappiness which come up beyond economic and socoial causes and conditions" pXIV
>>>Freud and the french psychoanalyst who followed him, Jacques Lacan.
IS THERE AN UNCONSIOUS?
example of the woman who faints everytime she hears the word sex - and the man who decided to take advantage of it. p1-2
"Frued suggests that we we use symbolism with unconscious meaning all the time but conspire to ignore what we're doing." p3
"The question Fried asks himself, and his answer, points to a general principle. The concept of the unconscious bears with iut the implication that people will often deny its existence so as to hold onto the (apparently) sane and ordinary world of everyday common sense." p4
Frued did not beleive in the subconscious (submerged) and gave up on it p4
"IN fact, the unconscious - if it exists - is not a physical object you can put into a tube and test with chemicals. Its nature is inferred from an analysis of features in human behaviour - and particularly linguistic behaviour - which cannot be understood except on the hypothesis that there is an unconscious. The process is only apparent to us indirectly." p4
Frued - the unconsious is not part of the body but has a close relationship to it p4
INSTINCT AND DRIVE
instincts for survival AND instincts for reproduction. p5
unconscious is concerned above all with meanings and with symbols... p6-7
EVIDENCE FOR NECESSARY UNCONSIOUS:
-hypnosis
-dreams
-jokes
-slips and everyday life
-art
-psychoanalytic case histories
assume hypothesis that the unconsious seeks pleasure wherever it can, without being fussy, has to find a way around the surveilance of the conscious mind. p7
Hypnosis
talk of hysteria, a physical effect without a physical cause.
Dreams
Freud thinks this is the royal road to understanding dreams
Jacobs dream from Genesis:28 p9
871 pages of the interpretation of dreams
47 dreamt by freud
176 dreamt by others
"dreams consist of 'the transformation of a thought into an experience' (161), into what Freud elsewhere refers to as a 'thing-presentation',which, like cinema, is made up of 'moving pictures'." p11
This has a relationship to phtotography and the creation of work, like dreams.
baby killer dream wanting parents dead
Freud argues that this disguise in dreams is maintained by four effects:
- firstly there is the representation in images
-displacement, important meanings appear here
-superimposed onto each other
-finally, censored by the unconsious mind by being cast into coherent speech if they are to be reported. p11
dreams to be interpreted need to be done in the context of the dreamer's life
dreams take form into a shared system of images and meanings... he points to fairytales, myths, jokes
offers list of dream symbols
Slips and mistakes in everyday life p13
famous examples
four categories of jokes
...interesting talkinjg about the comedic elements in jokes
Art p18
fantasties conscious, phantasies unconscious, suggested by issacs 1948
making personal thoughts public, like reading diary
Case histories p20
theory of the unconscious us SUPPORTED by the aforementioned few things, main supports ceoms from hundreds and thousands of patients - such as little Hans
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THE UNCONSCIOUS IN FREUD + LACAN p24
review of what the unconsious is:
-is elsewhere, censored so appears indirectly, disguised and in traces
-works with meanings
-meanings can take forms in jokes and dreams
- seeks pleasure (mainly expressed in fantasy)
-childish
-no interest in morality or ethical obligations of society
-can contradict itself
Freud introduces the conscious, unconscious and preconscious stystems
Cs., Ucs., and Pcs.
Pcs. largely consists of memory, things we do without thinking about it
must be somewhere else, where you can get access to it
e.g can't remember someones name because the name has slipped from the preconscious into the unconscious.
Unc. and childhood
Lacan developed a split - the conscious and unc split as we grow up, pcs. acts as an intermediary.
developed from Freuds 'splitting of the ego in the process of defence' (1973-86, vol11: 457 ff.) p26
essential for culture. Splits nature + culture
"The split between conscious and unconsious is brought about through a great act of renunciation" p27
Oedipus
hamlet
examples, kills the father and marries the mother
law against incest, universal, strong evidence for the unconscious
Castration
Freud argues fear of death is a developed fear of castration (1973-86, vol11:400) p31
castration is worse than death in freuds world
repression
"Freud therefore kept coming back to the idea that we inherit some of our ideas, preserving 'memories of what was experienced by our ancestors' (1973-86, vol 13: 346) p32
law language and society p33
these things Deleuze and Guattari have complained freud was too mechanical
also Derrida 1987 makes a comparible accusation against Lacan
language break this up and turns infant into a child, loss of self-identity
Freud and the unconscious p36
summed up by his essay of the same title (1915)
conscious has been split from Unc.
