Freud
jacquelynjampolsky
Attached is a reading guide and outline of the activities planned for Monday's discussion on Freud.
I kept on the theme of a reading guide and included a substantive outline as well.
For discussion, after our esteemed presenters do their thing- we are going to divide the rest of the time into two parts to: (1) do a Freudian analysis of the hypothetical as a class, and (2) work on connecting Freud's technique to broader questions of identity and social theory by going over some discussion questions (I propose only 4).
- JJ
jacquelynjampolsky
Also, for what it is worth, I think you are all brilliant and inspiring people who should be proud of the great work you are doing.
Eric Reiff
Eric A. Reiff
GEOG 5100 Social Theory, Discussion Paper 8
Sigmund Freud – An Outline on Psychoanalysis, Dora (not the Explorer!)
5 November 2012
While the larger social implications of Freud’s work is more explicit in Civilization and Its Discontents these two pieces give evidence as to Freud’s greater arc of theory and at what he offers us beyond therapy. In these two works Freud offers us a modified Cartesian ontology of interiority and exteriority which I will discuss 1) as the being of self, 2) the limitation of knowledge in this structure of being, 3) the role of symbols in being and knowledge. First Freud agrees with Descartes that our world is split into interior and exterior. Freud’s addition is that he complexifies our interior by dividing it into an unconscious, pre-conscious, and conscious. These states of being are governed by raw drives (Es), external social rules and expectations that we internalize and self-police (Über-Ich), and the everyday consciousness (Ich) that navigates the external world while dealing with the demands of the Es and Über-Ich (3). The theory of the conscious, pre-conscious, and unconscious puts large swaths of our being outside of the control of our Ich which is the only interiority that Descartes leaves room for. With a battle for control raging between the Es (unconscious drives) and the Ich, we develop repressive tensions that affect our consciousness through current tensions and remembered developmental tensions. Ontologically the world is a mash of past and present tensions between Es drives and Ich controls, fought out across a self made up of a consciousness that appears to represent the world and an unconsciousness that houses drives that are repressed. Being therefore is complicated, never fully in the grasp of one’s consciousness and unavailable without the aid of a psychoanalyst who can make conscious what is repressed.
Second, this ontological structure means that epistemologically we can never be sure of what we think we know or as Freud says, “‘reality’ will always remain ‘unknowable’” (50). We can repress memories as well as impulses in an unconscious that we can’t access without help from a psychoanalyst—interestingly, a person who by virtue of being a human would also be struggling with their own hidden self. Alone then we never consciously fully know anything because a part of us is repressed. In the case of Dora, Freud believes that she had repressed reality such that relationships became confused, memories forgotten, and somatic ailments the result of psychical repression. Freud explains how this repression and the drives of the unconsciousness can be exposed through dream therapy. That is, he argues that by looking at two of Dora’s dreams as windows into the battle between her Es and Ich he can map out her repressed drives and memories to discover the “truth” of past events in order to “cure” her of hysteria. That is, in cases where the individual’s Ich is so damaged by its battle with the Es that a patient suffers from psychosis, a psychoanalyst can expose the true nature of the Es’s drives and what has been repressed. That everything comes back to sex is in this case (and Freud says all hysteria cases) possibly due to the misogynistic and sexually repressive time and place in which he was doing his work. I only recall in one place where Freud mentions that Dora was of a particular moral upbringing which reveals the importance of the Über-Ich that he doesn’t forcefully deploy in these pages. It seems possible that the Über-Ich gives Freud the flexibility to be culturally aware or (gasp!) culturally relativistic when analyzing occurrences of mental ailments, but in these works his focus is on the battle between the Es (which is primordial) and Ich (which is the self in the now). His lack of attention to the Über-Ich simply leaves me unsatisfied.
