PSYCHOANALYTIC/PSYCHOLOGICAL CRITICISM

PSYCHOANALYTIC
CRITICISM

Critics, rhetoricians, and philosophers since Aristotle have examined the psychological
dimensions of literature, ranging from an author’s motivation and
intentions to the effect of texts and performances on an audience. The application
of psychoanalytic principles to the study of literature, however, is a relatively
recent phenomenon, initiated primarily by Freud and, in other directions, by Alfred
Adler and Carl Jung. The notion of the “unconscious” was not in itself new, and it can
be found in many thinkers prior to Freud, notably in some of the Romantics such as
Schlegel, in Schopenhauer, and in Nietzsche. Freud’s fundamental contribution was to
open up the entire realm of the unconscious to systematic study, and to provide a language
and terminology in which the operations of the unconscious could be expressed.

The positing of an unconscious as the ultimate source and explanation of human
thought and behavior represented a radical disruption of the main streams of Western
thought which, since Aristotle, had held that man was essentially a rational being,
capable of making free choices in the spheres of intellection and morality. To say that
the unconscious governs our behavior is to problematize all of the notions on which
philosophy, theology, and even literary criticism have conventionally rested: the ideal
of self-knowledge, the ability to know others, the capacity to make moral judgments,
the belief that we can act according to reason, that we can overcome our passions and
instincts, the ideas of moral and political agency, intentionality, and the notion – held
for centuries – that literary creation can be a rational process. In a sense, Freud postulated
that we bear a form of “otherness” within ourselves: we cannot claim fully to comprehend
even ourselves, why we act as we do, why we make certain moral and political
decisions, why we harbor given religious dispositions and intellectual orientations.
Even when we think we are acting from a given motive, we may be deluding ourselves;
and much of our thought and action is not freely determined by us but driven by
unconscious forces which we can barely fathom. Moreover, far from being based on
reason, our thinking is intimately dependent upon the body, upon its instincts of
survival and aggression, as well as obstinate features that cannot be dismissed (as in the
Cartesian tradition where the mind is treated as a disembodied phenomenon) such as
its size, color, gender, and social situation. The fact that I am a black working-class


part viii: the twentieth century

female will determine my world view just as much, and perhaps far more, than anything
I consciously learn in the realm of ideas.

Clearly, this general problematization of conventional notions extends to literature: if
the unconscious is a founding factor of our psyche, we can no longer talk unequivocally
of an author’s intention, or take for granted, as Aristotle did, that a drama structured
according to certain rules will produce a precise effect upon its audience. We cannot
assume that we are fully in control of what we say or that readers are fully in control of
their responses. We cannot presume that our intended meanings will be conveyed, or
that our conscious purposes represent our true aims. Neither can we presume that
language is a transparent medium of communication, of either thought or emotion.

Freud was aware of the problematic nature of language itself, its opaqueness
and materiality, its resistance to clarity and its refusal to be reduced to any one-
dimensional “literal” meaning. His own writings contain many literary allusions, and
some of his major concepts, such as the Oedipus complex, were founded on literary
models such as Oedipus Rex and Hamlet. Freud’s own literary analyses tend to apply
his models of dream interpretation to literary texts, viewing the latter as expressions of
wish fulfillment and gratifying projections of the ego of an author. Subsequent psychologists
and literary critics, developing Freud’s ideas, have extended the field of
psychoanalytic criticism to encompass: analysis of the motives of an author, of readers
and fictional characters, relating a text to features of the author’s biography such as
childhood memories, relationship to parents; the nature of the creative process; the
psychology of reader’s responses to literary texts; interpretation of symbols in a text, to
unearth latent meanings; analysis of the connections between various authors in a
literary tradition; examination of gender roles and stereotypes; and the functioning of
language in the constitution of the conscious and unconscious. What underlies nearly
all of these endeavors is the perception of a broad analogy, fostered by Freud himself,
between the psychoanalytic process and the production of a narrative. In a sense, the
psychoanalyst himself creates a fiction: triggered by a patient’s neurosis and recollection
of traumatic events, the psychoanalyst creates a coherent narrative about the patient
within which the traumatic event can take its place and be understood.

After Freud, psychoanalytic criticism was continued by his biographer Ernest Jones
(1879–1958), whose book Hamlet and Oedipus (1948) interpreted Hamlet’s indecisive
behavior in killing his uncle in terms of his ambivalent feelings toward his mother.
Another of Freud’s disciples, Otto Rank (1884–1939), produced The Myth of the Birth
of the Hero (1909), which reaffirmed Freud’s notions of the artist producing fantasies of
wish fulfillment, and which compiled numerous myths on subjects such as incest, and on
the notion of the hero. Ella Freeman Sharpe (1875–1947) treated language and metaphor
from a psychoanalytic perspective. Marie Bonaparte (1882–1962) wrote a large study
of Edgar Allan Poe, attributing much of his creative disposition to the loss of his mother
when he was a child. Melanie Klein (1882–1960) modified Freudian theory of sexuality,
rejecting the primacy of the Oedipus complex and elaborating a theory of the drive.

Another generation of literary critics – not necessarily Freudians – drew upon psychoanalysis
in their interpretations of literary texts. These included I. A. Richards,
William Empson, Lionel Trilling, Kenneth Burke, and Edmund Wilson, who in various
ways searched texts for latent content. Harold Bloom’s theory of literary influence as
mediated through “anxiety” drew upon Freud’s account of the Oedipus complex. Poets


psychoanalytic criticism

and critics such as Robert Graves and W. H. Auden (who wrote a poem in memory of
Freud) also had recourse to Freudian concepts in their prose writings. Indeed, the
influence of Freud’s ideas was so pervasive that it can be seen in the very conception
of character in many modern novelists, such as William Faulkner and James Joyce.
Interestingly, D. H. Lawrence appears to have arrived independently at ideas very
similar to Freud’s, as for example in his novel Sons and Lovers, where Oedipal feelings
figure powerfully.

The influence of psychoanalysis has extended into nearly all dimensions of modern
literary theory. Simon O. Lesser (1909–1979) furnished a psychoanalytic account of
the reading process. Influenced by Lesser, Norman Holland (b. 1927) used ego psychology
and the notion of the literary text as fantasy to elaborate his version of reader-
response criticism, studying the manner in which texts appeal to the repressed fantasies
of readers. Feminist critics such as Juliet Mitchell have used Freud’s ideas in their
explanations of the operations of patriarchy; others, such as Kristeva, have modified
his notions in undertaking their analyses of language and gender. Members of the
Frankfurt School of Marxist thinkers, such as Herbert Marcuse, have enlisted Freudian
concepts in their analyses of mass culture and ideology. Other significant theorists
include Norman O. Brown (b. 1913), D. W. Winnicott, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, who have explored the ideological bases of psychoanalysis; and Jacques Lacan,
whose ideas will be examined later in this chapter. The following account of Freud’s
own literary analyses places them in the context of his theories as a whole.

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 to Jewish parents in Moravia, a small town in what is
now the Czech Republic.1 His father was somewhat aloof and authoritarian while his
mother was a warmer and more accessible figure. When Freud was 4 years old his
family moved to Vienna where he received all of his education. Freud recounts how
his engrossment in the Bible profoundly affected the direction of his interests. He was,
however, also attracted to Darwin’s theories, which had recently generated controversy,
on account of their attempt to increase our understanding of the world. It was not
until he heard a “beautiful essay on Nature” (misattributed, according to some, by
Freud to Goethe) that he decided to become a medical student.

When Freud first began his medical studies at the University of Vienna in 1873 he
found himself somewhat excluded from the academic community and looked down
upon, on account of his Jewish origins. He saw this period, where he was forced into
the role of outsider, as furnishing the foundation for his independence of thought.
Eventually, however, in the physiological laboratory of Ernst Brucke he found congenial
colleagues and an atmosphere of mutual respect. His acquaintance here with the physician
Josef Breuer was to have an enormous impact on his thinking. He worked here
from 1876 to 1882 and was drawn to only one branch of medicine, psychiatry. He took
his medical degree in 1881.

Within a few years Freud had turned his attention to the study of nervous diseases.
Initially influenced by Jean-Martin Charcot’s investigations of hysteria, Freud developed


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the idea that neuroses might have a psychological rather than physiological origin.
Freud settled in Vienna in 1886 as a specialist in nervous diseases, and in the same year
married Martha Bernays, a girl from a high-ranking Jewish family who bore him six
children, including Anna Freud, who was herself to become a psychoanalyst. In treating
patients with nervous illnesses, Freud relied initially on electrotherapy and hypnosis.
Freud seems to have had no shortage of work. He talks of the “crowds of neurotics”
whose numbers multiplied as they moved frantically from one doctor to another.
Intent on improving his hypnotic technique, he visited the school in Nancy, and it was
here that he was struck by the “possibility that there could be powerful mental processes
which nevertheless remained hidden from the consciousness of men” (Freud, 10).

In 1895 Freud and Breuer jointly published their findings as Studies on Hysteria,
a text which stressed the emotional life of the patient, distinguished conscious and
unconscious mental acts, and introduced the idea of “conversion,” whereby a symptom
was viewed as arising from the damming-up of an emotional affect or impulse (Freud,
13). Freud eventually arrived at a number of conclusions. Firstly, in considering the
aetiology (the causes and origins) of neuroses, he reasoned that it was not just any kind
of emotional excitement behind these but specifically excitement of a sexual nature.
Thus, all neuroses, he claimed, derived from disturbances of the sexual function. Freud
eventually abandoned hypnosis in favor of what he would call psychoanalysis, though
he retained his practice of asking the patient to lie upon a sofa with the analyst seated
unseen behind him. Freud’s major theories concerning repression, sexuality, the
interpretation of dreams, and instincts can now be outlined.

Repression and the Unconscious

Reasoning that everything forgotten by a patient must have been somehow distressing
(alarming, painful, shameful), Freud concluded that this was precisely why it had been
expunged from the conscious memory. Freud hypothesized that, in the neurotic, any
powerful impulse or instinct which was embarrassing continued to operate in the
realm of the unconscious where it retained its full “cathexis” or investment of energy.
This instinct began to seek substitutive satisfaction by circuitous routes and would
produce neurotic symptoms. This is the process that Freud called repression, which he
regarded as a primary mechanism of defense whereby the ego was obliged to protect
itself against any renewed threat of the repressed impulse by a permanent investment
of energy. Freud saw repression as the foundation of our understanding of neuroses.
His new conclusions changed the nature of the physician’s task: he was no longer
simply redirecting an impulse which had found an abnormal outlet, but rather
attempting to uncover repressions and to replace them with conscious acts of
judgment. From this time on, Freud called his investigative method not catharsis but
psychoanalysis.

Infantile Sexuality

As if Freud had not sufficiently violated conventional thinking, his subsequent claims
regarding infantile sexuality aroused even more hostility and indignation. As Freud
was investigating the conflicts between subjects’ sexual impulses and their resistance to


psychoanalytic criticism

sexuality, he was led further and further back into patients’ lives into the period of
childhood. It was in this period, he found, that the dispositions of subsequent nervous
disorders were established. Freud’s assertion that the sexual function began in childhood
profoundly contradicted conventional beliefs and prejudices, expressed in theology,
poetry, and popular opinion, about the “innocence” of childhood.