Unc. divided into repressed Unc. + preconscious. (latent memories)
4 characteristics to the Unconscious:
-'exemption from mutual contradiction' eg desire + prohibition of incest
-'primary process'
-'timelessness' not altered by the passage of time, or affected by it at all
- 'replacement of external by psychical reality' seeks pleasure, - fantasy and wishes
word presentations and thing presentations p37
how are ideas interacting between Unc. and Cs.
"For an answer he turns to something that is important in all the classic instances of the unconscious to which I have referred: representation." p37
"Frued's hypothesis is that conscious and unconsious may be characterised generally by different kinds of representation; these he refers to, a little awkwardly, as w-p + t-p." p37-8
"When we think about an idea it comes into our minds as a word but at the same time it also present in the unconscious as a 'thing'." p38
p39 mentions art and photography
surrealism, tried, misread freud if you think you can sidestep censorship
Lacan and the unconscious
Freuds account of the unconscious is essentially an analysis of meaning
Lacan rethought the unconscious in relation to language
Famous principle: 'the unconscious is structured like a language' (e.g. 1977b: 203, 1993: 167)
Freud argues: cs = word presentations + thing presentations
but that: ucs = only thing presentations
has implications... 40-41
Lacan turns away from Freud's view of the unc. as hell below...
"For Lacan 'the unconscious us neither primordial nor instinctual' ((1977a: 170), rather it is something that happens when coherent language becomes dislocated." p41
signifier and signified
Lacan's view: "by the time we enter language, we always have to 'pass through the defiles of the signifier' (1977a: 264). Hence his definition of a signifier:
The definition of a signifier is that it represents a subject not for another subject but for another signifier. This is the only definition possible of the signifier as different from the sign. The sign is something that represents something for somebody, but the signifier is something that represents a subject for another signifier. (1972a:194) " p41
phonemes...
Some qualifications...
1923 freud revised his model of the psychic apparatus...
didn't give up on unc + cs, gave priority to three different agencies
THE EGO, ID AND SUPER EGO
Freud actually writes the I, IT and OVER-I
THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE 'I'
The Ego p48
"His solution is elegant and plausible. The ego is developed, with an awareness of reality, so that the unconscious does not waste its time pursuing objects which are imaginary and much kess pleasurable than real ones"
'originally the ego includes everything, later it seperates off an external world from itself' (ibid:255)
Defence p50
must defend against unpleasure from outside world + unconscious, making it too excited
"As a way to cope with these threat the ego has at its disposal a wide variety of mechanisms for redirecting libido into safer channels, including repression, projections and introjections ( ), rationalisation and sublimation." p50-51
Identification p52
"You can't identify with what you are. That is, strictly, the process of identification presupposes that subject and object - the one who does the identifying and what they identify with - remain distinct and sepparate" p53
princess diana example
lacan's ego... p58 GO BACK AND RE-READ
Frued seems to offer two disjunt theories of the ego...
the mirror stage p59
we all arrive into human culture from the outside, manage to learn english langauge etc, to be english...
"Lacan's answer is that identity is a form of identification, that the subject's ego is 'that which is reflected of his form in his objects' (1977a:194) p59
This other underlying self, is that not then perhaps part of the unconsious and preconsious, things thata re there but kept hidden from us.... timeless things
The 'I' is an Other p60
construction of identity - essay - 'The Mirror Stage'
mirror stage predates language
the ideal I p61
"The mirror stage 'situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction (ibid: 2). The bad news and the good news are the same - there's no real me and this identity I think is me is the best I;ll ever have. My ego seems to be the same in space, permanent across time and unified in substance, though in all of these i misrecognise how I come about as an effect, thinking I'm really there, despite different spaces, times, my own actual dispersal into various selves, being splits between conscious and unconscious." p61
The idealised I and the I idealised p62
Read and skipped the sex talk
THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE TEXT
"Frued records that 'myths and works of imaginative writing and of art' are among those human activities 'whose connection with an incomprehensible unconsious was always suspected' (1973-86, vol 15: 180) p109
fantasy
common element between art and the unconsious is fantasy
Dr No
The pleasures of the signififier
Freud does think that the formal aspects of art does give us pleasure p112
Freud records in a letter after spending some time with a painter:
"'Meaninh is but little to these men; all they care for is line, shape, agreement of contours'. They are, he concluded, 'given up to the pleasure principle' (Jones 1956-58, 3:412) That pleasure - and ours - comes from the work/play of the signifier" p112-113
emphasis on what art does for the reader...
share in the fantasy..