Finally, Freud talks to us about symbols like fire and water, key and jewelry box that have powerful meaning for him in analysis and potentially for those of us at work in the social sciences. Freud analyzes symbols in Dora’s dream analysis to tell her that instead of worrying about missing keys and lovely jewelry box gifts she is really fixating on male and female genitals. Freud says that our unconscious can become pre-conscious and conscious, so if symbolism is at work in our unconscious it surely has to be at work in our conscious. If this is true then analyzing symbols in our world can be revealing to how society at large functions. (I am well aware that this is an entire fork in social theory and that I am impoverished by not yet having surveyed it.) We could for instance start to understand why there has never been a women President of the US in terms of symbols. The position is one of symbolic strength and a projection of power, which is preserved by a masculine figure, while denigrated by a feminine figure—one only need to think of the gendered comments that Hillary Clinton had to endure when running for president that her male opponents did not. For the same reasons, in America we preference military budgets over social welfare based on the symbolism of the male genital being preserved in the military and degenerated by helping others. We could talk about capitalism in the same way but then I would have to bust out my Gibson-Graham and I’m out of space.
To sum up Freud gives us an ontology of a self that we can never know without the help of a trained professional who presumably must also be analyzed so that they can be conscious of their Es and repression so as to remain objective. But, I’m still not comfortable with any objective reality in Freud’s framework; it seems impossible if the self and thus the social world are in part governed by drives which we repress into our unconsciousness. However, I think that Freud offers us a stimulating point of departure to talk about feminism not because he is a Viennese man from the sexually repressive 19th century, but because he gives us a framework on which to start talking about sex and formation of gender. A framework which is part primordial and socially symbolic, part cultural and oppressive, and part consciousness trying to navigate reality with primal drives and social expectations.
On Tuesday, October 30, 2012 5:23:53 PM UTC-6, jacquelynjampolsky wrote:
Kaitlin Fertaly
Kaitlin Fertaly
GEOG 5100
Freud
Response to Freud’s Outline of Psychoanalysis and Dora
In these two texts, Freud’s describes his theory of psychoanalysis and deploys this method to analyze the hysterical symptoms and dreams of his patient Dora. His theory of psychoanalysis was profoundly transformative to Western thought. Drawing on his analysis of dreams, which he argued represent the fulfillment of wishes (21), he the idea of an unconsciousness, the Es or the source of various drives for gratification. The Ich, on the other hand, is our conscious or preconscious mind that has control over our everyday actions and is tasked with negotiating experiences in the outside world as well as negotiating with the Es by gaining mastery over its drives (2). There is also a third component of an individual’s psychical nature that the Ich also has to negotiate with: the Uber-Ich which is drives primarily from an individual’s childhood relationship to their parents and is an internalized notions of parental (and parental substitutes) demands. Psychological neurosis is generally the effect of disharmony between these three components and an individual’s experiences with the external world. Drawing on this psychological structure and his theory of drives, Freud is able to present a number of other radical ideas that were picked up and both used by and critiqued by later feminists theorists. These radical ideas stem from his challenges to notions of sex, normality, and femininity.
First of all, Freud challenges the conventional notion of sexuality: that it is the desire among individuals of the opposite sex to bring their genitals into contact with the other, usually for the means of procreation (7). He turns this on its head by arguing that sexuality begins at birth and that there is no sharp distinction between sexuality and genitals. He clearly demonstrates this in his analysis of Dora where he associated her spasmodic coughing with oral sexual gratification (469). However, despite these radical thoughts, Freud does not go so far as to challenge the problematic notions of homosexuality at the time, which he still sees as an example of inhibited sexual development (11). Furthermore, in his discussion of the Oedipus Complex and the development of healthy sexualities, Freud recognizes that there is no strict purity in masculinity and femininity but that individuals of either sex show both masculine and feminine characteristics (47-48).
