Sigmund and Dora: Art, Science, Patience

Science will not suffice, nor Art,
But Patience, too, must play her part.
     —lines from Goethe's Faust, quoted by Freud on page 9

Introduction
Dora is the record of Freud's three-month treatment in 1899 of Ida Bauer, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a wealthy Austrian textile factory owner, for coughing and loss of voice ("aphonia") attributed to hysteria. Dora's father has his own motive for sending his daughter to therapy: he'd like Dr. Freud to help her abandon the idea that he's having an affair with Frau K.

A childhood photo of Ida Bauer (Dora)
with her  brother Otto

The crucial episode in Dora's recent past is a sexual proposition made to her two years ago by Herr K. in the Alpine town of L___. Dora rejects the proposal and slaps Herr K.; a few days later, she tells her mother about the event, and her mother tells her father. He confronts Herr K., who denies that any such thing has happened. Dora's father believes Herr K., and insists that Dora's story was fabricated, an hysterical "phantasy" brought about in part by too much reading about sex (19). Her father nonetheless believes this (fantasized) incident is the cause of Dora's nervous symptoms, and of the suicide note that her parents have discovered.

Freud's own title for this case-study is simply Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (Bruchstück einer Hysterie-Analyse), and he'll say a great deal about fragments in a variety of contexts. Most fundamentally, the case is a "fragment" because Dora broke off her treatment with Freud before her symptoms were cured.

Although the treatment took place in 1899 and Freud wrote up the case study not long afterwards, he chose not to publish it until 1905, five years after The Interpretation of Dreams and in the same year as Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. The case study, he hopes, will provide an extended example of the clinical usefulness of his interpretive methods in resolving hysterical symptoms. (The Interpretation of Dreams contains many examples of dreams drawn from Freud's clinical practice, but no extended account of the role his interpretations played in the treatment of any one patient).

Raphael, Sistine Madonna (c. 1513)
"She remained two hours in front of the
Sistine Madonna, rapt in silent admiration" (88).

Yet in his treatment of Dora, Freud discovered a new interpretive problem even as he applied his existing methods: "transference." In the "Postscript" (102-112) to his study, he explains that he failed adequately to account for Dora's projection (or transference) of her conflicted feelings for Herr K. onto Freud himself.

Freud would later in his career ask what may seem like an obviously pressing question to us: if the patient transfers feelings to the analyst, might not the analyst also transfer feelings onto the patient? Psychoanalysis calls this projection of the analyst's a "countertransference." Since that idea hasn't occurred to Freud yet in Dora, it leaves an opening for us to ask about the feelings and associations in this study that may belong to Freud rather than to his patient. (This is something you're welcome to consider in your prewriting exercises or in your comments on the blog, or both).





Glossary of terms
roman à clef (3): French: a story of true events in which the characters' names have been changed;
     literally, the phrase means "novel with a key."
tabo-paralysis (13): paralysis resulting from tabes, a disease resulting from syphilis
anti-luetic (13): a drug, often some form of mercury, for fighting syphilis before the discovery of
     antibiotics
marasmus (13): undernourishment
dyspnoea (15): difficulty in breathing
tussis nervosa (15): Latin, a nervously induced cough
catarrh (15): a build-up of mucus, usually in the throat; Freud and Dora also use the word to refer to
     vaginal discharge (see e.g. 75)
taedium vitae (17): Latin, a mild depression; literally, weariness of life
aphonia (20): loss of voice
inter urinas et faeces nascimur (24): Latin, we are born between piss and shit
jeu d'esprit (33): French, game of wit
per os (41): by means of the mouth
J'appelle un chat un chat (41): French, I call a cat a cat
pour fair une omelette il faut casser des oeufs (42): to make an omelette, you have to break some eggs
Medea...Creusa (54): In the Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts, Jason abandons Medea for
     Creusa. Medea takes revenge by killing her own and Jason's children, and by giving Creusa a
     poisoned dress.
leucorrhoea (67): vaginal discharge
coitus interruptus (71): sexual intercourse interrupted to prevent pregnancy
Sistine Madonna (88): a painting by Raphael, held at Dresden's major museum (the Gemäldegalerei or
    picture gallery). See the image above.
Secessionist exhibition (90): The Vienna Secession was an avant-garde group of artists founded in
     1897 (see the image below). Its most famous member was Gustav Klimt.
perityphlitis (94): appendicitis
deus ex machina (105): literally, "God outside of the machine." This refers to a theological view of
     God as having created the universe and then set it in motion, thereafter playing no active role in
     determinig individual events. Sometimes paraphrased as the "clockmaker God."
Ça n'empêche pas d'exister (105): French, that doesn't stop it from existing

Some notes on the prewriting exercise
I'm tempted to summarize what's troubling about this case study thus: for Freud, Dora's "no" means "yes."

"Dora," whose real name was Ida Bauer,
in a photo taken long after Freud treated her.

That's a perhaps too pat statement of the problem, though, if it suggests that Freud's interpretive sensitivity to the ambiguity, even the contradictions of human sexuality automatically entails a practical and rather violent deafness to the unambiguous matter of consent. Yet interpretation and ethics, knowledge and power, are also very hard to separate in this text. It should nonetheless be possible, we might hope, to honor the integrity of Dora's will without impoverishing our (or her own) understanding of the complexity of her thoughts and feelings. We should wonder about the extent to which Freud succeeds at these two projects.