Again challenging conventional notions, Freud not only saw sexuality as operative
from the beginning of a person’s life, but also viewed normal adult sexual life as the
result of a long and complicated development of the sexual function in an individual.
At first this function is attached to other vital functions of the body and only later
achieves independence from them and concentration in the reproductive function.
The sexual function initially expresses itself in component instincts classified according
to various erotogenic zones in the body. Hence at first the sexual function is auto-
erotic, finding its objects of pleasure in the subject’s own body. The first stage of
organization is dominated by the oral components; there follows an anal-sadistic stage;
and only then does sexuality concentrate its expression through the genitals as serving
the end of reproduction. Freud used the term “libido” to designate the energy of the
sexual instincts (Freud, 22).

The Oedipus Complex

The organization of the libido occurs side by side with an important element in mental
life, the seeking after an object. After the first stage of auto-eroticism, the first love-
object for both sexes is the mother, who is not yet perceived as distinct from the child’s
own body. As infancy progresses, sexual development undergoes the Oedipus complex:
the boy focuses his sexual wishes upon his mother and develops hostile impulses
toward his father. At this stage, Freud thought that girls underwent an analogous
development but his views on this changed drastically. Again in the face of established
beliefs, Freud saw the constitution of the human being as “innately bisexual.” Only
later was sexuality differentiated in terms of gender, children being initially unclear as
to the differences between the sexes. Under the threat of castration, the male child
represses its desire for the mother and accepts the rules laid down by the father. Freud
saw as unique in human sexuality the fact that it was diphasic: the first climax, as
described above, occurs in the fourth or fifth year of a child’s life. This is followed
by a long period of latency which lasts until puberty, which is the second climactic
phase; during this interim period certain repressions have taken effect and reaction-
formations impelled by morality, such as shame and disgust, are built up. The onset of
puberty reanimates the sexual impulses and there occurs a conflict between the urges
of the early years and the inhibitions of the period of latency.

Freud saw himself as having extended the concept of sexuality in two important
ways. Firstly, sexuality was now divorced from its exclusive connection with the genitals
and occupied a broader bodily function, having pleasure as its goal and only
subsequently serving a reproductive function. Secondly, sexuality now encompassed all
of the emotions of affection and friendliness traditionally subsumed under the word
“love” (Freud, 23). These affectionate impulses were originally sexual in nature but
became inhibited or sublimated; such diversion of the sexual instincts has produced,
according to Freud, some of the most important cultural contributions. This extension


part viii: the twentieth century

of the realm of sexuality, Freud thought, would allow for a greater understanding,
rather than merely dismissal or moral condemnation, of the sexuality of children and
perverts, which had hitherto been neglected. Homosexuality, in particular, was hardly
a perversion; rather, it could be traced back to the constitutional bisexuality of all
human beings. Freud adds that psychoanalysis has no concern whatsoever with judgments
of moral value.

As was seen earlier, Freud’s initial analytic method for uncovering a patient’s resistance
relied on hypnosis; this gave way to a method of insistence and encouragement;
this in turn gave place to another method, that of free association. Instead of directing
the patient’s thoughts, Freud would allow the patient to abandon himself to a process
of free association, on the condition that the patient report literally everything that had
occurred to him, no matter how irrelevant or meaningless it seemed. The advantages
of free association were that the patient was subjected to the least compulsion, that no
element related to the neurosis would be overlooked, and that the course of the analysis
would be guided by the patient rather than the expectations of the analyst (Freud,
24–25). Nonetheless, the patient’s resistance still finds a way to express itself: the
repressed material itself will never occur directly to the patient but will be expressed
allusively, in the form a substitutive association. Hence the analyst must master the art
of interpretation, since he must infer the unconscious or repressed material from the
patient’s allusions or recognize its character from the associations the patient makes.

The most important feature of the technique of analysis, according to Freud, was the
phenomenon of transference, which took the form of an intense emotional relationship
between patient and analyst. The emotion could range between passionate love and
embittered defiance and hatred. In the patient’s mind, transference replaces the desire
to be cured; if it comprises positive feelings for the analyst, the latter can use it to
influence the patient. If it is negative, it becomes the main tool of the patient’s
resistance. What the analyst must do is make the patient conscious of the transference
and convince him that in his transference attitude he is reexperiencing emotional
relations originating in his earliest object attachments during the repressed period
of his childhood. Thus transference is changed from a weapon of resistance to an
instrument for the patient’s cure. Analysis without transference, said Freud, was an
impossibility. This phenomenon, however, he saw as universal and not merely created
by analysis (Freud, 26).

The Interpretation of Dreams

Free association and skilled interpretation allowed psychoanalysis to make another
breakthrough, in Freud’s eyes, which contravened conventional scientific wisdom: to
discover the meaning of dreams. Ancient cultures attached various kinds of significance
to dreams, such as foretelling the future or expressing a means of communication
between divine and human; modern science, however, regarded the reading of dreams
as belonging to the realm of superstition. Yet psychoanalysis insisted that dreams could
be scientifically interpreted. From the associations produced by the dreamer, the
analyst could infer a thought structure, composed of latent dream thoughts. These were
expressed not directly but only as translated and distorted into the manifest dream,
which was composed largely of visual images. In his study The Interpretation of Dreams


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(1900), Freud argued that among the latent dream thoughts, one in particular stands
out from the others (which are residues of waking life) and governs the construction of
the dream, using the day’s residues as its material. This prominent, isolated thought is
a wishful impulse and the dream represents the satisfaction of this impulse. During
sleep, Freud argued, the ego is focused on withdrawing energy from all the interests of
life, and relaxes its expenditure of energy upon repression. The unconscious impulse
uses this opportunity to make its way into consciousness via the dream. But the ego
maintains some of its repressive resistance as a kind of censorship of the dream: the
latent dream thoughts are obliged to undergo alteration, a process Freud called dream
distortion, so that the forbidden meaning of the dream is unrecognizable. Hence Freud
defined a dream as the disguised fulfillment of a repressed wish (Freud, 28). The
dream-work, or process by which the latent thoughts are converted into the manifest or
explicit content of the dream, occurs through a number of functions: condensation of
the component parts of the preconscious material of the dream; displacement of the
psychical emphasis of the dream; and dramatization of the entire dream by translation
into visual images. While a dream expresses fulfillment of a repressed wish, it can also
continue the preconscious activity of the previous waking day, expressing an intention,
a warning, or a reflection. Psychoanalysis can exploit this dual feature of the dream to
obtain knowledge of the patient’s conscious and unconscious processes.

The Theory of the Instincts

Freud’s continuing observations led him to believe that the Oedipus complex was the
nucleus of the neuroses. It was both the climax of infantile sexual life and the foundation
for all of the later developments of sexuality. This in turn brought Freud to believe that
neurotics failed to overcome difficulties that were resolved by normal people. In other
words, psychoanalysis expressed the psychology of the normal human mind. Before
the Oedipal phase in which the libido is attached to images of the parents, there is a
period of narcissism or self-love in which the subject’s libido has his own ego for an
object. This state, Freud surmised, never completely ceases, and for all of his life his
libido moves back and forth from the self to objects in the world. In other words,
narcissistic libido is continually being transformed into object-libido and vice versa, as
well exemplified in the state of being in love, where the subject can range between
self-sacrifice and self-indulgence. These considerations led Freud to reformulate the
mechanism of repression. The main agency of repression, urged Freud, was the
instincts of self-preservation, or the “ego-instincts.” It is precisely these instincts which
constitute the narcissistic libido. In the process of repression, narcissistic libido is
opposed to the object-libido; the self-preservative instincts defend themselves against
the demands of object-love (Freud, 36).

In some of his later works, such as Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Group
Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), and The Ego and the Id (1923), Freud
considered a new account of the operation of the instincts. He used the word eros
(Greek for “love”) to designate the instincts of self-preservation as pertaining to both
the individual and the species. He opposed this instinct to another instinct of death or
destruction, which he called thanatos (Greek for “death”). He viewed these two forces
as engaged in a constant struggle, which is the broader context of our mental experience.


part viii: the twentieth century

Psychoanalysis as an Institution

Freud recounts that after his separation from Breuer, there was an “official anathema”
against psychoanalysis. For over ten years he had no followers and was shunned. His
Interpretation of Dreams was largely ignored. The result of this ostracization was to
bring members of the psychoanalytic movement into a cohesive body. A small group
of disciples joined Freud in Vienna, and psychiatrists in Switzerland such as E. Bleuler
and Carl Jung began to take an active interest in psychoanalysis. Freud was given
a different reception in America, where he was invited to give his Five Lectures on
Psycho-Analysis (1910) by the psychologist G. Stanley Hall. Psychoanalysis had also
obtained a following among the public in America.

During 1911–1913 two movements broke away from psychoanalysis, led respectively
by Alfred Adler and Carl Jung. Jung, attempting to circumvent the issues of infantile
sexuality and the Oedipus complex, attempted to give to the findings of psychoanalysis
an impersonal and non-historical interpretation. Adler went even further in repudiating
the importance of sexuality, tracing neurosis and character development to men’s
desire for power. Significantly, Freud refers to these two figures as “heretics,” while he
uses the word “loyal” to describe the individuals, such as Otto Rank, Ernest Jones, and
Hanns Sachs, who continued to collaborate with him (Freud, 33).

Freud and Culture

Around 1907 Freud’s interests in the implications of psychoanalysis began to extend
over the entire domain of culture. He sought to apply psychoanalytic principles to the
study of art, religion, and primitive cultures. In his studies of religion, Freud viewed
obsessional neurosis as a distorted private religion and religion itself as a universal
obsessional neurosis. In studies such as Totem and Taboo (1912–1913) Freud explored
taboos or prohibitions in primitive cultures, and analogized the various postulates of
primitive beliefs with neurosis. In works such as Civilization and its Discontents (1930)
Freud suggested the extension of the analysis of neurosis in individuals to the examination
of the imaginative and cultural creations of social groups and peoples. Some of
Freud’s disciples, such as Ernest Jones and Otto Rank, followed through the implications
of psychoanalytic theory in the realms of literary analysis, mythology, and symbolism.
All in all, Freud hoped that psychoanalysis, while yet underdeveloped, might offer
valuable contributions in the most varied regions of knowledge.

