Transcript Psychoanalysis: A Journey into the Dark

Psychoanalysis:
A Journey into the Dark
HKASL ~ Literature in English
Introduction
A family of psychological theories and
methods based on the work of Sigmund
Freud
 To discover connections among the
unconscious components of patients'
mental processes
 To help liberate the patient from
unexamined or unconscious barriers of
transference and resistance

Hypotheses
Human development: changing objects of sexual
desire
 The psychic apparatus habitually represses
wishes




Usually sexual or aggressive
Preserved in one or more unconscious systems of
ideas
Unconscious conflicts over repressed wishes
manifested in dreams, parapraxes ("Freudian
slips"), and symptoms
Hypotheses
Unconscious conflicts: source of neuroses
 Treated in psychoanalytic treatment:
bringing the unconscious wishes and
repressed memories to consciousness

The Unconscious
The unconscious: part of mental
functioning of which subjects make
themselves unaware
 Not including all of what is not conscious,
e.g., motor skills
 Actively repressed from conscious
thought, such as stereotypes and the
effects of past relationships on the present

The Unconscious

A depository for…
 Socially
unacceptable ideas, wishes or desires
 Traumatic memories
 Painful emotions put out of mind by the
mechanism of psychological repression
Not necessarily solely negative
 A force to be recognized by its effects — it
expresses itself in the symptom

Psychic structures


Divisions of the psyche
The id



The super-ego:


Primitive desires
Hunger, rage, and sex
Internalized norms,
morality and taboos
The ego:


Mediation between the two
May include or give rise to
the sense of self
Roots of Neurosis
Freud’s earliest writings: all neuroses
were rooted in childhood sexual abuse
(the seduction theory)
 Freud came to abandon or de-emphasize
this hypothesis
 The importance of unconscious fantasy as
the cause of neurosis

 Particularly
fantasy structured according to
the Oedipus complex
Roots of Neurosis: The Oedipus
complex
A concept developed to explain the origin
of certain neuroses in childhood
 Based on the Greek myth of Oedipus:

 Unwittingly
kills his father Laius
 Marries his mother Jocasta
To emerge in childhood
 To persist into adulthood in the form of
symptomatic interferences with mature
sexual relationships if left unresolved

Roots of Neurosis: The Oedipus
Complex

Including ‘positive' and
'negative‘ aspects

The positive oedipal longings:
 The
child's sexual wishes for and desire to
possess the parent of the opposite sex
 Engendering jealousy and death-wishes
towards the rival same-sex parent
Roots of Neurosis: The Oedipus
Complex

The opposite or 'negative' oedipal longings
For the parent of the same-sex
 Corresponding wishes to eliminate the parent of the
opposite sex
 Usually are less predominant
 Depending on multiple factors





The sex of the child
Other constitutional factors
The point in time during the oedipal phase
External circumstances within the child's environment
Roots of Neurosis: The Oedipus
Complex
Conscious initially
Sometimes verbalized by children during the
oedipal phase of development
 Roughly between the ages of three and five
 Resolution to the conflicts:





Child’s concessions to reality in his / her growth
Identifications with parental values
Unresolved residues:


Repressed to the unconscious
To be manifested in the form of symptoms and
inhibitions
The Life and Death Instincts

Humans driven by two conflicting central
desires:

The life drive
 Eros
/ Libido
 Incorporating the sex drive
 Creative, life-producing

The death drive
 Thanatos
(or death instinct)
 An urge inherent in all living things
 Returning to a state of calm, or, ultimately, of nonexistence
Post-Freudian Schools

Object relations theory
 The
ego-self exists only in relation to other
objects
 External or internal
 Internal objects:
 Internalized
versions of external objects
 Primarily formed from early interactions with the
parents
Post-Freudian Schools

Object relations theory
 Three
fundamental "affects" existing between
the self and the other
 Attachment
 Frustration
 Rejection
 Universal
emotional states
 Major building blocks of the personality
Post-Freudian Schools

Interpersonal psychoanalysis




Harry Stack Sullivan
Details of patient's interpersonal interactions with
others: insight into the causes and cures of mental
disorder
Patients keep many aspects of interpersonal
relationships out of their awareness by selective
inattention
Psychotherapists:


Conduct a detailed inquiry into patient's interactions with
others
Patients would become optimally aware of their interpersonal
patterns
Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism
Influenced by the tradition of
psychoanalysis begun by Sigmund Freud
 Psychoanalytic reading as an interpretive
tradition
 To explore the psyche of authors and
characters
 To explain narrative mysteries
 To develop new concepts in
psychoanalysis

Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism





Object: the psychoanalysis of the author or of a
particularly interesting character
Following the analytic interpretive process
discussed in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams
More complex variations are possible
The founding texts of psychoanalysisre-read for
the light cast by their formal qualities on their
theoretical content
Example: Freud's texts


Resembling detective stories
Archaeological narratives
~Hope you enjoy the
journey into your “self”~