It will be important for us to think about how Freud re-orders events into a narrative in this case study; events are narrated in a different order than that in which they happened. (You may have heard these two orders called "story" and "plot" in other literature classes; the terms are from Peter Brooks' Reading for the Plot).

Keep Foucault's arguments in mind as you read. Terms that feel a bit abstract in History of Sexuality, (e.g. "confession," "incitement to discourse," sex as a "secret") become rather wonderfully concrete in Dora.

I'd encourage you to make a timeline of events in Dora in your notes as you read--this helps to clarify the basic facts of the case, which Freud will reorder and interpret in his narrative. You might organize it thus:

Dora's age:                       4         6         8           10             12            14             16              18

Dora's symptoms:

Her father's illnesses:

Other important events:

Below is an example of the sort of analysis (or 'close reading') that I'd like you to attempt in the pre-writing exercise for this Wednesday. The passage analyzed is about 140 words long, and the commentary is about twice as long as what I'm asking you to write. Some features to notice in what follows:

*the commentary points back to (quotes) specific moments from the passage

A poster for the 1899 5th Secessionist Exhibition in
Vienna, where Dora saw a painting of nymphs
in a wood (90). 

*it considers form as a part of the passage's content, and connotation as well as denotation. For example, it's important not just that Freud says that the grandmother's letter is irrelevant, but that he repeats the idea twice. To "tear" a secret away is importantly different from taking it or revealing it. 

* it looks for tension and contradiction both within the passage (e.g. between "torn" and "play"), and between this passage and others.

*it considers the relation of the order of narration ("plot") to the order of events ("story")

*its method is very often to put the same sorts of interpretive questions to Freud's narrative that he puts to Dora's.

* its paragraphs aren't all that continuous with one another--each takes up a slightly different line of analysis, and they often end by asking questions rather than asserting answers. That kind of looseness if just fine (and even productive) in a draft, though I'd want to see it tightened up in a paper.

* it occasionally makes reference to passages from Dora other than the primary one being analyzed; you're also welcome to do this.

Sample Passage

Dora’s symptomatic act with the reticule did not immediately precede the dream. She started the sitting which brought us the narrative of the dream with another symptomatic act. As I came into the room in which she was waiting she hurriedly concealed a letter which she was reading. Something then came out which was a matter of complete indifference and had no relation to the treatment. It was a letter from her grandmother, in which she begged Dora to write to her more often. I believe that Dora only wanted to play “secrets” with me, and to hint that she was on the point of allowing her secret to be torn from her by the physician. I was then in a position to explain her antipathy to every new physician. She was afraid lest he might arrive at the foundation of her illness[.] (70; 143 words)

Sample Commentary

           What drew my attention to this passage at first was Freud’s rather unusual assertion that something is irrelevant to his interpretation of Dora’s illness. More often, Freud takes pains to remind us that her actions and symptoms are “overdetermined,” saturated with multiple meanings. Here, though, the content of the letter that Dora hides is “a matter of complete indifference and had no relation to the treatment.” The redundancy of Freud’s phrasing is striking: he tells us twice that this matter is irrelevant. Elewhere, Freud is sensitive to the obsessive quality of Dora’s “incessant repetition” (47) of certain ideas; we might wonder here what Freud’s own repetitive insistence signals. Why must the request of Dora’s grandmother that she write more often have nothing to do with her treatment? Why is this detail insignificant when so many others are overcharged with meaning?

            Bracketing the content of what Dora hides allows Freud to emphasize the act of hiding itself, the form of the act: it’s a game of “secrets.” The tension between the light-heartedness of “play” and the hint of violence in “torn” might disconcert us here. And why must Dora’s hiding of her letter be taken as a sign that she is “on the point of allowing,” and not preventing, her secret to be discovered? One reason is surely that in allowing Freud to see the letter before she puts it away, Dora is making manifest the act of concealing; she’s showing hiding. Yet elsewhere Freud has no problem simply calling her resistance resistance, and interpreting it nonetheless as confession (see e.g. notes 8 and 9 on p. 61). It’s curious that here, his language both admits (Dora’s secret is “torn” from her) and disavows (she “plays,” “hint[s] that she was point of allowing this to happen”) the conflictual nature of his interpretive work. 

            Freud speaks of his “position” here. He’s in a position to know Dora’s secret, of course. As he walks into the “room”—a word that has received special emphasis in his interpretation of the first dream (59n6)—and stands over her, though, he’s also in a position strikingly similar to that of Dora’s father in the dream. This may be significant (or it may be overreading).

            The first two sentences of this paragraph quietly signal Freud’s structuring work as a narrator of Dora’s history: while her concealment of her grandmother’s letter happens before her dream, and before her playing with her purse, he tells us about it only afterwards. What happens first in the order of events comes second in the order of narration. Again, Freud is sensitive to this sort of belatedness when it’s Dora doing the telling, as in her “addendum” about the smell of smoke in her dream (65). One thing that Freud’s re-ordering of events permits here is for the idea of masturbation to precede the anecdote about the letter in the narrative; Dora’s concealment of the letter is really, in this telling, about the concealment of masturbation more clearly signaled by her play with the purse. Yet why couldn’t we reverse the order of this interpretation; could the purse not rather be a reminder of the letter, which after all preceded it?