Freud’s Literary Analyses

Even in his earlier work, Freud had appealed to literary texts – notably Oedipus Rex
and Hamlet – not only to exemplify and illuminate, but even to ground some of his
theoretical notions. He saw Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex as expressing a “universal law
of mental life,” and interpreted fate in that play as the materialization of an “internal
necessity.” He also saw the Oedipus complex as governing the tragedy of Hamlet,
though he later altered his views on this play. As for poetic and artistic creation in
general, Freud wrote a paper, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” (1907), which
viewed works of art as the imaginary satisfactions of unconscious wishes, just as dreams


psychoanalytic criticism

were. What the psychoanalyst can do is to piece together the various elements of an
artist’s life and his works, and to construct from these the artist’s mental constitution
and his instinctual impulses. Freud conducted such an analysis of Leonardo da Vinci’s
picture of The Madonna and Child with St. Anne (1910). His lengthy examination of
Leonardo da Vinci’s character generated a prototype for psychoanalytic biography. He
wrote a psychoanalytic account of the novella Gradiva by the German author Wilhelm
Jensen, as well as psychological readings of other works. In 1914 he published (anonymously)
an acute reading of the “meaning” of Michelangelo’s statue of Moses in Rome.
Notwithstanding his own readings of literary and artistic texts, Freud never claimed
that psychoanalysis could adequately explain the process of artistic creation. In his
paper “Dostoevsky and Parricide” (1928), he stated: “Before the problem of the creative
artist analysis must, alas, lay down its arms.”2

We can obtain a sense of Freud’s psychoanalytic “literary-critical” procedure by
looking at his paper “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming.” This was initially delivered
as a lecture before an audience of laymen, which perhaps accounts for some of its
views on literature. Freud admits at the outset that the creative writer is a “strange
being” who himself cannot explain his power to arouse new and intense emotions in
us. He suggests that, in seeking an explanation, we might think of an analogy between
creative activity and some activity of “normal” people (Freud, 436). He suggests that
the “first traces of imaginative activity” can be discerned in childhood: “every child at
play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather,
re-arranges the things of this world in a new way which pleases him.” The child takes
this “play” very seriously, investing (or “cathecting”) it with much emotion. Yet the
opposite of “play,” says Freud, is “not what is serious but what is real.” In fact, the
child distinguishes his world of play “quite well from reality; and he likes to link his
imagined objects and situations to the tangible and visible things of the real world.”
This ability to link the two worlds differentiates the child’s playing from phantasying
(Freud, 437).

As people grow up, says Freud, they cease to play, but they do not give up the
pleasure they once derived from playing. As always in mental life, “we can never give
anything up; we only exchange one thing for another. What appears to be a renunciation
is really the substitute or surrogate” (Freud, 438). What the growing child does instead
of playing is to phantasize, indulging in day dreams. There is one difference, however:
whereas the child takes no pains to hide his play, the adult is “ashamed of his phantasies
and hides them from other people. He cherishes his phantasies as his most intimate
possessions” (Freud, 438). The difference in behavior between those who play and
those who phantasize, says Freud, can be attributed to a difference in motives: the
child’s play is motivated by a wish, the wish to imitate adults. The adult’s phantasies
are also motivated by a wish, but in many cases this is of a nature that he would prefer
to conceal.

How, then, do we have any knowledge of phantasies, if people are so reluctant to
reveal them? Freud remarks that there is one class of people upon whom falls the task
of “telling what they suffer and what things give them happiness.” These are “victims
of nervous illness, who are obliged to tell their phantasies . . . to the doctor by whom
they expect to be cured” (Freud, 438). Taking a characteristic leap, Freud stretches this
insight to claim that such neurotics “tell us nothing that we might not also hear from


part viii: the twentieth century

healthy people” (Freud, 439). He proceeds to enumerate some of the characteristics
of phantasying. To begin with, he claims, “a happy person never phantasies, only an
unsatisfied one [sic]”; and the motive forces of phantasies are “unsatisfied wishes, and
every single phantasy is the fulfilment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality”
(Freud, 439).

Freud divides the motivating wishes that give rise to phantasy into two main types:
they are either erotic wishes or ambitious wishes. In “young women,” says Freud, “the
erotic wishes predominate almost exclusively, for their ambition is as a rule absorbed
by erotic trends. In young men egoistic and ambitious wishes come to the fore clearly
enough alongside of erotic ones” (Freud, 439). The predictable sexism of Freud’s
account here, as elsewhere in his work, indicates inevitably that his model of the mind,
far from being somehow universal, is grounded indissolubly in his own social era.
Freud does temper his own position in this case by suggesting that the two kinds of
wishes “are often united.” In either case, however, there are sound motives for concealment
of these wishes and their resultant phantasies: young women are typically “only
allowed a minimum of erotic desire,” while the young man must suppress his excessive
self-regard, so that he can adjust to a society “full of other individuals making equally
strong demands” (Freud, 439).

The content and form of a phantasy, explains Freud, are unique to a given individual.
A phantasy is intimately related to the three dimensions of time: it is linked,
firstly, to “some provoking occasion in the present” which arouses one of the major
wishes of a person; this triggers the memory of an earlier experience, usually in childhood,
in which this wish was fulfilled; the mind then imagines a situation in the future
where the wish is fulfilled. What is thus created, says Freud, is a daydream or phantasy,
which carries in it traces of the present, past, and future: “Thus past, present and future
are strung together . . . on the thread of the wish that runs through them” (Freud, 439).
In phantasy, the dreamer regains “what he possessed in his happy childhood.” However,
if phantasies become “over-luxuriant and over-powerful,” they can express the onset
of neurosis or psychosis. Freud reminds us that our dreams at night are nothing more
than phantasies expressing, in distorted form, wishes that our own minds have
repressed (Freud, 440).

Freud proceeds to analyze creative writing in terms of the foregoing concepts: the
creative writer also engages in a kind of play: “He creates a world of phantasy which he
takes very seriously – that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion – while
separating it sharply from reality” (Freud, 437). (Someone cynical of Freud’s account
might observe the neat circularity of his argument: the child’s play is analogous to
creative writing; therefore, we can begin to understand creative writing if we recognize
that this too is a form of play.) Freud divides creative writers into two broad groups:
those who, “like the ancient authors of epics and tragedies, take over their material
ready-made,” and those who “seem to originate their own material” (Freud, 440).
Oddly, Freud states that he will choose for analysis “not the writers most highly esteemed
by the critics, but the less pretentious authors of novels, romances and short stories,”
who have the “widest and most eager circle of readers of both sexes” (Freud, 440).
Behind this preference may lie the fact that Freud’s immediate audience consists of
laymen, and also a desire to examine creative writing as a phenomenon in popular
culture rather than a professional or academic elite. It is clear, also, that Freud often


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offended the academic establishment; he sometimes observed that the popular reception
of his works was more telling than its assessments by experts. Whatever the reason
behind Freud’s focus on popular fiction, it is surely questionable whether his claims
can be unproblematically extended to higher forms of literature.

Nonetheless, within the terms of his own inquiry, Freud does open up certain
pathways of literary-critical analysis. He observes that popular stories typically have “a
hero who is the centre of interest,” a hero whom the writer appears to “place under the
protection of a special Providence.” No matter what dangers and adventures he undergoes,
he is invulnerable: knowing that he will eventually survive allows the reader to
follow his journey with a feeling of security, which Freud describes as “the true heroic
feeling.” Through “this revealing characteristic of invulnerability,” says Freud, “we can
immediately recognize His Majesty the Ego, the hero alike of every day-dream and of
every story” (Freud, 441). Freud’s point here is that the fiction is not a “portrayal of
reality” but has all the constituents of a phantasy or daydream: the hero is invulnerable,
women invariably fall in love with him, and the other characters in the story are
“sharply divided into good and bad” in a manner that contravenes the more subtle
variations found in real life (Freud, 441). Hence the story expresses a phantasy on the
part of the creative writer, who can indulge in this parading and projection of his ego.

We might readily agree that such features characterize a romance novel intended for
popular consumption, and written according to an explicit formula. But how can such
features belong to great literature, which surely is somehow original and exceeds such
formulaic constraints? Freud acknowledges that many “imaginative writings are far
removed from the model of the naive day-dream.” But he suspects that “even the most
extreme deviations from that model could be linked with it through an uninterrupted
series of transitional cases” (Freud, 441). Freud offers the example of “psychological”
novels, in which the author inhabits the mind of the hero and views the other characters
from the outside; such novels denote the tendency of “the modern writer to split
up his ego, by self-observation, into many part-egos, and, in consequence, to personify
the conflicting currents of his own mental life in several heroes.” In other words, even
where the author does not exert a godlike authorial omnipotence that can delve into
the mentality of every character, even in cases of “limited” omniscience, the author’s
phantasies are nonetheless being played out.

Freud acknowledges that certain other kinds of novels, such as the naturalistic novels
of Émile Zola, seem to “stand in quite special contrast to the type of the day-dream.”
Here, he concedes, the hero plays only a small active role and “sees the actions and
sufferings of other people pass before him like a spectator” (Freud, 441). How can such
novels accord with the model of the daydream? Freud’s answer (again characteristic) is
to say that some daydreams are precisely like naturalistic novels: in these dreams “the
ego contents itself with the role of spectator” (Freud, 442). A cynical observer might
remark that it would be difficult for a novel not to conform with Freud’s model, since
that model itself can be modified to accord with the nature of the novel in question.

Freud’s inquiry moves to the connection between the life of a writer and his works.
He applies to the creative artist his earlier formula for phantasies: “A strong experience
in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually
belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its
fulfilment in the creative work.” Freud points out that his emphasis on a writer’s


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childhood memories derives from his assumption that a creative work is “a continuation
of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood” (Freud, 442). It might be
remarked that while Freud’s notion of “play” is not quite the same as the concept of
“play” or “free play” in the work of Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva, and others, there
are perhaps continuities between all of these uses, which might usefully be pursued.
For example, Freud’s understanding of play implies a self-created world of language, a
language that reconfigures the conventional idioms that are held to express reality; it
also lays stress on the writer’s highly subjective entry into the system of language, an
entry marked by psychological make-up as well as by social and political circumstances;
it implies, like much of Bakhtin’s thought, that language is appropriated by the
artist for her own ends; it implies a kind of “return” to a Lacanian imaginary realm of
infantile security and satisfying wholeness, a realm where everything is ordered just as
we might wish it; and that, whatever the author’s explicit aims or intentions, there is an
underlying subtext, working unconsciously, whose motivations may be different. The
kind of psychoanalytic literary criticism enabled by Freud’s account here would be one
that analyzed both the form and content of art in relation to the author’s psychology
and biography. For example, despite T. S. Eliot’s disclaiming insistence on writing
“impersonal” poetry, his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” might be analyzed
in terms of the history of Eliot’s own attitudes toward women and the derivation of
these attitudes from his childhood relationship with his mother and father, as well as
from figures such as Baudelaire and Laforgue who sustained tortuous relationships
with the “feminine.”

As for the other main category of imaginative works, such as epics, which entail a
“re-fashioning of ready-made and familiar material,” Freud acknowledges that the
writer has some independence in her choice and presentation of material. The material
itself, however, is derived from “the popular treasure-house of myths, legends and fairy
tales.” Freud surmises that further investigation into folk-psychology might reveal myths
to be “distorted vestiges of the wishful phantasies of whole nations, the secular dreams
of youthful humanity” (Freud, 442). Unfortunately, Freud himself does not pursue this
fascinating hypothesis; it is clear that certain myths become associated with the identity
of particular nations or cultures. A striking example might be the Germany of the
Third Reich, or the self-conception of “Britishness” as articulated by Thomas Babington
Macaulay and other “cultural ambassadors” during the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.