"The account of art in relation to the unconsious can be divided into four different concerns:
1) the author;
2) the content of the text;
3) formal features;
4) the reader's experience.
I shall take up each. Set out in advance they may look straightforward enough - in fact, each turns out to be problematic in its own way. On fantasy for example, I shall digress at some length on differences between fantasy in Freud and lacan." p115
I think finally I have reached a good point of discussion for my chapter 4
author: leonardo da vinci p115
Freud believes that the artist is someone who pours too much sexual energy into fantasy
more sex related stuff from Freud here
MUST REREAD
Leonardo left homosexual in his feeling sbecause brought up by his father and fathers wife
"I hope this brief account suggests what criticisms via the author's unconsious can do." p116
Well this chapter may unveil a bombshell that interpretation from unbias is completely impossible to know what the real self is anyway.... and so we could easily give up.... THEN can suggest the huge turn around even of, it is the SEER that is the important factor and their interpretation.
Content of the fantasy p117
form aspects of art
Barthes draws on Lacan's distinction between pleasure + desire p121
Kristeva
Art and the reader p124
"The idea of the unconscious has encouraged critics to try to talk about the pleasures of actual readers (the work of Norman N. Holland is a good example, see 1968 and 1975). But such accounts end up being either the fantasies of that particular writer, which are not very interesting, or they write about what they see as the fantasy contained in the text, which is a little more interesting." p124
Fantasy in Freud and Lacan p125
interpret the same dream, moving dream
child father candle burning...
"Who can say how or where anyone will latch onto the text? It depends on how the reader identifies with it. There are therefore multiple points for identification" p127
Multiple identifications: being beaten p127
" ' a child is being beaten' illustrates tge fact of multiple positions in and for a scenario." p128
Psycho (ref to the film i think)
"there is also a discontinuity between the events as we follow them and the events as we reinterpret them afterwards" p131
(same with Oedipus when he killed his dad and married his mother
may reread...
The Unconscious and History p135
So far the concern has been with the inner psychic life of individual human beings, moved slightly beyond this when talking about the unc and art
"This present chapter aims to expand the scope of the discussion in order to argue that the unconscious acts as 'lining' or 'inside' to all forms of social life." p135
Universal Human Nature?
Jung - archetypes + the collective unconscious
Freud in IOD his conclusion is very different
Dreams have to be understoof in the context of the indivudual dreamers experience and unconscious disposition. The experience can never be solitary p136
p 167
"At the renaissance Descartes founded the tradition which made consciousness and the ego the centre of human subjectivity and being - ' I think, therefore I am' (1960: 24). Since then, as Freud says in 'A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis' (1953-74, vol 17: 136-44), our 'universal narcissism' has suffered 'from the researches of science'. A first blow was discovering the earth was not the centre of the universe, a second when Darwin proved that ours is just another species, 'more closely related to some' and 'more distant to others'. The third blow to Western self-love came when psychoanalysis showed 'that the ego is not master in its own house'.
To be sure of the existence of the unconscious all you need to do is think of the acts of your own mental life 'as if they belonged to someone else' (1973-86, vol 11: 171). Freud's conclusion is that 'we myst learn to emancipate ourselves from the importance of the symptom of "being consious" (ibid: 197). Lacan openly attacks Descartes' notion of the priority of the ego. The idea of a split between conscious and unconscious forces us to reverse Descartes' position. Instead, Lacan offers, 'I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think' (1977a: 166). Whether I want it or not my unconsious will follow its own rules and do its own thinking for me."
GOOD ... USE IT.... Descartes cogitio
Simon Johnson
www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk
The Unconscious - Antony Easthorpe
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