            Finally, it’s interesting that the irrelevant object here happens to be a piece of writing. It would be interesting to consider the grandmother’s letter in the context of other texts mentioned in this case study (e.g. Kraft-Ebbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis [43], Mantegazza’s Physiology of Love [19]) and of Freud’s often pointed comments about the nature of his own writing (e.g. 52).

            

Michel Foucault: Rethinking Repression

Michel Foucault

Foucault: History of Sexuality, volume I
The first volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality seeks to change our understanding of the relationship between sexual pleasure and power.

One way to understand that relationship is as one of opposition. On this model, power seeks to block, quash, silence the expression of sexuality and the experience of pleasure. This oppositional model conforms to a certain image of the Victorians, as straitlaced and determined to exert control over the instincts at all costs.

Yet Foucault wishes to substitute for Queen Victoria two very different figures as the true representatives of this age: the anonymous author of My Secret Life (1505), and a "simple-minded" French villager named Jouy (1510-11).

*In what sense are these two figures more Victorian than Victoria? What does Foucault wish to bring into focus for us by making them into representative figures for 19th century sexuality?

*How, in other words, do they lead Foucault to challenge the oppositional model of power's relation to sexuality described above?

We should start discussing Foucault's arguments about homosexuality on Wednesday as well (with an eye to deepening that discussion on Friday). Foucault makes the curious claim that the "medical category of homosexuality" has its "date of birth" in 1870 (1517).

*What does he mean by this--what originates or changes at around this time in the late 19th century?

Nietzsche and Foucault: Power's Progress
Foucault began writing his History of Sexuality at the height of a brilliant intellectual career devoted to a critical history of science and its institutions. In Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault had sought to redescribe the nature of how power was exerted over criminals during an era usually thought of as one of liberalization or humanization. Remember that in 1757, one of Burke's ready-to-hand illustrations of the power of real as opposed to imitated suffering was the popularity of public executions (95). This sort of spectacle gradually disappeared from public life over the course of the nineteenth century.

Presidio Modelo prison, Cuba; the centralized
watchtower exemplifies the principle of
Bentham's panopticon

Against a narrative of enlightened progress that would see this as evidence for the waning of human cruelty in the West, Foucault will direct his attention instead to the increasingly pervasive and invasive forms assumed by the exercise. One of his central examples for this was the "panopticon," a prison surveillance scheme--the word translated as "discipline" in Foucault's title is surveiller--devised by the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham at the end of the 18th century. In the panopticon layout, a centralized observation post has clear lines of cite to each cell arrayed radially around it; the cells, however, cannot see into the observation post. Each prisoner is thus always potentially being watched; the result is that he must act as if he is being watched at all times; discipline becomes internalized, becomes self-discipline. If the nineteenth century emphasis on the "reform" of inmates made punishment less savage than it was in earlier eras of public torture and execution, it also made punishment more intimate, tightened even as it softened its grip.

Foucault's most important predecessor in theorizing these transformations of power was Friedrich Nietzsche: the subtitle to the first volume of History of Sexuality is "The Will to Knowledge" (La volonté de savoir), a clear allusion to Nietzsche's idea of a "will to power" inherent in all life. Foucault's suggestion is that the sciences themselves partake of this will to power. In the selection from The Genealogy of Morality that I've included for you among the suggested readings, Nietzsche insists that the historian of moral life must understand power as opportunistic with regard to social forms. Existing forms are seized upon for new purposes, without regard to the purposes originally intended for them:

the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous "meaning" and "purpose" are necessarily obscured or even obliterated. (77; §12 of the 2nd essay)

In Nietzsche as in Foucault, it's a matter of some uncertainty just whose power is being spoken of here. A critique of the "subject," the metaphysically coherent agent, underlies their critique of social and moral life in the modern era. We'll want to understand this and explore its uses and limits when we discuss the later chapters of Foucault's History of Sexuality on Friday.

Louise Augustine, a patient for hysteria
at the Salpetrière from 1875-80.

Bernini, The Ecstasy of St. Teresa (1652)
"The phenomena of possession and ecstasy... were undoubtedly effects that had got outside the control of the erotic technique immanent in [confession]" (70).

From Lacan to Foucault
Lacan too, of course, is no believer in the integrity of the "subject." For Lacan, language (or signification) itself is the major instrument of power. It not only makes meaning, but also gives law, and the most fundamental law is the law of repression, acceptance of which resolves the Oedipal complex. For Freud, Lacan writes,

the signifier has an active function in determining certain effects in which the signifiable appears as submitting to its mark, by becoming through that passion the signified. This passion of the signifier now becomes a new dimension of the human condition in that it is not only man who speaks, but that in man and through man it speaks (ça parle), that his nature is woven by effects in which is to be found the structure of language[.] (1184)

We submit to the mark of the signifier--elsewhere Lacan explicitly calls this the "mark of the Verdrängung (repression) of the phallus" (1187) or more simply "the law...[of] the father" (1188)--and thus we enter into a reality to which it gives shape. In doing so, we allow it to enter into us, Lacan seems to suggest.

The last part of this quotation may sound, after you've read more of the History of Sexuality, rather Foucauldian in the way it talks about power as permeating the human subject, woven through her and speaking through her. What does Foucault want us to understand about "repression" in his chapter on "The Repressive Hypothesis"? How would he understand the relation of power and pleasure in this passage? How does he understand the role of psychoanalysis in the history that he narrates?