Freud ends his paper by confronting the question: how does a creative work afford
us pleasure? It is not usually pleasurable, he argues, to listen to the self-aggrandizing
phantasies of others. Why, then, do we enjoy the narratives of creative artists? Freud
suggests that the writer “softens the character of his egoistic day-dreams by altering
and disguising it,” perhaps in the same way that our own minds disguise the content of
our dreams during sleep (Freud, 443). A second method is the writer’s providing us
with aesthetic pleasure through purely formal techniques. Freud refers to such pleasure
as “fore-pleasure”: our enjoyment of an imaginative work issues from “a liberation
of tension in our minds,” perhaps because the writer enables us to “enjoy our own
day-dreams without self-reproach or shame” (Freud, 443).

One of the interesting features of Freud’s account is that it (typically) ignores
the entire history of its subject, in this case, aesthetics and literary criticism, almost


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blundering onto the scene with its radically new insights, infusing yet another perspective,
drawn from psychoanalysis, into the repertoire of literary criticism. In this brief
paper, Freud opens up a number of literary-critical avenues: the linking of a creative
work to an in-depth study of an author’s psychology, using a vastly altered conception
of human subjectivity; the tracing in art of primal psychological tendencies and
conflicts; and the understanding of art and literature as integrally related to more
general patterns of human activity.

It is not difficult to be skeptical of Freud’s trains of reasoning, riddled as these are
with leaps of imagination, logical inconsistencies, contradictions, and the molding of
the available matter to the desired form of his interpretation. Yet his procedure in this
paper demonstrates that the context of literary interpretation can be deepened into
dimensions of individual and collective human subjectivity little explored hitherto.
Beyond the immediately discernible themes and issues raised by a literary text, beyond
its formal attributes, beyond its apparent entry into certain literary traditions, a text
can be approached in terms of its probings of deeper, unconscious, impulses that lie
hidden in recurring human obsessions, fears, and anxieties. Such paths will be further
explored by Carl Jung, Northrop Frye, Lacan, and others.

Freud on History and Civilization

In later works such as Civilization and its Discontents Freud did indeed deal with social
and religious phenomena as expressed in collective, as well as individual, psychology.
He situates the human psyche within the fabric of social institutions: what we call
civilization is to some extent the cumulative product of our psychology, its intrinsic
character, and the ways in which it reacts upon its environments; civilization is also in
some ways analogous with the human psyche, exhibiting a collective psychology that
develops according to similar rules. It is in this text that Freud situates the production
and enjoyment of creative art and other forms of sublimation within the contexts of
broader questions such as the purpose of human life, the pursuit of happiness, and the
functions of culture and religion.

Freud initially raises the question: what is the purpose of human life? This indeed is
the fundamental question that religion tries to answer, and the very idea of purpose,
says Freud, stands or falls with religion (Freud, 729). In contrast with religious
accounts, Freud argues that the basic purpose of human life, as revealed by the actual
behavior of people, is the pursuit of happiness. He defines “happiness” narrowly, as
correlative with the gratification of our desires according to the “pleasure principle,”
which has both positive and negative aspects: the experience of intense pleasures, and
the elimination or avoidance of pain and discomfort (Freud, 729). There are in fact
three sources of suffering: our own bodies, the external world, and our relationships
with others. The inevitability of suffering increasingly moderates our demands for
happiness in accordance with the “reality principle”: we transfer, defer, and deflect our
instinctual aims into directions that cannot be so easily frustrated by the external
world. Our alternative pleasures, then, are more tempered and diffused, as expressed in
the realms of art, science, and religion (Freud, 731). An artist’s joy in creating exemplifies
this kind of satisfaction; yet it is marked by at least two weaknesses: it is accessible to
only a few people, and such “substitutive satisfactions, as offered by art, are illusions in


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contrast with reality” (Freud, 728, 731). The region from which these illusions arise,
says Freud, is “the life of the imagination; at the time when the development of the
sense of reality took place, this region was expressly exempted from the demands of
reality-testing and was set apart for the purpose of fulfilling wishes which were difficult
to carry out. At the head of these satisfactions through phantasy stands the enjoyment
of works of art” (Freud, 732). Here, as in his earlier essay about creative writers, Freud
sees the entire realm of art as arising from a psychical constitution on the part of
human beings that allows them a channel of escape or release from the harsh demands
of reality; in this view, art is of the same order as phantasy, issuing from the demands
of wish fulfillment, and by its very nature opposed to reality. Freud’s brief comments
on beauty are in the same vein: when we adopt an “aesthetic attitude to the goal of
life,” we seek happiness predominantly in the enjoyment of beauty, even though beauty
“has no obvious uses” and even though there is no “clear cultural necessity” for it.
Beauty, like art, can offer no protection against suffering. Nonetheless, the enjoyment
of beauty, entailing a “mildly intoxicating quality of feeling . . . can compensate for a
great deal” and “civilization could not do without it” (Freud, 733).

Freud’s argument concerning art is fundamental: the human psyche, frustrated in its
attempts to mold the world in a self-comforting image, resorts to art to create its world
in phantasy. Art – in a broad sense that includes science, philosophy, and religion – is
the highest form of such an impulse, and is the embodiment of civilization itself,
whose foundations are erected on the graveyard of repressed instincts. Indeed, Freud
views religion as one of the schemes of human thought that regard “reality as the sole
enemy,” and encourage a turning away from the world, as is embodied in the delusive
behavior of hermits or madmen. The “religions of mankind,” exclaims Freud, “must
be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind” (Freud, 732). By arresting people
in a state of “psychical infantilism . . . religion succeeds in sparing many people an
individual neurosis. But hardly anything more” (Freud, 734–735).

Freud notes that one of the sources of our suffering – our relations with other
people, on the levels of family, community, and state – is self-created (Freud, 735). It is
apparently the function of culture to regulate such relations. Yet why, Freud asks, does
such regulation fail to procure happiness? He cites two causes, the one being our own
mental constitution: we can experience happiness only as a contrast with suffering, and
it is by nature transitory (Freud, 729). The second factor is that culture regulates social
relations precisely by restricting our possibilities of instinctual gratification, in two
broad spheres: sexuality and aggression. Sexual life must be restricted in the interests of
binding together the members of a community by libidinal ties, as well as by the bonds
of common work and common interests (Freud, 747). Freud speaks of the kind of love
that is used for this purpose as “aim-inhibited love”: such love was originally sensual
but is now modified so that it no longer attaches to a specific object (person) but to all
people equally, creating new bonds (Freud, 744–745). Sexuality is also restricted in
other ways in Western civilization, where object-choice is narrowed to allow only the
opposite sex and where there is basically one standard of sexual life for all. Such
constraints, says Freud, ignore the actual sexual constitution of individuals, which was
originally bisexual. The only non-censured sexual outlet is heterosexual genital love,
constrained even further by the stipulations of legitimacy and monogamy (Freud, 746).
Interestingly, Freud makes an analogy similar to that made in Plato’s Republic between


psychoanalytic criticism

the constitution of a state or civilization and the constitution of the human psyche.
Civilization, says Freud, “behaves toward sexuality as a people or a stratum of its
population does which has subjected another one to its exploitation. Fear of a revolt by
the suppressed elements drives it to stricter precautionary measures” (Freud, 746).
Freud acknowledges, however, that in practice civilization has been obliged to “pass
over in silence” many sexual transgressions (Freud, 746). Acknowledging this line of
thought, Foucault was later to propound a theory whereby sexual repression occurred
through more subtle means of categorization and control.

Our other primal urge, toward aggression, must be restricted because it threatens to
disintegrate society. It is well known that thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes had a
dismal view of human beings in a state of “nature,” as being embroiled in a “war of all
against all.” In a sense, Freud’s view of human nature is even more dismal since it sees
a cruel aggressiveness as an intrinsic instinctual disposition, regardless of external threats.
Humans see in their neighbor “not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also
someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity
for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his
possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him” (Freud,
749). Needless to say, Freud rejects the view advanced by “the communists” that “man
is wholly good” and that abolition of private property would remove ill-will and
hostility among men. Private property, says Freud, is only one of the instruments of
aggression; aggressiveness “was not created by property . . . it already shows itself in
the nursery . . . it forms the basis of every relationship of affection and love among
people (with the single exception, perhaps, of the mother’s relation to her male child)”
(Freud, 750–751). Having said all this, Freud expresses some good will toward the
struggle against “the inequality of wealth among men and all that it leads to” (Freud,
751n.). He also acknowledges the potential value of “a real change in the relations of
human beings to possessions” (Freud, 770).

This “primary mutual hostility of human beings” threatens civilization with disintegration.
Civilization must use its utmost efforts to deflect these aggressive instincts into
“identifications and aim-inhibited relationships of love” (Freud, 750). Civilization checks
aggression by fostering its internalization into the superego. The resulting tension
between the superego and the ego is characterized by Freud as the sense of guilt. We
can see, then, that this sense of guilt answers to two factors: the dread of authority, and
dread of the superego. The first of these compels us to renounce instinctual gratification,
and the second urges the need for punishment, both factors generating unhappiness
(Freud, 759). The place of the father or of both parents, says Freud, is taken by the
larger human community. The sense of guilt that began in relation to the father ends
as a relation to the community (Freud, 756–757). Even whole peoples, remarks Freud,
have behaved in this way, bowing to a higher power or Fate which is “regarded as a
substitute for the parental agency” (Freud, 758).

Hence the price of progress in civilization is the forfeiting of happiness through an
increase in the sense of guilt. This sense of guilt, says Freud, is “the most important
problem in the development of civilization” (Freud, 763). In fact, when the external
demands of the community or higher power are internalized within the superego, we
have effectively exchanged a “threatened external unhappiness . . . for a permanent
internal unhappiness, for the tension of the sense of guilt” (Freud, 759). On a broader,


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“phylogenetic” level, Freud traces man’s sense of guilt ultimately to the Oedipus complex,
arguing that it was established at the killing of the primitive father by the band of
brothers who challenged his harsh authority: this sense of guilt, acquired on actually
having committed a crime, Freud calls remorse, which resulted from the sons’ ambivalent
feelings of love and hatred toward their father. After their act of aggression had
satisfied their hatred, their love “set up the super-ego by identification with the father;
it gave that agency the father’s power . . . as a punishment for the deed of aggression”
(Freud, 762). This scenario, says Freud, makes clear “the part played by love in the
origin of conscience and the fatal inevitability of the sense of guilt” (Freud, 762–763).
Freud also characterizes this conflict by viewing sexuality as the representative of the
life instinct eros and aggression as the representative of the death instinct thanatos. He
states that aggressiveness “is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man,”
which “constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization . . . civilization is a process
in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and
after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of
mankind.” Since civilization develops by restricting sexuality and aggression, the evolution
of culture is a struggle between eros and thanatos (Freud, 755–756). The sense of
guilt, he says, arises from precisely this primordial ambivalence, and is the expression
of this “eternal struggle” (Freud, 763).