Despite his still problematic view of homosexuality, Freud challenges the concept of normality, in terms of both sexual normality and psychical normality. “We have recognized that it is not scientifically feasible to distinguish between what is psychically normal and psychically abnormal, so this distinction—despite is practice importance—has only conventional value attached to it” (49). He discusses the problems of the culturally specific notions of proper sex in his analysis of Dora when he reminds his readers and critics to suppress their personal definitions of perversion citing the example of the homosexuality practiced by Greeks and suggesting that we should be aware of “the very vagueness of the boundaries of what might be called a normal sexual life in different races and at different periods of time” (470).
While Freud’s work often appears clearly dated and even a bit absurd at times (I find myself stuck on his concept of penis envy), his work paved the way for exploring different understandings of sex and gender while challenging what “normal” means. Because of these contributions, it is clear why his work was picked up by subsequent feminist theorist and reworked to form more contemporary notions of gender and sex.
Lindsay Skog
Week 11: Freud Response
In An outline of Psychoanalysis, Freud lays out his theory for understanding the ‘psychical apparatus’, or the workings of the mind (as opposed to the brain) and how those functions shape human/social experience. In Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria (Dora) Freud follows up his hypothesis with a case study of the ways in which his theory is operationalized to understand, and attempt to ‘cure’, an emotionally distressed, physical ill, and likely victimized and traumatized young woman. In brief, Freud theorized that the Es (Id), the Ich (Ego), and the Über-Ich (Super-Ego) work together to shape human behavior and experience. The Es, Freud explains is the bare, unimpressed mind with which we are born, and it is the place from which the drives for desire and destruction arise. Such desires must be tempered, or moderated, by the Ich—the aware self, the conscious. However, the authority of the Ich is not innate; it must be developed through the Über-Ich. The Über-Ich is the outside influence that shapes the ways in which the Ich negotiates the desires of the Es. In childhood, the Über-Ich is the parent(s), but with maturity the Über-Ich becomes society at large. Further, Freud argues that in this transition children must separate from one parent and attach to another in order to develop a ‘normal’ gender identity. Indeed, for Freud, it is a misstep in this process that leads to abnormal sexual development and mental illness. Despite the glaring naiveté and ignorance of Freud’s theories, for better or for worse, Freudian psychoanalysis underpins much of Western thought and understanding about the ways in which humans develop and function as social beings, especially with regards to gender, sexuality, and mental illness. While I would argue that Freud’s theories are limited in what they can reveal about the human psyche, they may be more useful when put into dialogue with Foucault’s work on discourse, knowledge, and sexuality.
In many ways, much of Foucault’s work on gender, sexuality, and deviance can be understood as a response to Freud. Referring to Foucault’s rereadings of Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, Lisa Downing writes,
All three, claims Foucault, bring to light not the depths of truth, but rather the fiction at the heart of depth claims and the extent to which interpretation has already been placed in that which may, at first, appear as original material awaiting primary interpretation. . . . And Freud’s psychoanalytic theory is shown to reveal the retroactively constructed fantasy of a cause of trauma, not a traumatic event itself (2008, 19-20, emphasis in the original).
This passage highlights Foucault’s aversion to Freud’s attempt at a grand theory or narrative that reduces human behavior to sexual repression while pointing to the discursive formations informing such attempts. For Foucault, the key to understanding behavior and experience is not locked in the developmental relations with ones parents, but in the ways in which behavior is categorized and normed. Foucault would argue that Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis categorizes and norms behavior and experience by medicalizing sexuality, and that these practices persist today to define ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ sexual behavior. Therefore, the value in Freud’s work lays in its illumination of the categories and discourses that it produces, not in its explanation. In considering these two theorists together, we can better understand Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis as, on one hand, embedded in a discourse of sexual normativity, and on another hand the parent of a specific line of discursive thought.