For Friday: a few further questions on Foucault
In parts 3 and 4 of The History of Sexuality, on "Scientia Sexualis" (the science of sex) and "The Deployment of Sexuality," Foucault will elaborate his critique of the repressive hypothesis with reference to somewhat more concrete social practices. I always have the feeling that Foucault is at once repeating himself and making wild leaps in these later chapters, and both are somewhat true: his account of law (pp. 81-91), for example, locates the roots of our modern understanding of power all the way back in the Middle Ages; yet the nature of his critique of law is really just an expansion of his critique of repression, and so the logic of this section should seem familiar even if some of its historical references go rather far afield.

To orient myself in these later chapters, I've found it helpful to seize upon some of Foucault's more resonant sentences and concepts. Here are a few that we might discuss tomorrow -- try to explain for yourselves what's important about the following:

* the distinction, for Foucault, between "sex" and "sexuality" (see 68 and passim)

*the combination of confession and scientific discourse, a major theme of part 3 (58ff)

*the relation of the science of sex to erotic technique (i.e. scientia sexualis to ars erotica)

*"In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king" (88-9)

*"Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere" (93)

*"the tactical polyvalence of discourses" (100-101)

*"deployment of alliance" and "deployment of sexuality," 106ff.; in relation to this, and more broadly, the role of the family in modern sexuality

A drawing of the female reproductive organs from
 Georg Bartisch, Kunstbuche (1575), as reproduced by
Thomas Laqueur in Making Sex (1990)

I hope the dictionary assignment has proven interesting. If you're having trouble finding words that do seem worth the effort of looking up, here are a few suggestions: the sexual senses of "invert" and "inversion"; homosexual; gay; queer; queen; uranian; sodomy; fetish/fetishist; molly; uterus; vagina; testicle; ovary; hermaphrodite; transvestite; transsexual...

In your comments, feel free to take up any of the questions I've raised above, or to discuss parts of our reading from Foucault that I haven't touched on yet (no shortage of those!).

Jacques Lacan: the poetry of the unconscious

I. Background: Language and the Unconscious in Freud

Glanz auf der Nase.

There's a quirky example in Freud's essay on "Fetishism" that will be useful to keep in mind as we read Lacan. That essay begins with Freud's discussion of a man who had a nose fetish, and more particularly still a fetish for a "shine on the nose." Freud tells us that this fetish originated in the man's childhood, when he spoke English, a language he had since forgotten; the sexual charge he associates with "shine" is thus really attached, a bit less quirkily, to looking at the nose. This is because the German word for "shine"--"Glanz"--sounds like the English word "glance."

What's useful for us in this example is that it shows the unconscious expressing itself through a purely linguistic association: the connection between "glance" and "Glanz" is purely arbitrary, and exists only in language, not in the world.

Lacan's claim that psychoanalysis discovers in the unconscious "the whole structure of language" (N 1169) is thus not quite such a leap away from Freud as it might at first appear; indeed, Lacan thought of his development of psychoanalysis as a "return to Freud," a reading of Freud's texts more faithful to their insights than other competing interpretations of psychoanalysis.

Already in the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud theorized that dreams came to be distorted along pathways that are basically figurative. Dream-images, he believed, escaped the censorship of the conscious self by expressing repressed ideas in disguised forms: an image might be substituted for one that resembled it in some way, or the emotional energy attached to one thing might be displaced onto something associated with it. Hence the strange disproportion of emotion and content in dreams: a highly charged dream about flowers or about a floor or about the Uffizi galleries might be a distorted way of expressing some wish about your mother, if her name happens to be Florence. (The idiosyncrasy of this example is again to the point. There's no master code for decoding unconscious images; they depend on associations unique to the individual, though some of these will of course be shared, and they have to be discovered and confirmed in a dialogue between analyst and patient. This is why a cigar really is, sometimes, just a cigar).

Freud's names for the two primary mechanisms of dream distortion are "condensation" and "displacement" (you can read his account of these on N 818-24). These are roughly parallel to the metaphorical and metonymical modes of association described by Jakobson (N 1152-6) and appropriated from him by his friend Lacan.

II. "The Signification of the Phallus"
Lacan understands Freud's method of interpreting the associative distortions produced by the unconscious through Ferdinand de Saussure's model of the linguistic sign. We'll see the most thorough version of Lacan's integration of these two theories in "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," which we're reading for Friday. In "The Signification of the Phallus," a couple features of Saussure's model and Lacan's radicalization of it are worth keeping in mind.

Saussure says that the relation between the signifier (e.g. the English word "tree," a sound-image) and the signified (e.g. the concept of a tree) is arbitrary. In itself, as Lacan will point out, this isn't a new but a very ancient idea. Saussure's important innovation is to understand the consequences of this arbitrariness in a new way: the meaning of the signifier "tree," he will argue, doesn't take its meaning through a referential relationship to real trees; it doesn't mean by pointing to the world. Instead, "tree" takes on meaning only through its differentiation from other signifiers. Its full meaning depends, in English, on how we distinguish it from "bush" and "log" and "wood" and "plant." Saussure generalizes this idea by saying that "in language there are only differences without positive terms" (N 862, author's italics). Think of a night sky in which the darkness had no more and no less substance than the stars.

Lacan will also insist, to an extent that Saussure doesn't, on the mobility of the signifier with respect to the signified; he'll write of the "slipping" of the signifier over the domain of the signified, as if the bar between them (in the diagram above) is made of ice or covered with grease. For everyday use, "tree" pretty much means tree; in a poem or a dream, though, it can easily enough take on other signifieds, other meanings.