This struggle between the two primal urges, in fact, characterizes not only the
development of human civilization but also that of the individual. Freud insists on the
analogy: the same process is being “applied to different kinds of object” (Freud, 767).
There is, however, one important distinction: in the development of the individual,
“the programme of the pleasure principle, which consists in finding the satisfaction of
happiness, is retained as the main aim . . . But in the process of civilization things are
different. Here by far the most important thing is the aim of creating a unity out of the
individual human beings . . . the aim of happiness is still there, but it is pushed into the
background” (Freud, 768). Freud extends further the analogy between individual and
social development: the community itself “evolves a super-ego under whose influence
cultural development proceeds” (Freud, 769). Freud attributes the origins of communal
superegos to the influence of great personalities such as Jesus; what is interesting is
his acknowledgment that the demands of an individual’s superego will “coincide with
the precepts of the prevailing cultural super-ego” (Freud, 769). This is an implicit
acknowledgment that the content of the superego is not somehow patterned on some
primal or timeless myth but that it is profoundly and locally rooted in an individual’s
ethical environment. Freud even states that entire communities and civilizations might
be regarded as “neurotic”: the difficulty of diagnosing such “communal neuroses”
would be that, if all members of a group were afflicted with the neurosis, the standards
of normality would be difficult to define. Nonetheless, Freud ventures the
hope that the “pathology of cultural communities” will someday be studied. Like
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Freud has no illusions about where our ideas ultimately
derive from: “man’s judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness – that,
accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments” (Freud, 771).
Once again, Freud stands opposed to Enlightenment notions of man’s rational
potential: his very capacity to “reason” is premolded to conform to his deepest-rooted
instinctual demands.


psychoanalytic criticism

But what exactly is “civilization” according to Freud? He sees it as characterized
by a number of traits: the exploitation and protection of nature’s resources; a facility
for order and cleanliness; and the reverence of practically useless things such as beauty
(Freud, 737–739). What most seems to epitomize civilization, in Freud’s eyes, is its
esteeming of ideas and higher mental activities, as expressed in religious and philosophical
systems, as well as in human ideals for the individual, society, and humanity
(Freud, 739–740). A final and essential element of civilization, insists Freud, is the
regulation of social regulations. He states that the decisive step toward civilization
was the substitution of the power of a united number of men for the power of a
single man. The essence of this substitution was the restriction of possibilities of
gratification by the members of a community, whereas the individual recognized no
such restrictions. The final outcome, says Freud, “should be a rule of law to which
all . . . have contributed by a sacrifice of their instincts” (Freud, 740–741). Hence,
“sublimation of instinct” is a conspicuous feature of cultural development, and is what
makes possible for “higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic or ideological, to play
such an important part in civilized life.” Effectively, then, “civilization is built up upon
a renunciation of instinct.” This cultural privation, Freud says, dominates all social
relations between human beings and, unless it is compensated, serious disorders will
result (Freud, 742).

Finally, it is worth stressing that Freud’s entire view of civilization – in particular,
its construction of art as well as religious and scientific systems – rests ultimately on his
account of the infantile ego, an account that has profoundly influenced thinkers such
as Lacan and which finds important parallels in the work of Derrida and some feminist
writers such as Julia Kristeva. Freud sees religious feeling as a kind of unbounded
“oceanic feeling,” which he characterizes as the “feeling of an indissoluble bond, of
being one with the external world as a whole” (Freud, 723). What interests Freud is the
question: what is the source of such a feeling? Normally, says Freud, “there is nothing
of which we are more certain than the feeling of our own self, of our own ego. This ego
appears to us as something autonomous and unitary, marked off distinctly from
everything else” (Freud, 724). Yet this feeling of certainty, says Freud, has been shown
by psychoanalysis to be “deceptive” and that in fact “the ego is continued inwards,
without any sharp delimitation, into an unconscious mental entity which we designate
as the id.” Freud acknowledges, however, that “towards the outside . . . the ego seems
to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation.” In other words, the conscious ego is
continuous with the unconscious mind; but it is still fairly clearly distinguished from
the external world (Freud, 724). But even this feeling of separation has not always
existed, and has undergone a process of development. An infant at the breast, says
Freud, “does not as yet distinguish his ego from the external world,” and only
gradually detaches itself from the external causes of its sensations. Originally, says
Freud, “the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself.
Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more
inclusive – indeed, an all-embracing – feeling which corresponded to a more intimate
bond between the ego and the world about it.” It is this that accounts for the “oceanic
feeling” characteristic of religious experience: this “primary ego-feeling” persists in
many people alongside the more mature perception of the ego’s separation from the
world (Freud, 725). Hence Freud traces religious feeling to an early phase of


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ego-feeling: “The origin of the religious attitude can be traced back in clear outlines as
far as the feeling of infantile helplessness” (Freud, 727).

Clearly, Freud challenges many of the central impulses of Enlightenment thought:
the (Cartesian) view of the human self as an independent unit; the view – extending
through many Enlightenment thinkers into the work of Kant – of the ego as autonomous
and rational agent; the idea (culminating in the philosophy of Hegel) of human progress
in history; the notion that the external world and nature can be subjugated both
intellectually and materially; and, perhaps above all, the view deriving from Plato
and Aristotle and reaching into the later nineteenth century, that human beings
can understand themselves. But neither is Freud part of the Romantic reaction against
Enlightenment thought. He is indeed a rationalist, and wishes to extend the domain
of science over the terrain of the human mind itself. But, like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,
and Bergson, he sees human reason as intrinsically practical and self-preservative in
its orientation, and ultimately involved in an intense struggle with our sexual and
aggressive instincts. What Freud gives to, and shares with, much cultural and literary
theory is a view of the human self as constructed to a large extent by its environment,
as a product of familial and larger social forces; a profound sense of the limitations of
reason and of language itself; an intense awareness of the closure effected by conventional
systems of thought and behavior, of the severe constraints imposed upon human
sexuality; a view of art and religion as issuing from broader patterns of human need;
and an acknowledgment that truth-value and moral value are not somehow absolute
or universal but are motivated by the economic and ideological demands of civilization.

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981)

The work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan centers around his extensive
re-reading of Freud in the light of insights furnished by linguistics and structuralism.
Lacan’s project was not merely to apply these discourses to psychoanalysis, but rather
to enable the mutual reinterpretation of all of these areas of inquiry. He effectively
employed these disciplines, as well as mathematics and logic, to reformulate Freud’s
account of the unconscious and his own account of human subjectivity in a (somewhat
altered) Saussurean terminology of the connections between signifier and signified.
Lacan’s highly esoteric personality and views involved him in unusual and often stormy
relationships with family, friends, spouses, and the psychoanalytic establishment. He
was born in Paris to Roman Catholic parents who gave him the name “Jacques-Marie.”
It is arguable that his (anti-nominalist) views of language and subjectivity found their
initial inspiration here, in reaction against this moment of primordial naming. He later
de-nominated himself, removing the appellation “Marie,” and went on to study medicine,
after which he undertook training in psychiatry. In 1939 he joined the Psychoanalytic
Society of Paris and became president of this organization in 1953. He was
criticized, however, for his irregular and unorthodox techniques and was eventually
made something of an outcast. He responded by establishing his own Freudian School,
which he himself dissolved in 1980, just before his death.


psychoanalytic criticism

Apart from Freud, the main influences on Lacan’s work were Saussure, Roman
Jakobson, and Hegel (Alexandre Kojève’s famous lectures on whom Lacan had attended).
Lacan’s reputation was established by his publication of Écrits (1966), a large collection
of essays and papers, which were translated into English in a much abbreviated format
in 1977. Like Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Louis Althusser, and other notable French thinkers,
Lacan participated in a landmark conference in 1966 at Johns Hopkins University.
Lacan’s influence not only has extended over the field of psychoanalysis but also reaches
into the work of Marxists such as Louis Althusser (whose theories were influenced by
Lacan and who, ironically, became Lacan’s patient, after which, even more ironically,
he killed his wife) and feminists such as Julia Kristeva and Jane Gallop, as well as
deconstructive thinkers such as Barbara Johnson. Other feminists have reacted strongly
against the phallocentric thrust (a not altogether inapt expression) of Lacan’s own work.

Before examining some of Lacan’s most influential texts, it may be useful to outline
some of his pivotal views. As stated earlier, Lacan rewrites Freud’s account of the
unconscious using linguistic terminology and concepts. Lacan posits three orders or
states of human mental disposition: the imaginary order, the symbolic order, and the
real. The imaginary order is a pre-Oedipal phase where an infant is as yet unable to
distinguish itself from its mother’s body or to recognize the lines of demarcation
between itself and objects in the world; indeed, it does not as yet know itself as a
coherent entity or self. Hence, the imaginary phase is one of unity (between the child
and its surroundings), as well as of immediate possession (of the mother and objects),
a condition of reassuring plenitude, a world consisting wholly of images (hence
“imaginary”) that is not fragmented or mediated by difference, by categories, in a
word, by language and signs. The mirror phase – the point at which the child can
recognize itself and its environment in the mirror – marks the point at which this
comforting imaginary condition breaks down, pushing the child into the symbolic
order, which is the world of predefined social roles and gender differences, the world
of subjects and objects, the world of language.

In this way, Lacan effectively reformulates in linguistic terms Freud’s account of the
Oedipus complex. Freud had posited that the infant’s desire for its mother is prohibited
by the father, who threatens the infant with castration. Faced with this threat, the
infant represses his desire, thereby opening up the dimension of the unconscious,
which is for Lacan (and Freud as seen through Lacan) not a “place” but a relation to
the social world of law, morality, religion, and conscience. According to Freud, the
child internalizes through the father’s commands (what Lacan calls the Law of the
Father) the appropriate standards of socially acceptable thought and behavior. Freud
calls these standards internalized as conscience the child’s “superego.” The child now
identifies with the father, sliding into his own gendered role, in the knowledge that he
too is destined for fatherhood. Of course, the repressed desire(s) continue to exert
their influence on conscious life. As Lacan rewrites this process, the child, in passing
from the imaginary to the symbolic order, continues to long for the security and
wholeness it previously felt: it is now no longer in full possession of its mother and of
entities in the world; rather, it is distinguished from them in and through a network of
signification. The child’s desire, as Lacan explains it, passes in an unceasing movement
along an infinite chain of signifiers, in search of unity, security, of ultimate meaning, in


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an ever elusive signified, and immaturely clinging to the fictive notion of unitary
selfhood that began in the imaginary phase. The child exists in an alienated condition,
its relationships with objects always highly mediated and controlled by social structures
at the heart of whose operations is language. For Lacan, the phallus is a privileged
signifier, signifying both sexual distinction and its arbitrariness. Lacan never accurately
describes the “real”: he seems to think of it as what lies beyond the world of signification,
perhaps a primordial immediacy of experience prior to language or a chaotic
condition of mere thinghood prior to objectivity. For Lacan, the real is the impossible.
Lacan rejects any notion that the mind of either child or adult has any intrinsic psychical
unity; it is merely a “subject” rather than a self or ego, merely the occupant of an
always moving position in the networks of signification; hence, for Lacan, as he
indicates in a famous statement, even “the Unconscious is structured like a language.”
The unconscious is as much a product of signifying systems, and indeed is itself as
much a signifying system, as the conscious mind: both are like language in their openness,
their constant deferral of meaning, their susceptibility to changing definition, and
their constitution as a system of relations (rather than existing as entities in their own
right). In Lacan’s view, the subject is empty, fluid, and without an axis or center, and
is always recreated in his encounter with the other, with what exceeds his own nature
and grasp. Influenced by Hegel’s master–slave dialectic, as well as by his account of
objectivity, Lacan sees the individual’s relation to objects as mediated by desire and by
struggle.

