#psychoanaysis

[grandhotelabyss]

If you haven't already, I highly recommend Philip's Against Self-Criticism in the LRB. It's one of my favorite essays written in the 21st century. The piece explores Hamlet, Freud, Lacan, etc. (All of which, as you've persuasively argued, emanate from mind of Shakespeare.)

Thanks, just read it, a literally perfect essay, and, re: a previous post, one of the best defense of Freud ever made: the way it begins with Hamlet and ends with Don Quixote to start and finish at the origin of modernity, the way it connects Freud to the tradition of liberal jurisprudence and the thought of Mill, and above all, most movingly to me, the way it defends overinterpretation (metatextually, given Phillips's own close readings):

After interpreting Hamlet’s apparent procrastinations with the new-found authority of the new psychoanalyst, Freud feels the need to add something by way of qualification that is at once a loophole and a limit. ‘But just as all neurotic symptoms,’ he writes, ‘and, for that matter, dreams, are capable of being “over-interpreted”, and indeed need to be, if they are to be fully understood, so all genuinely creative writings are the product of more than a single impulse in the poet’s mind, and are open to more than a single interpretation.’ It is as though Freud’s guilt about his own aggression in asserting his interpretation of what he calls the ‘deepest layers’ in Hamlet – his claim to sovereignty over the text and the character of Hamlet – leads him to open up the play having closed it down. You can only understand anything that matters – dreams, neurotic symptoms, people, literature – by over-interpreting it; by seeing it, from different aspects, as the product of multiple impulses. Over-interpretation, here, means not settling for a single interpretation, however apparently compelling. The implication – which hints at Freud’s ongoing suspicion, i.e. ambivalence, about psychoanalysis – is that the more persuasive, the more authoritative the interpretation the less credible it is, or should be. If one interpretation explained Hamlet we wouldn’t need Hamlet anymore: Hamlet as a play would have been murdered. Over-interpretation means not being stopped in your tracks by what you are most persuaded by; to believe in a single interpretation is radically to misunderstand the object one is interpreting, and interpretation itself. In the normal course of things, tragic heroes are emperors of one idea: they always under-interpret. Hamlet, we could say, is a great over-interpreter of his experience; and it is the sheer range and complexity of his thoughts – his interest in his thought from different aspects – that makes him such an unusual tragic hero. ‘Emerson was distinguished,’ Santayana wrote, ‘not by what he knew but by the number of ways he had of knowing it.’ Freud was beginning to fear, at this moment in The Interpretation of Dreams, and rightly as it turned out, that psychoanalysis could be undistinguished if it had only one way of knowing what it thought it knew. It was dawning on him, prompted by his reading of Hamlet, that psychoanalysis, at its worst, could be a method of under-interpretation. And to take that seriously was to take the limits of psychoanalysis seriously; and indeed the limits of any description of human nature that organises itself around a single metaphor.

If I have a pedagogical rather than just a literary vocation, it is to teach the art of overinterpretation, an art that testifies to the abundance of the universe. How does this affect me as an artist? Wallace Stevens's second criterion for "Supreme Fiction" is that "It Must Change." I believe that means that the greatest art makes itself maximally available to overinterpretation (while still retaining its discrete form). It therefore presents itself variably to different audiences and epochs.

[itoendme]

i feel the need to write another vinland saga essay

[iwan-out]

something something freud's discovery that invasive xix-century moral and social norms lead to burying thoughts and desires which results in tension, aggression and pain may be helpful in the xxi century when constantly in public mentality/purity culture makes people afraid of their own thoughts as if twitter's BIG EYE was constantly watching them... ANYWAY

[chloeamblergd-blog]

Psychoanalysis

Why is it relevant to talk about psychoanalysis?

For analysis of films

Sigmund Freud 1986 austrian

Art&Psychoanaysis

Group together societal issues

Automatic drawing in his theory practice

Free association

Dreams

Parapraxis

Freud believed that unlocking the unconscious was the key to curing their health issue

Compared the mind to an iceberg your conscious is only the tip

Freud - The interpretation of dreams - He wanted to understand it

Freud thought we were all driven by pleasure principle

The reality principle

The ID - out basic animal instincts and primal desires works on the pleasure principle

The ego this can also be thought as I. The ego mediates between the id and the real world, working on the reality principle

The superego this can be thought of the conscience and incorporates learned societal values and morals and working on idealistic principles

Bow to the reality principle

Neuroses mild mental  illness not caused by an organic disease -anxiety, depression ect

Childhood Trauma

Freud Psychosexual stages

5 stages

The oral phase(01), can develop habits like smoking or drinking anything excessive bad oral behaviours  

The anal phase(1-3), Strict potty training, annally retentive, might be overly tidy - Other side is very rebellious and wants to share everything if

Phallic Phase (3-5)

The oedipus Complex a young boy sexually desires his mother and therefore wants to remove the father. The young boy believes the father should find out about these desires.

Tracing peoples development back to childhood - childhood shaping them as an adult

Sublimation expressing strong emotions, or use energy by doing activities, especially and activity that is considered socially acceptable - like art therapy

Leonardo Da Vinci used twisted sexual desires and transformed that into art

Free Association then that would get analysed

Sleep

Criticisms of Freud Theories some of his data is not credible his patients only represented a small percentage

John Bowlby very interested in child development

Separation Anxiety If there isn't enough maternal care, they might begin to think that this will disappear at any given moment, therefore becoming more anxious.  

Secure Attachment - Very secure know something may arise but know it can be worked through

Anxiously Attached - In a relationship where you are scared where they are, constantly texting calling ect.

Avoidant Attachment- When a small issue occurs they detach themselves

Jacques Lacan His work was veru influential in universities

Mirror Phase when an infant first recognises themselves in a mirror and what instability this causes as we are just a stream of consciousness

We have this consciousness and know how we feel and the only way we can tell other people

We feel anxious that people will never fully understand us and we will never truly be understood by anyone and we cant understand anyone else

Imaginary - Grasp the concept that he is separated from their mother

The symbolic stage The infant realises all experiences is filtered through language

The Real Left over from the pre talking phase

Appearances not being what they seem

The illusion of unity in which a human being is always looking forward to self mastery entails a constant danger of sliding back again into the chaos which he started. - Always looking for that comfort that we know who we are what we look like

Slavoj Zizek - uses psychoanalysis to look at films and

The pervert's guide to ideology

The pervert's guide to cinema  

The birth of cinema sense of uncanny

Dreams Sequence from spellbound a lot of things can be analysed from this

The Male Gaze Mulveys stated that cinema was always shown in the eyes of a heterosexual man 

deconstruct cinema from a female perspective

[waituntilspringbandini]

This is the paradox of Narcissus: the extreme affirmation of subjectivity goes hand in hand with his extreme negation and finds its scansion, or its punctuation, in the neuter. An essential instability, as a result of which the structure, forever in search of a new point of stability, will be weakened by oscillations between the One and the Other. Stance understood as rest, sojourn, dwelling place, and stasis as arrest, immobility and stagnation, alternate in narcissistic figures

Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, Andre Green