This is important for Lacan because it lets him understand the phallus, a signifier, as something other than just a reference to the male anatomy. Both men and women, he will say, have "a relation ... to the phallus that is established without regard to the anatomical difference of the sexes" (N 1182). Furthermore, that relation starts out from a fantasy of the mother and of the mother's body, one in which the child (of either sex) desires her love. Yet for her to love the child, the child must have or be something she needs, something she has lost. And if she has lost something, than the child has perhaps lost something too. That loss is both terrifying and, insofar as it creates the hope of being able to supply  what the beloved has lost, endlessly promising.

The Priapus fresco from ancient Pompeii,
to which Lacan refers on page 1187.

There's a paradox here that Lacan is aware of: the privileged signifier of sexual difference is the same, regardless of your sex. This doesn't mean that sexual difference makes no difference--on the contrary, it means that the female body and the male body are both stuck with a single gendered signifier, the phallus, for their difference. Even though the signifier "phallus," because it's a signifier, is not a positive term, and takes its meaning only as a mark of difference between men and women, it tends to disguise that difference as the presence of something in men and the absence of something in women; the male body fits it in a way that the female body doesn't. And this is true, for Lacan, of language as such, in so far as patriarchal powers--the oedipal father is their epitome--have appropriated language's structural potential to allocate power.

A couple of things to attend to in Lacan's terminology:

a) He largely stops using the term "castration" after the first page or so, but he continues to refer back to the idea using more abstract terms like "lack" and "division" and "splitting." Bear in mind that these terms are, if not quite synonymous, at least continuous with one another. It's also worth thinking about the consequences of this rhetorical strategy of abstraction; does glossing castration as lack critique or merely repeat a sexist language?

b) Lacan's ostentatiously capitalized "Other" doesn't refer just to another empirical person. In fact, it's important to Lacan that what one person desires in another isn't empirical at all; this is one source of his quarrel with the observational (rather than linguistic) bent of English and American psychoanalysts in what's called the "object relations" tradition (see N 1183 and 1172-3). Lacan gives a problematically and deliberately (I think) circular definition of the Other on page 1185: it is "the very locus evoked by the recourse to speech in any relation in which the Other intervenes"; the Other is the place evoked by the Other. Later in the same short paragraph, he glosses this "locus" or place as "the unconscious." The Other, then, would seem to be both inside the self (as the unconscious) and outside of the self (as someone else's language). For Lacan, it is indeed both. This is a troubling feature of his thought that we should seek to account for--what does it portend for my relation to you?

c) Note that demand, desire and need are importantly distinct terms for Lacan. Their meanings are a bit easier to sort out from within the text of this essay, so I'll simply flag them for your attention here and will surely ask how you understand them in class.


III. "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience"

Perhaps the first thing to say about this essay is that it gives us a few moments at which Lacan's sometimes too precious language registers acute observation of human behavior. The child before the mirror, he writes, even if unable to walk and confined in a stroller, "overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his confinement so as to suspend his [or her] attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position and take in, in order to still it, an instantaneous view of the image" (1164, translation modified).

Baby likes her mirror. Why does this matter for the mental life of adults?

Lacan draws our attention to the rather poignant and funny contrast between the baby's triumphant celebration before the mirror, on the one hand, and her utter dependence on the other. Unable to walk or speak, baby finds something in the mirror that she can nonetheless control, an image of herself as whole, complete, autonomous. It's important to note in Lacan's description of the child that she's not just looking at herself in the mirror, but also controlling the movement of her image, celebrating and then pausing, taking in for a moment an image of herself undisturbed by time or change.

Bosch, detail from The Garden of
Earthly Delights, c. 1500

On some level, Lacan seems to suggest, we all want what baby wants: we want to be whole, complete, autonomous. Yet this is no less ironically impossible for an adult than it is for the baby, and to the extent that we give ourselves over to language, it is perhaps more so. For language, unlike a stilled image, exists in and depends on time for its meanings, and a person who tries to find herself in it can only get her reflection back from another person, from someone else's words, words that will never be wholly her own. (Lacan's word for the process of establishing an identity interpersonally (socially, linguistically), is "dialectic," a term he borrows from the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel).

We'd all like to be as cute as baby in the mirror, but language isn't a mirror. It gives us to ourselves in pieces, not as wholes. And so instead of looking like baby, the images we make in our dreams and all too often in our history--this essay was written shortly after World War II--look like Bosch:

Hieronymous Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights. Lacan refers to Bosch with regard to the "fragmented body" (1167).

Our true selves, on this account, are less like perfect images than like tangles of limbs, in which it's hard to tell one body from another, or like Lacanian sentences, in which the play of words teases us out of thought rather than getting down to the business of reflecting a neatly coherent proposition. Desire mixes us up.

Bosch, Garden, detail

As you read "The Mirror Stage," then, look for the two figurative undercurrents that often structure Lacan's argument. The essay is about the difference in psychic life between time and space, on the one hand, and between parts and wholes, on the other. (Consider, to take just one key term, how these tensions are at play in the word "stage" itself).

It's surprising, in a way, that Lacan wants to insist not just on the truth but on the ethical value of remembering that we're not whole, and not autonomous. That baby is so happy, and those people in the Bosch painting are so twisted! One question you might take up in your comments, then, concerns what this ethical value is. Read the essay's last couple of pages, in which Lacan compares psychoanalysis to existentialism and alludes to the Holocaust, with particular care in this regard.