Lacan elaborates his most renowned concept, that of the “mirror stage,” in a 1949
paper of that title.3 He suggests that this concept can shed light on “the formation of
the I as we experience it in psychoanalysis” (Écrits, 1). This experience, he says, will
result in a rejection of any philosophy resulting from Descartes’ proposition cogito ergo
sum, a proposition that grounds existence in thought, that sees man’s thinking as the
essence of his being. As Lacan states later in his paper, one such philosophy, based on
the presumption that thought or consciousness forms a coherent unity, is existentialism,
which erringly grants the ego “the illusion of autonomy” (Écrits, 6).

When does the mirror stage occur? Lacan locates it in the development of a child
between the ages of 6 and 18 months. Such a child can “recognize as such his own
image in a mirror.” In the case of intelligent animals such as monkeys, this act of
recognition is self-exhausting and its implications extend no further. In the case of
the child, however, this recognition has a profound and enduring impact: in his
mirrored gestures and his reflected play, the child experiences “the relation between
the movements assumed in the image and the reflected environment, and between this
virtual complex and the reality it reduplicates – the child’s own body, and the persons
and things, around him” (Écrits, 1). In other words, whereas the monkey sees in the
mirror simply another monkey, the child sees reflected himself and his relationship
with his environment.

Lacan stresses, then, that we must “understand the mirror stage as an identification,”
which results in a “transformation” in the subject: though the child is somewhat helpless,
unable to walk or even stand up, he exhibits a “jubilant assumption of his specular
image” [speculum meaning “mirror”], an image which “would seem to exhibit in an
exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial
form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before


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language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject” (Écrits, 2). The child is
“jubilant” because the image reflected in the mirror is what Lacan calls “the Ideal-I,”
an idealized, coherent, and unified version of itself. The child’s ego is precipitated into
the symbolic matrix of language, the symbolic order: the word “primordial” indicates
that the experience of the child is somewhat premature, anticipating its entry into
language, and into the entire relation of subject and object which will govern its
engagement in the world. In other words, the mirror stage occurs prior to the child’s
actual acquisition of a sense of self, a sense of itself as subject in distinction from
objects in the world: the child experiences, as projected in its mirror image, itself and
its surroundings as an integrated unity. It has not consciously entered the symbolic
order, even though it is already surrounded by the effects of that order and even
though that order indeed governs its present experience.

What is also important, however, is that this present experience of illusory unity is
not entirely left behind even when the child grows beyond the mirror stage. Lacan
states that the form of the ideal “I” “situates the agency of the ego, before its social
determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the
individual” (Écrits, 2). The “fiction” is the unity of the ego, a fiction which is entrenched
in the child’s psyche prior to its direction or constitution by social factors, and
which will continue (since it is “irreducible”) even as the child’s mind is influenced
and formed by social determinants. The child “anticipates in a mirage the maturation
of his power,” in a mirror image which exhibits a symmetry that contrasts with the
child’s actual feelings of turbulence. This power the child sees only as a gestalt or pattern
of totality which “symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as
it prefigures its alienating destination” (Écrits, 2). Hence, the illusion of unity and
enduring identity that occurs in the mirror phase also anticipates the life-long alienation
of the ego, not only from the objects that surround it, objects of its desire, but also
from itself.

Lacan is led to view the “function of the mirror-stage as a particular case of the
function of the imago, which is to establish a relation between the organism and its
reality,” between the inner world and the outer world (Écrits, 4). Imago is an ancient
Latin term that can refer to an image, likeness, copy, picture, statue, mask, or apparition.
The Romans sometimes used it to refer to statues of distinguished ancestors
which were placed in the atria or central courts of their houses. Freud had used the
term to indicate the impression made by parental strictures on the child’s mind. Lacan
appears to use the term to mean something like the assuming of an image: it is this
assumption of an image of itself that establishes the child’s relation to reality. But
Lacan suggests that in the case of the human child, this “relation to nature is altered by
a certain dehiscence at the heart of the organism, a primordial Discord” betrayed by
the infant’s lack of motor coordination (Écrits, 2). The word “dehiscence,” referring in
botany to the gaping or bursting open of vessels containing the seeds of plants, could
refer both to the fragmenting or breaking up of the child’s sense of unity and to the
persistence of this false sense through its later life. This process, as well as the child’s
assuming an image, is elaborated in an important passage:

This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively projects the formation
of the individual into history. The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is


part viii: the twentieth century

precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation – and which manufactures for the subject,
caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends
from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic – and,
lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its
rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development. (Écrits, 4)

Lacan also speaks of the “spatial captation manifested in the mirror-stage.” What he
seems to be suggesting in the passage above is that the mirror stage is a phase where the
temporally discrete experiences of the child in reality are projected, in their mirrored
idealization, into the form of space, a form in which totality and permanence can
obtain. Space, as the dimension in which images subsist, is thereby also the medium
in which fantasies of imaginary unity can be constructed. Lacan suggests that the
movement of the mirror phase is from the child’s actual “insufficiency” through its
“anticipation” of its entry into the symbolic order to the child’s “assumption” of the
protection of a unified identity; this identity, however, is alienating: it is fictive, a
spatialized projection into unity of the child’s actually temporally discrete “self.” Lacan’s
point seems also to be that the recourse to this “rigid” fiction, to this brittle and
breakable identity, will haunt the remainder of the child’s mental development.

Lacan continues the metaphor of armor and protection, explaining that “the formation
of the I is symbolized in dreams by a fortress, or a stadium – its inner arena and
enclosure, surrounded by marshes and rubbish-tips, dividing it into two opposed
fields of contest where the subject flounders in quest of the lofty, remote inner castle
whose form . . . symbolizes the id in a quite startling way.” Lacan adds that likewise,
on the mental plane, fortified structures are metaphors designating the “mechanisms
of obsessional neurosis – inversion, isolation, reduplication, cancellation and displacement”
(Écrits, 5). According to Lacan’s metaphors, the id – the locus of unconstrained
instincts and desires, and perhaps the projection of remembered, imagined unity and
totality – is the lofty inner castle, to whose protection the floundering “subject” – the
“I” that has entered the constraints and self-alienation of the symbolic order – wishes
to return. And yet it seems that the metaphor of fortification expresses not only the
formation of the “I” but also the operations of neurosis: it expresses both the “defences
of the ego” and the alienating, neurosis-generating nature of these defenses, dating
from the end of the mirror stage, from the “deflection of the specular I into the
social I ” (Écrits, 5).

In other words, the passing of the mirror stage marks the transition from the child’s
jubilant and comforting assumption of his satisfying total image or “I” in the mirror to
his entry into the social world. As Lacan puts it, the ending of the mirror stage
“inaugurates . . . the dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated
situations” (Écrits, 5). Lacan adds that this moment corresponds to a “natural maturation,”
which itself is normalized by “cultural mediation” as in the case of the Oedipus
complex (Écrits, 5–6). The child has effectively passed from the imaginary order to the
symbolic order. What Lacan seems to be suggesting is that from this point onward,
the child’s knowledge or awareness will never be immediate, will never be based on a
somehow pure experience which precedes identity formation and the categories of
subject and object; rather it will enter a “socially elaborated” system where all knowledge
will be relational and highly mediated (through social, educational, and ideological


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structures), and where the child as “subject” will confront elements of the world as
“objects,” as forms of otherness or foreignness to his identity; his relation to these
objects will assume the form of desire, which is, according to Hegel, the form of
consciousness itself (since it is desire of a subject for an object that defines their mutual
relation as one of mutual demarcation, separation, and definition). Moreover, these
objects are constituted in “an abstract equivalence by the co-operation of others,” in
other words by a socially based consensus that determines the criteria of sameness and
difference between objects, that determines – abstractly, rather than by any natural or
essential connections between them – how objects will be categorized.

Opposing the philosophy of existentialism which, according to Lacan, takes consciousness
as a primary datum in the fashion of Descartes, Lacan does not regard “the
ego as centred on the perception-consciousness system,” or as organized by the “reality
principle.” He insists that “we should start instead from the function of méconnaissance
that characterizes the ego in all its structures” (Écrits, 6). The word méconnaissance
refers to a failure to recognize or appreciate, a misreading, a misprizing, or even a
disavowal or repudiation of an action. Lacan’s point seems to be that the ego, far from
being the coherent, unified, and rational agency that has been bequeathed by Descartes
and by Enlightenment philosophy, is characterized by its very failure to achieve unity,
by its very failure to achieve self-understanding, by its perpetual propensity to misprision.
At the end of his article, Lacan seems to imply that the very process of the
formation of the “I,” of which the mirror stage is a founding moment, itself harbors
“the most extensive definition of neurosis” (Écrits, 7). Is Lacan, like Freud, redefining
the human being as the “neurotic animal”? If so, he hints at certain historical conditions
underlying our general neurosis: his opposition to existentialism is based in part
on its failure to explain the “subjective impasses” arising from a society based primarily
on utilitarian functions and a lack of true freedom, and the recognition of another
consciousness only by what Lacan calls “Hegelian murder,” by a stagnant immersion
in (rather than progression through) Hegel’s master–slave dialectic (Écrits, 6). Lacan
also seems to see neurosis and psychosis as a function of the “deadening of the passions
in society.” Whereas anthropology has long examined the connections of nature and
culture, says Lacan, it is psychoanalysis alone that recognizes the “knot of imaginary
servitude that love must always undo again, or sever” (Écrits, 7). Is this an appeal, like
Kristeva’s, to return to the fullness of the imaginary as a resource for subversive thinking,
as a locus that preexists the bondage of the symbolic, weighed down as this is in
convention and tradition? The general tenor of Lacan’s thought is more conservative,
though he does at times invoke Dali and the concept of “paranoiac knowledge,” an
obsession with order and unity and terror of fragmentation, an obsession that has
worked its way through Western thought for many centuries.

