Reflection 6

March 8, 2011

          Today our class was on a quest to determine the reason why we think and feel the way we do according to the psychoanalysis theory of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Each man expressed their own version of the reasoning “why” we do what we do.

          Freud’s work began while he was a clinical neurologist delving into the minds of his patients. He was distracted by his enjoyment of research so he managed to intertwine patients and research. While listening to his patients he was convinced that many suffered childhood sexual abuse by the father; however, further study revealed that some of the tales of sexual events were fantasies. Looking deeper, he saw a psychic reality contained in these fantasies. During this enlightenment of the realities of fantasy much transpired—switching roles from son to daughter, and from father to mother with the father becoming the lawgiver instead of the lawbreaker. Freud introduced his new theory, the “Oedipus complex” based on the unconscious desire. The psychoanalysis used goes back to the psycho sexual stages that he introduced along with the ego, superego, and the id (known to Freud in German as: “I,” “it,” and “over-I”). By Freud listening to his patients differently, he discovered the unconscious. He felt that everyone was transmitting their own scrambled messages in a cryptic language trying to thrust through the conscious surface. Freud’s radical subjectivity theory has influenced literary theory because literature to Freud was not just an illustration, but central for understanding the desires and intentions of the writer.

          Lacan combines structuralism and Freudism “to leave the reader no other way out than the way in, which I prefer to be difficult" (Lacan, Norton 1156). He does not expect a reader to merely find the meaning, but to experience the path of difficulty. According to Lacan, there are three dimensions in the psyche which are: Symbolic,

Imaginary, and the Real. Saussure used three implications in the model of “sign.” Lacan’s counter model of the signifying chain has only two doors which are: ladies and gentlemen. The sign has now become a structure that the reader has to fit into because both doors are identical, except in their labels. He states that we follow signs and that language speaks us. In this process we are split between conscious self and unconscious. Signs lead the reader to where and how to proceed using the law of sexual difference, but not giving an explanation of it. According to Lacan, signs include all of our unconscious social codes, conventions, and prohibitions. In his linguistic structure “the Other” is a mirror image or another person and therefore, becomes the Symbolic dimension for subject relatedness. Lacan pulls from several sides to produce his theory leaving us with—the subject is presumed and the knowledge is out there somewhere.

Word Count 478

Works Cited

Leitch, Vincent B., ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.

          New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2010. Print.