Yet feel free, too, to bring up anything else in the essay that you found interesting or puzzling. We'll pick up on Friday where we left off with "The Signification of the Phallus," and move on to "The Mirror Stage" and "The Agency of the Letter" (more on the latter here soon) as time permits.

IV. "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious"
This is, in my opinion, the most difficult of the three essays we're reading this week. My own experience of reading it over the years has been and remains one of alternating moments of insight and puzzlement--this latter feeling particularly when Lacan starts expressing his semiotic theory in the form of quasi-mathematical functions [f(S) etc]. Yet the essay does, I think, articulate with some clarity (and wit) ideas that are helpful for understanding the two more approachable essays of Lacan's that we've studied this week, and for thinking about the relation of language to gender and sexuality more broadly. I'll point to three such ideas.

1) Lacan's revision of Saussure's model of the sign

Where Saussure's model of the sign places the signified (a concept) over the signifier (a sound-image, a word), Lacan revises that model to clarify what he sees as a more important aspect of the signifier than its relation to the concept. His model seeks to clarify not the relation of signifier to concept, but the relation of the signifier to the human subject:

Lacan's model of the sign.

Obviously, the signifier "ladies" has no very direct link to the concept of a door. Lacan regards all such links between signifier and concept as fundamentally unstable, though, and he regards Saussure's model of the sign misleading insofar as it suggests such stability (see number 2, below). What Lacan's model of the sign clarifies, he says, is "how the signifier enters the signified" (1173).

That's a characteristically playful phrase: for surely the signifier "ladies" doesn't, in Lacan's model, cross the bar; it doesn't go into a door. What does go through the door, of course, is a lady who needs to satisfy a bodily need, needs to use the bathroom. This raises a further question, then: how does a woman's (or a man's) entry into the proper bathroom door explain something about how the signifier enters into the signified?

2) The poetry of the slippery signifier: metaphor and metonymy

Saussure's diagram of how the sign divides up the
essentially fluid spaces of language (A, above) and
 of concepts (B, below).

Lacan describes an "incessant sliding [glissement] of the signified under the signifier" (1175) in Saussure's model of the sign, referring to the diagram at left (you can see it in context at N 856). What Saussure wishes to show with this diagram is how the sign segments and stabilizes the fluid regions of conceptual and verbal space by binding certain signifiers to certain signifieds.

The emphasis on sliding is really Lacan's more than Saussure's, and we should note that Lacan revises the meaning of Saussure's diagram by metaphorizing it. Whereas Saussure wishes the dotted lines to show divisions, Lacan insists that they are no less fluid than anything else in the diagram: its upper and lower regions resemble "the upper and lower Waters in miniatures from manuscripts of Genesis," and the dotted lines are "fine streaks of rain" (1175).

Whereas Saussure sees language as linear, Lacan wants us to understand it as a musical "polyphony...aligned along the several staves of a score" (1175). Any word in a sentence might metaphorically evoke terms associated with it through similarity, as if sounding with them in a chord, or it might metonymically evoke terms associated with it through contiguity, as if preparing an arpeggio. These associative substitutions are most pronounced and most deliberate in poetry, but they're potentially at play in language at all times. Thus Jakobson's picture of language as determined at every point by metonymic and metaphoric axes of substitution gives us a fuller picture of its workings than Saussure's idea of linearity, according to Lacan.

This leads Lacan to think differently about where meaning resides in a linguistic utterance. In Saussure's model of the sign, the signifier "tree" is rather tightly bound to its concept, and this accords with our everyday use of language up to a point. Yet if I walked into class and began speaking to you with the single word "tree," you might think me rather odd if I paused for a very long time after that single word; you'd be waiting to hear what came next. Language creates meaning in sentences, and Lacan notices that even sentence fragments that don't express complete thoughts are nonetheless not without meaning. In the cliché that he plays with, the phrase "she is poor, but...", although it doesn't express a completed thought, nonetheless creates a horizon of expectation that depends on how we think about poverty, and about women--depends on the set of associations that might allow us to complete this sentence.  The signifier, argues Lacan, "'insists'" in the signifying chain, but "none of its elements 'consist' in the signification of which it as at the moment capable.

A somewhat recent example that illustrated this 'insistence' was the unusual frequency with which Barack Obama was praised for being "articulate" during his presidential campaign four years ago. That term elicited comment and sometimes criticism because it was felt to depend on another: Obama was articulate (even though he was black). The words in parentheses were never, so far as I recall, actually spoken by those who praised him for being articulate, and of course to be troubled by what articulate seemed to imply, one would have to already be aware of it. The discomfort around the term arose not from the actual utterance of any speaker, nor from anything we could discover in a dictionary definition of "articulate," but from the relation of "black" and "articulate" in the historically inflected structure of our language.

Another example for you to ponder: "She's professionally successful, and...."

3) The Lacanian cogito: Where am "I"?

Lacan's idea of the signifying chain has profound consequences for how he understands the human subject. Just as the meaning of an utterance is never fully present within it, so too the human subject is never fully present to itself.

René Magritte, The Treachery of Images (1928-9).
The sentence in French says "This is not a pipe."