Lacan’s theories of language and the unconscious are formulated in a widely known
paper called “The Agency/Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious since Freud.”
This paper was delivered initially as a lecture in 1957 to a philosophy group at the
Sorbonne, and subsequently reprinted in Écrits. In the first part of his paper, entitled
“The Meaning of the Letter,” Lacan urges that psychoanalysis “discovers in the
unconscious . . . the whole structure of language” (Écrits, 147). Lacan is reacting
implicitly against a psychological view of the unconscious as a locus of desire and
instinct. He observes, in a cryptically tautological gesture, that “letter” is to be taken


part viii: the twentieth century

“literally” here: it is the “material support that concrete discourse borrows from language”
(Écrits, 147). Lacan attempts to clarify this definition: language does not consist
of “the various psychical and somatic functions that serve it in the speaking subject.”
Language and its structure exist prior to the moment at which the speaking subject
makes his entry into it (Écrits, 148). Lacan seems to imply here that the various
elements which are immediately involved in an individual subject’s making of utterances
– sound-image, visual image, and the impressions of these upon sensation,
together with psychic associations of sounds and meanings – do not constitute language,
whose structure is itself their enabling foundation. Another way of putting this
is to say that language is not innate (the individual is not born possessing it), nor is it
merely a form of behavior.

Lacan proceeds to talk of the subject as “the slave of language,” whose place is
already “inscribed at birth” (Écrits, 148). Hence, it is not the subject who gives rise to
language or who controls it; rather, it is language which governs and constitutes the
subject. Language is not generated by a communal experience comprising the aggregate
or even accumulation of individual speech acts. It is language, then, which determines
and authorizes the range of cultural structures and possible experience. The point is
that language does not arise from these, for there cannot be meaningful experiences
which are somehow prelinguistic (Écrits, 148).

The only assumptions allowed by Lacan are those through which language has
become an object of scientific investigation. He observes that linguistics itself has
attained the status of an object of scientific investigation, and currently this science
occupies a key position: the reclassification of the sciences around linguistics is tantamount
to “a revolution in knowledge” (Écrits, 149). He observes that the constitutive
moment of the emergence of linguistics, the founding moment of this science, is contained
in an algorithm:

S (Signifier)
s (Signified)

This algorithm is essentially Saussure’s formulation. But the position of Saussurean
linguistics, says Lacan, is suspended at this precise distinction between two orders
“separated initially by a barrier resisting signification” (Écrits, 149). We need to understand
this limitation in order to grasp the connections proper to the signifier and their
function in the genesis of the signified. What Lacan seems to be pointing out is that
the bar or barrier, in Saussure’s scheme, is itself outside of the structure of language,
imposed, as it were, from without. This primordial distinction or barrier, says Lacan,
transcends the discussion of arbitrariness of the sign, which is constrained to the
relation of word and thing. In other words, the extra-linguistic nature of the barrier
cannot be accounted for or explained simply as signifying arbitrariness (in the connection
between signifier and signified).

In sum, no signification can be sustained other than by reference to another signification.
There is no language (langue) which cannot cover the whole field of the signified.
If we grasp in language the constitution of an object, this constitution is found at the
level of a concept (which is very different from simple naming). To grasp an object in
language, we find the object constituted only at the level of the concept, not as a thing.


psychoanalytic criticism

In other words, it is an illusion that “the signifier answers to the function of representing
the signified” (Écrits, 150). This illusion or heresy – that the signifier represents the
signified – leads logical positivism to search for the “meaning of meaning,” or to search
for the final signified (treating this as the actual thing or entity) to which the signifier
points, excluding the apparatus of interpretation (Écrits, 150). The relation between
signifier and signified is not one of parallelism.

Saussure’s diagram of TREE/Picture of tree (as an illustration of the connection
between signifier and signified) could be replaced, to better illustrate this connection,
with two identical doors over which, respectively, are inscribed “Ladies” and
“Gentlemen.” This, says Lacan, should silence the “nominalist debate” by showing how
“the signifier enters the signified” (Écrits, 151). In other words, the signifier or sound-
image “Ladies” does not merely point to a signified or concept that somehow is already
there, outside of it: it enters the signified, it alters or creates the meaning or concept.
The bathroom doors are identical but they do not have the same meaning; this meaning
is structured or “entered” by the signifier. As Lacan says later, the signifier “always
anticipates meaning by unfolding its dimension before it.” When we say “I shall
never . . .” or “And yet there may be . . . ,” these interrupted remarks are not without
meaning, and are all the more oppressive inasmuch as they make us wait for this
meaning (Écrits, 153).

But no contrived example, warns Lacan, can be as telling as the actual experience of
truth. If a train arrives at a station and a little brother and sister are sitting face to face
in a compartment, one of them will see the sign “Ladies,” and the other, “Gentlemen.”
They will disagree on what they are seeing. This signifier (seen differently) will become
subject to “the unbridled power of ideological warfare.” For these children, “ladies”
and “gentlemen” will henceforth be “two countries towards which each of their souls
will strive on divergent wings” (Écrits, 152). Another way of putting this might be to
say that each signified is the “same” country, traversed from different points of view;
the difference in point of view, however, creates a difference in the signified.

In the algorithm signifier/signified, access from one to the other cannot have a
signification. The algorithm can reveal only the structure of the signifier in this transfer.
In other words, the algorithm cannot reveal the connection between signifier and
signified but only the connections between the signifier in this algorithm and the
signifiers in other algorithms. These units (signifiers) are subjected to a double condition:
(1) being “reducible to ultimate differential elements” in a synchronic system;
these elements are phonemes, the smallest units of sound that can indicate differences
in meaning; the differential connection of phonemes present the “letter,” which Lacan
calls “the essentially localized structure of the signifier”; and (2) “combining them
according to laws of a closed order”; this second property of the signifier reflects the
“topological substratum of . . . the signifying chain.” Lacan sees this chain as “rings of
a necklace that is a ring in another necklace made of rings” (Écrits, 152–153). The
connections between the various rings is differential: meaning is not contained in any
one of these rings but is a movement through them; and even these connections
between rings on one level or circle ultimately depend on the entire necklace, which is
itself but one ring on an even larger necklace. As Lacan has it, “it is in the chain of the
signifier that the meaning ‘insists’ but that none of its elements ‘consists’ in the signification
of which it is at the moment capable” (Écrits, 153). The Latin sistere means “to


part viii: the twentieth century

stand”; hence insistere means “to stand upon” but can also mean to stop or pause,
to dwell upon, and to doubt or withhold one’s assent. The word consistere means to
place oneself somewhere, to stand still, stop, to settle or take up an abode, to stand or
remain, to endure or subsist. The point seems to be, then, that meaning does not settle
or halt at any one element in the signification chain: none of these elements in itself
consists of meaning. Rather, meaning pauses, or stands upon, elements in the chain,
always moving from one to another, none of the elements, therefore, being stable.

We are forced then, says Lacan, in a statement that was to become widely cited, “to
accept the notion of an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier” (Écrits,
154). What he appears to mean by this is that (1) we can never reach the pure signified;

(2) that the realm of the signifier is far more extensive, both structuring and controlling
the realm of the signified; the latter realm can never somehow extend or protrude
beyond the domains of the signifier since that would imply that concepts (and ultimately
things, entities) can exist prior to, and independently of, the process of signification;
(3) the relation between the two realms, contrary to Saussure’s formulation of it, is not
linear. In fact, says Lacan, all “our experience runs counter to this linearity”; at most,
one can speak of “anchoring points” when considering the subject’s constitution and
transformation by language (Écrits, 154). Saussure’s view of the “chain of discourse” as
linear can only apply in a temporal dimension. Otherwise, one has only to listen to
poetry “for a polyphony to be heard.” And Lacan sees all discourse as marked by such
polyphony: “all discourse is aligned along the several staves of a score” (Écrits, 154).
Lacan appears to be following Jakobson here. Indeed, as an example of this polyphonic
process, of the sliding of the signified under the signifier, of the crossing of the bar
(barre) of Saussure’s algorithm, he looks again at the word “tree” (pointing out that
arbre is an anagram of barre). The signifier “tree” can bring to mind a range of
significations, from the strength and majesty of nature, through biblical connotations
(the shadow of the cross), to various pagan symbolisms: what these multiple
significations show is that an element in the signifying chain can be used “to signify
something quite other than what it says” (as “tree” was used to refer to the cross, etc.).
And this function of speech is also the “function of indicating the place of this subject
in the search for the true” (Écrits, 155). Hence, in the very process of using signification,
the subject or speaker is herself inserted at a specific point into the signifying
chain. This “properly signifying function . . . in language,” this process whereby one
word is used to mean something else, has a name (that Lacan purports vaguely to recall
from Quintilian): this name is metonymy (Écrits, 156). Lacan cites an example of
metonymy: when “thirty sails” is used to refer to “ship”; in other words, when the part
is taken for the whole. Lacan’s immediate point here is that “the connexion between
ship and sail is nowhere but in the signifier, and that it is in the word-to-word connexion
that metonymy is based” (Écrits, 156). Metonymy, then, the core of the signifying
process, is a connection between signifiers, between words, and not between signifiers
and signifieds.
Lacan states: “I shall designate as metonymy, then, the one side (versant) of the
effective field constituted by the signifier, so that meaning can emerge there . . . The
other side is metaphor” (Écrits, 156). Lacan acknowledges his debt to Roman Jakobson
in viewing metonymy and metaphor as lying at the heart of the signifying process.
Lacan urges that metaphor does not spring from the presentation of two images, i.e., of


psychoanalytic criticism

“two signifiers equally actualized.” Rather, the creative spark of metaphor “flashes
between two signifiers one of which has taken the place of the other in the signifying
chain, the occulted signifier remaining present through its (metonymic) connexion
with the rest of the chain . . . One word for another: that is the formula for metaphor”
(Écrits, 157). Hence, in Lacan’s eyes, the “occulted” or displaced word remains, though
reduced to the same level of metonymic presence as other signifiers (Écrits, 158).
If metonymy yields a certain power to “circumvent the obstacles of social censure,”
metaphor reminds us that the spirit could not “live without the letter” (Écrits, 158). It
was “none other than Freud who had this revelation, and he called his discovery the
unconscious” (Écrits, 159). By the end of this section, Lacan has, with several forms
of wordplay, discussed the “meaning of the letter,” laying down his basic positions
regarding language and the signifying process, viewing the notions of truth, subjectivity,
and objectivity as immanent in this process (created within it rather than assuming
any externality or independence from it). His final sentence, concerning Freud’s
revelation, anticipates his forthcoming examination of structuring of the unconscious
by the operations of the linguistic process.

In the second part of his paper, entitled “The Letter in the Unconscious,” Lacan
points out Freud’s increasing attention to language as he examined the unconscious. In
fact, Freud’s “royal road to the unconscious,” his “Interpretation of Dreams,” is concerned
throughout with “the letter of the discourse, in its texture, its usage” (Écrits, 159).
Freud was aware of the linguistic grounding of mental processes, and just as the linguistic
structure enables discourse, so it “enables us to read dreams” (Écrits, 159–160).