Lacan makes this most clear in his revision of the famous axiom of René Descartes: cogito, ergo sum; I think, therefore I am. Lacan applies to this axiom his own insight that the signified is always displaced from the signifier, always elsewhere with respect to it. If I say "I want cake," what the word "cake" conveys first of all my lack of cake; what's more, even my use of "I" is the result of a displacement of my hunger into a symbolic system that merely represents it. The poet Arthur Rimbaud famously wrote to his friend that the experience of poetry had made him feel that "I is an other" (Je est un autre). Lacan gives a version of that thought in his revision of Descartes: "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think."

Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

Sigmund Freud began developing the theory of sexuality outlined in his Three Essays during the 1880s and 1890s while working with patients, mostly women, suffering from "hysteria." Hysteria was a widespread psychological diagnosis in the late nineteenth century, and widespread in part because it was defined so variously and so loosely; its symptoms ranged from mildly irregular moods to psychotic episodes to physiological problems such as insomnia or partial paralysis. The diagnosis was overwhelmingly given to women ("hysteria" comes from the Greek word for uterus), and both its symptoms and its treatment were understood to be sexual in nature. One common treatment was for a doctor to induce an orgasm in his female patient. (The recent film Hysteria makes comedy out of this).

Pierre-André Brouillet, "A Clinical Lesson at the
Salpetrière" (1887). Freud's teacher Charcot is at right.

Freud studied the treatment of such patients in Paris under Jean-Martin Charcot, perhaps the most influential psychiatrist in Europe at the time. Charcot pioneered the treatment of hysteria through hypnotic suggestion, a technique that Freud used early in his career but later abandoned as unreliable.

Freud's own early breakthroughs in the treatment of hysteria came with patients suffering from psychosomatic symptoms: bodily disorders (e.g. blurred vision, a chronic cough) inexplicable through bodily causes, and thus attributed to mental ones. Freud hypothesized that these symptoms were caused by repressed desires, desires felt to be intolerable to the conscious self and so driven back into the unconscious parts of the mind. Once repressed, these desires would nonetheless persist, and would seek expression through channels that the conscious self couldn't censor -- in dreams, for example, or in psychosomatic symptoms. Freud's therapeutic discovery (made in close collaboration with Josef Breuer) was that these symptoms could be relieved by bringing the content of the repressed desires to the patient's conscious attention; this was the 'talking cure' of psychoanalysis.

First published in 1905 but revised continuously until 1924, the Three Essays draw on Freud's clinical experience but also on the considerable body of research on sexuality carried out by others in the second half of the nineteenth century. At the book's first publication, for example, Freud had no clinical experience with actively homosexual patients (though he would treat many later on); his knowledge of homosexuality was second-hand.

In class on Wednesday, we should start out by making sure that we have a firm grasp of Freud's theory of sexual development. Here are some questions that should help us do so: 1) Why does it make sense for Freud to speak of "infantile sexuality"? 2) How are the many forms of infantile sexuality transformed at puberty? How, on Freud's account, is this transformation different for girls than for boys? 3) How, on Freud's account, is sexual pleasure different than other kinds of pleasure? (See pages 74-8 on this). 4) What accounts for the development of "perversions" in certain individuals? 5) What does Freud mean when he writes that "neuroses are, so to say, the negative of perversions"? (31). 6) What does it mean that "the finding of an object [i.e. a sexual object] is in fact the refinding of it"? (88).

Among feminist and queer readers, the response to the Three Essays has been intensely conflicted. I'd like us as we read this text to consider why this might be so, to imagine different ways in which it might be a problematic or a productive theory of sexuality for the present. Feminists in the U.S. (less often in Europe) have sometimes rejected Freudian psychoanalysis wholesale as a sexist (and heterosexist) enterprise, and I suspect you'll see what might motivate this as you work your way through the book. Some theorists of sexuality, though, have found continuing inspiration for their own work in this foundational text of Freud's.

One reason for this conflicted reception of Three Essays is that the book is sometimes at odds with itself. You should keep an eye out for claims that seem to clash with one another -- for tensions within Freud's own theory, as he works through and rephrases it over the course of the book. I'd be particularly interested in hearing about such moments of tension in class or in your comments here.

"Normal" is a term at the heart of many debates about this book. The word carries both descriptive and evaluative burdens--it names what usually is the case, and implies what ought to be the case. Yet a range of attitudes towards normality are possible--none follow automatically from the mere fact that Freud uses the word. How typical is normal sexuality, according to Freud? How should abnormal ("perverse") sexual practices be judged, medically and ethically? When might Freud's descriptions of normal sexuality or normal sexual development appear particularly dubious or coercive to a queer or feminist reading of this text?

Another important question about Freud's theory of sexual development concerns the social quality of sexual desire. Freud tends to fall into technical terms when this question comes up: he'll discuss "ego-libido" versus "object-libido," "narcissistic" versus "altruistic" desires, or the importance of "object choice" in sexual development. The fundamental distinction in all of these cases is between self and other. How does sexual desire bring self and other into relation? Does it draw us into genuine contact with another person, or does it rather return us more deeply into the self? (See for example pages 48-9, on "auto-erotism," or page 88 on "Finding an Object" with regard to this question).

We saw in Burke and Wollstonecraft a somewhat low valuation of sexual desire: they found love to be at odds with respect, and pleasure with virtue. Where does Freud stand on this question? When in the Three Essays does erotic love appear to be ethically or socially constructive, and when destructive or regressive?

"The Oedipus Complex" (1899) and "Fetishism" (1927): Castration and Sexual Difference
Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex, of which we've read the first version from his Interpretation of Dreams (in the Norton), underwent significant change in his own later writings. Later psychoanalysts have also continued to question and revise it. I'll update the end of this post over the weekend to give you an outline of how Freud himself developed the idea. Before I do so, though, I think it would be useful for us to question his initial model ourselves. What assumptions about gender and sexuality underlie Freud's description of the Oedipus complex? What experiences does it account for well, and what sorts of experience would it have a harder time accounting for?

One of the stranger features of Freud's elaboration of the Oedipus complex is his idea that a boy learns to repress incestuous desires for his mother out of fear not simply that he will be disciplined by his father, but more specifically and more melodramatically that this discipline will take the form of castration, the loss of his own penis. (In Sophocles' play, Freud understands Oedipus's self-blinding as a displaced form of castration).

It seems stranger still that Freud held castration to be an instinctive childhood explanation of sexual difference. It seems "self-evident" to a child that everyone has a penis, Freud says (see Three Essays, p. 61). When this belief is disproven by the sight of a woman's genitalia, the child holds onto his original hypothesis, that everyone had a penis once, and interprets what he sees as a lack or loss: women (and the child's mother in particular) had a penis that has been cut off; they're wounded.

In Three Essays, Freud says that the discovery of women's castration often leads for male children to "an enduringly low opinion of the other sex" (61 n.2). There's no need to belabor how that interpretation seems to reverse cause and effect, using an interpretation of sexual difference that results from misogyny to provide a myth of origin for misogyny itself. What interests me in Freud's essay on "Fetishism," which he wrote in 1927 and thus over two decades after his first edition of Three Essays, is how much more emotionally and psychologically complex his description of the psychological response to sexual difference becomes. Here, the male child's reaction to female (and maternal) castration is no longer simply one of contempt.

If you hadn't read this essay before Wednesday, Nicole's summary of its central idea in class might have sounded confused: it seems like the mother both does and doesn't have a penis. That summary is perfectly faithful to Freud's text, though. The question we might take up on Friday is what psychic or emotional purpose this self-contradictory belief serves for the fetishist in Freud's account -- what sort of a response to sexual difference does it record?

"Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman" (1920)
This is a fairly easy text to read compared to the others we've worked with this week. Here we see Freud the storyteller, writing in a more social and somewhat less technical mode than in Three Essays. (We'll see more of this very readable Freud when we get to Dora in a couple of weeks).

I'd like to leave the field as open as possible for your responses to this essay, and so I'm not going to introduce it in a way that reveals any of its surprises here. I've included it in our reading because after Three Essays, it seemed to me important to have a brief look at Freud the clinician responding to real people, and dealing concretely with female sexuality and homosexuality. Here, he has responsibilities towards both the young woman and her parents, and also towards himself. If in the Three Essays "normal" is primarily a concept, one that Freud in some ways rather admirably divests of its coercive potential, here normality manifests itself as a more palpable social pressure towards (perhaps different and competing kinds of) respectability. I'd be interested to hear how you think Freud handles those pressures.

Postscript: Freud's revisions of the Oedipus complex
Freud continued practicing psychoanalysis and re-examining its underlying theory for over thirty years after the 1899 publication of The Interpretation of Dreams.  Many developments in his theory are visible in additions to the revised editions of Three Essays. His idea that narcissism, understood as an attachment of libido to the self, plays an important part in mental life dates from the 1910s; in his earlier accounts of libido (i.e. sexual desire), he understood libido as necessarily attaching only to objects outside the self. The distinction between "ego-libido" and "object-libido" that we've seen in the Three Essays is thus a fairly late one in Freud's thinking.

An important development of Freud's understanding of narcissism came through his study of patients suffering from depression (for which he used the older term "melancholia"). Freud noticed that these patients, in their often excessive self-criticism, would reproach themselves for faults that seemed (to Freud) not applicable to the patient at all, but rather to someone that the patient loved. He inferred from this that the patient had unconsciously identified with the beloved, and was protecting them from criticism by directing that criticism inwards.

Love, in other words, involves identification with the object as well as attachment to it (to him, to her). In The Ego and the Id (1923), Freud revised his own model of the Oedipus complex on the basis of this understanding of love, which also helped him to incorporate into the model his hypothesis that love is originally bisexual. A child will love the parent of the opposite sex and identify with the parent of the same sex; he called this the "positive Oedipus complex." Every childhood will also, however, identify with the parent of the opposite sex and desire the parent of the same sex; this is the "negative Oedipus complex." Together, these two formations of desire together make up the "total Oedipus complex." ("Positive" and "negative" are terms used to suggest that these two halves of the total Oedipus are complementary, mirror images of one another, and not that one half is good and the other bad).

This revision of the Oedipus complex has been important for later psychoanalysts and other theorists of sexuality, especially those who seek a fuller account of same-sex desire and of the distinctive development patterns of girls. Nancy Chodorow, a practicing psychoanalyst (and author of the foreword to our edition of Three Essays), has written an influential feminist revision of the Oedipus complex in The Reproduction of Mothering (1978). Judith Butler, in a section of Gender Trouble ("Freud and the melancholia of gender") that isn't part of the assigned reading on our syllabus, critiques Freud's theory of original bisexuality in an extensive engagement with his essay on melancholia. For fresh approach to the significance of "penis envy" and to envy within feminist debates more generally, see Sianne Ngai's Ugly Feelings (2005).