Lacan has spoken of the “sliding of the signified under the signifier.” He sees this
process designated as “distortion” or “transposition” in Freud’s account of the dream.
According to Freud, dream distortion, referring to the repressive transformation or
disguising of embarrassing elements by the conscious ego, was accomplished by at least
two strategies, condensation and displacement. Lacan equates these two strategies with
what he has described as the two “sides” of the effect of the signifier on the signified:
metaphor and metonymy. Condensation corresponds to metaphor, whose field is “the
structure of the superimposition of the signifiers” (Écrits, 160). Lacan, we may remember,
had defined metaphor as the substitution of one signifier for another, with the displaced
one remaining in metonymic form. The second strategy, that of “displacement,”
Lacan sees as corresponding to metonymy, a “veering off ” on the part of the
signifying process, so as to foil the censoring ego. In short, Lacan sees the mechanisms
that are fundamental to the signifying process in language – metaphor and metonymy

– as equally fundamental to the dream. The dream is “a form of writing,” and the
“dream-work follows the laws of the signifier” (Écrits, 161).
Lacan now turns to the function and place of the subject in the signifying process.
Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, he suggests, avers a “link between the transparency of the
transcendental subject and his existential affirmation” (Écrits, 164). Descartes’ statement
“I think, therefore I am” assumes that the human self is “transcendental”: it
exists as a unity prior to its empirical experience. It is transparent because, in principle,
everything is knowable about it, and it provides a clear, detached, perspective onto the
world, being uncolored or smeared by the opacity of a specific historically conditioned
subjectivity. This transparent self affirms its own existence, locating this in its very
ability to think. In other words, its “being” is equated or identified with its “thought”


part viii: the twentieth century

in an unmediated relationship. Lacan cites a more modern, and perhaps less impugnable,
version of Descartes’ formula: “ ‘cogito ergo sum,’ ubi cogito, ibi sum” (I think,
therefore I am, where I think, there I am) (Écrits, 165).

It was Freud’s “Copernican Revolution” (which we might see as a second such
revolution, Kant having claimed the first) that created “the Freudian universe,” in
which was questioned for a second time “the place man assigns to himself at the centre
of a universe.” According to Lacan, the place that I occupy as signifier will be a place in
language, a grammatical function; the place that I occupy as a signified will be a
concept that is also situated within the networks of language. The “I” which speaks
(known to linguists as the “subject of enunciating,” the actual person pronouncing a
sentence about herself ) is not definable as a coherent unity and cannot be adequately
represented or signified by the “I” which is the subject of the sentence (the “subject of
enunciation”). The question, says Lacan, is one of “knowing whether I am the same as
that of which I speak” (Écrits, 165). In other words, is my being the same as that being
which is signified in the language that expresses my thought? Lacan’s answer is negative:
the very process of signification, of conceptualization in thought and language, is a
substitution for actual existence (Hegel – whose views on the connection between
existence and signification anticipate Lacan’s – would say a “mediation” of existence).
Language, as a network of signifiers, displaces and redistributes the world of immediate
existence, a world that can be known only as it is mediated by language. We might
recall that the self that emerged from the imaginary stage was a split subject, with its
repressed desire opening up the field of its unconscious; hence the child is split
between unconscious desire (for the mother, for wholeness, for unity, for absolute
meaning, all vestiges of the imaginary stage) and its conscious obligations in the symbolic
order. In the passage above, Lacan describes this split as a desire split between “a
refusal of the signifier and a lack of being.” The choice, for my desire, is between
signifying and existing: to refuse the signifier is to opt for an imaginary fullness and
unity of being; if I choose to subsist as a signifier, I take my place in a vast network of
signification but I have distanced myself from the world of existence: I cannot “situate
myself,” my real being, in the signifying chain. Hence, “my” thought, far from being
under my control or identifiable as the basis of my identity, is actually part of a vaster
signifying process in which I find myself and which largely controls me; and when I am
caught up in this vast chain of signification, the situation of myself as signified is not
the situation of myself as existing. The second part of the formula seems to suggest that
my immediate self-consciousness involves a (perhaps temporary or provisional)
repression of my knowledge that these larger structures of thought and signification
constitute me. It might be said that certain of Lacan’s insights here, such as the distinction
between the ontological and semiotic dimensions of any entity, were already
formulated by Hegel and a number of neo-Hegelian philosophers on a somewhat
higher intellectual plane.

Indeed, the desire that comprises the unconscious, a desire that mocks philosophy
and the infinite, a desire that associates knowing and dominating with jouissance, is an
endless journey through an infinite chain of signifiers. The subject is “caught in the
rails – eternally stretching forth towards the desire for something else – of metonymy”
(Écrits, 167). After the mirror phase, the subject is on an endless quest for unity,
for wholeness, for security, a quest that must take place metonymically along a chain


psychoanalytic criticism

of signifiers, one being displaced for another (Écrits, 167). Lacan draws attention to
the rhetorical nature of the “talking cure” in psychoanalysis, whereby the unconscious
mechanisms correspond with the figures of style and the tropes enumerated by
rhetoricians such as Quintilian (Écrits, 169). He ends this section by issuing a caution
against psychoanalysts who are “busy remodelling psychoanalysis into a right-thinking
movement whose crowning expression is the sociological poem of the autonomous ego”
(Écrits, 171).

The third section of Lacan’s paper is called “The Letter, Being and the Other.” His
concern here is to show how psychoanalysis has been bypassing the “truth discovered
by Freud,” which affirms, in Lacan’s words, “the self ’s radical ex-centricity to itself
with which man is confronted” (Écrits, 171). The notion of the unconscious indicates
that the self bears an otherness within itself; or, rather, the self ’s otherness can be seen
as external, as alien, to itself. Psychoanalysis has “compromised” this insight, which is
contained in both the letter and spirit of Freud’s works. The psychoanalytic institution
has fallen prey to a humanism long prevalent in Western thought, one of its tenets
being the idea of a unified personality, an idea that has persisted through Descartes’
cogito and Enlightenment philosophy into the present: the idea of the human being as
a rational, autonomous, free agent. Psychoanalysis has fallen under this general disposition,
engaging in “moralistic tartufferies” and talking endlessly about the “total
personality” (Écrits, 172). The underlying idea being that neurosis can be cured once
placed in the totalizing narrative of the coherent conscious life of the patient.

But this, insists Lacan, is to compromise and domesticate Freud’s radical discovery:
the unconscious cannot be treated as simply an aberration that must somehow
be reintegrated into the total, normal personality, into the customary bourgeois-
Enlightenment conception of the ego. The unconscious, as constituted by desire, is
not only structured like a language in its operations through mechanisms such as
metaphor and metonymy, but also thereby extends the nature of its operations, fueled
by desire – including the endless search for unity along an infinite chain of signifiers,
the deferment and displacement of meaning, the inability to accede to reality other
than through language – into the realm of the conscious, there in fact being no sharp
demarcation between these. Freud taught us that we witness our nature “as much and
more in our whims, our aberrations, our phobias and fetishes, as in our more or less
civilized personalities” (Écrits, 174). We cannot simply place the unconscious alongside
our rational selves as inherited from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment: our
conception of the operations of reason itself must be transformed; madness has been
used by the philosopher to adorn the “impregnable burrow of his fear . . . the supreme
agent forever at work digging its tunnels is none other than reason, the very Logos that
he serves” (Écrits, 174). Reason has been used to hide and define madness, an operation
inspired by fear rather than love of knowledge. Since Freud’s discovery, however,
of a “radical heteronomy . . . gaping within man,” this gap can never be hidden over
again. Repeating his famous statement, Lacan reminds us that the “unconscious is the
discourse of the Other (with a capital O)” (Écrits, 172). It is with the appearance of
language that “the dimension of truth emerges” and the existence of subjects can be
recognized in “the manifested presence of intersubjectivity” (Écrits, 172). The slightest
alteration “in the relation between man and the signifier . . . changes the whole course
of history by modifying the moorings that anchor his being” (Écrits, 174). It is precisely


part viii: the twentieth century

in this, says Lacan, that Freudianism has “founded an intangible but radical
revolution . . . everything has been affected” (Écrits, 174). What Lacan is calling for,
then, is a return to Freud, a return to the letter (and spirit) of the Freudian text, a
return to the truly radical nature of his discovery of the unconscious, as well as an
endeavor to formulate this discovery – and to realize its radical potential – in linguistic
terms. Lacan reminds us that the patient’s symptom is indeed a metaphor, and that
man’s desire is a metonymy: it is the concept of humanistic man, man as a total,
integrated being, that has stood in the way, through “many centuries of religious
hypocrisy and philosophical bravado,” of our being able to articulate the connection
between metaphor and the question of being, and between metonymy and a lack of
being (Écrits, 175).

In insisting on the self ’s “radical ex-centricity” to itself, this phrase refers not to
simple externality (as in the self being outside of itself ) but perhaps also to the idea
that the self is not centered on itself, it does not move on the same axis as itself. What
does it mean to say that the self in these ways is external to itself ? To say that the
unconscious is not so much within us, centered on the same axis as the conscious
mind of which it is a kind of controlled depth or projection, but that the unconscious
is “radically” exterior to the conscious mind; it is not “beneath” it, not somehow
secondary to it, not adjectival upon it. Rather, the unconscious is engaged in a dialectically
uneven series of connections with the conscious mind whereby it structures the
conscious mind somewhat and the conscious mind thus structured in turn exerts its
influence on the unconscious. In answering the questions just posed, we need to be
careful not to think of the conscious mind itself as some sort of unity – this is precisely
what Lacan is rejecting – any more than the unconscious is a unity. The two notions do
not stand in binary opposition. The point is that by viewing the unconscious as radically
exterior and “other,” Lacan forces into visibility the notion that the unconscious
is not somehow tucked away, hidden and protected from the social structures which
govern the world, a world they construct and define through language. Rather, the
unconscious is part of that world; it is subject to, and constituted by, the same fundamental
linguistic processes as is the conscious mind; as such, like the conscious mind,
it is without a center, without an essence, without a psychological substratum; it is
nothing more than the series of positions it occupies in language, a series of positions
that can only artificially and for convenience be coerced into identity as a “subject,”
and, with even more coercion, molded into the coherence of an ego or self.

In this way, Lacan, through “insisting” on the agency of the “letter” in the unconscious,
brings out the truly radical and subversive nature of the otherness discovered
by Freud: the unconscious. In Freud’s work (in spite of its actually radical implications),
the unconscious – often treated as one controllable and aberrational element in
a broader overall and normalizable structure of the mind – is in danger of being tamed
and domesticated, of subserving the very notion of a coherent ego or self, descended
through centuries of theology, humanism, and Enlightenment, that it set out to subvert.
By dethroning the unconscious from this unwitting disposition toward transcendence
in Freud’s work, by immanentalizing it within the vast networks of signification into
which the child is born and which in effect constitute the child’s psychology as a
network of significations, by resituating the unconscious within language, by redefining
it as and through language, Lacan returns us to the startling and revolutionary nature


psychoanalytic criticism

of the Freudian discovery. This extension of the genuine implications of Freud’s theories
was furthered by the structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser, who adapted Lacan’s insights
in his account of the workings of the ideological apparatus of the political state, thereby
exploring the connections – which are merely latent in Freud – between the unconscious
and social structures.

Notes

1
This treatment of Freud’s life and work is based on his own account as offered in “An
Autobiographical Study” (1925). It is included in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York
and London: W. W. Norton, 1989). The following accounts of Freud’s various works draw
upon some of Peter Gay’s insights, and all further citations of Freud’s works refer to this
excellent and easily accessible collection. Hereafter cited as Freud.