Gender presents a unique moment of convergence and divergence between Freud and Foucault, which leads to a set of questions. Both Freud and Foucault understand that gender is constructed, but in different ways. Freud understands gender as constructed through the process of disassociation with a parent of one gender and identifying with the parent of the other gender. In this way, gender construction, for Freud, is a construction of Ich. Foucault, however, understands gender as a construction of gendered discourses. What this brings to the fore is the relationship between Freud’s Über-Ich and Foucault’s discourse. If we are to understand the Über-Ich as the set of societal norms imposed on the mind, we can ask how this is related to discourse, and further how this relates to biopolitics. If Freud, had understood the Über-Ich as discourse, how would that have changed his formula of the ego as moderator between the Es and the Über-Ich? Would that have created a space for other formations of the Über-Ich that would exist outside of the discursive construction of the Über-Ich, and in so doing counter-act the reductionism of his theory?
References
Downing, L. 2008. The Cambridge introduction to Michel Foucault. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
On Tuesday, October 30, 2012 5:23:53 PM UTC-6, jacquelynjampolsky wrote:
Ian Rowen
Ian Rowen
GEOG 5100
November 4, 2012
Commentary on Freud
In An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Freud provides a model for the psychic world of the human. This model provides two three-part splits: First, the unconscious, preconscious and conscious, and then a second, more elaborate deconstruction: The id (Es), the most primal component of the self, which is instinctually driven in two directions—eros and thanatos, love/pleasure and death/destruction. The ego (Ich), which emerges later, mediates between the id’s urges and external reality. Finally, at about age 5, after being influenced by parents, society, and other features of the external world, the super-ego (Uber-Ich) begins developing, providing a sort of voice of the conscience that directs the self in socially-accepted modes. If these components get out of joint, neuroses or even psychosis are likely to occur. Dreams, the “empire of the illogical” (perhaps the best single phrase in this work), are the realm in which these components interact, in which the unconscious, preconscious, and conscious engage and manifest or resolve psychic problems.
One of the more remarkable claims in this work is its pretense of generality, even universality. To be sure, Freud does acknowledge a different psychic composition in the “savage”, as opposed to the “civilized”, and does allow for the absorption of cultural content into the primal id. But even given with those caveats, his scientific pretensions, apparently based speciously and solely on his own largely undocumented empirical results, lead him to argue that he has uncovered some profound secret key to the psyche (of course, after reading the 2nd dream interpretation “Dora”, now as I write the word “key”, I wonder if I must be making some phallic reference). Freud’s truth claims are terrifyingly ambitious—anyone who disagrees with him simply hasn’t done the requisite data collection—and female therapists may even be constitutionally unable to accept his truth, especially if they don’t sufficiently acknowledge their repressed penis envy.
As spectacularly influential as his work has been, Freud can be taken to task not only for his sexist theoretical assumptions, but also for his dangerously myopic portrayal and treatment of his patient, Dora. Based on a mere three months of contact, and creatively anchored by the interpretation of two dreams, Freud views a complicated web of family drama and medical symptoms through a psycho-sexual filter.
Many questions come to mind while reading this account. Why does he assume that Dora should be aroused by the forced kiss of an older man? How can he be so confident that Dora’s care for the children of Herr K. demonstrates her repressed love for him? Freud often points out temporal coincidences: The duration of her three-to-six week illnesses might match the time when Herr K. was away, and she gave Freud 14 days notice, just like the governess of the K family. So what? How can he leap from “wealthy” to “impotent” in Dora’s characterization of her father, based merely on phonetic similarity between the two German words? Or assume that Dora is in love not only with Herr K., but also her father and Frau K.?
These are all relatively minor questions revolving around at least two greater ones: How can Freud consistently dismiss Dora’s self-understanding in favor of his own interpretation? And as prominent as transference is in his account of Dora’s therapeutic failure, remarkably, Freud does not allow for the possibility that he may have been transferring his own past experiences with women onto Dora.
It is not only the prevailing patriarchal social structure of Freud’s day, but the interpretive framework of his own fashioning that allows Freud to portray himself as omniscient. The mantle of science, carried by the new field of “Psychoanalysis”, with its positing of a normally inaccessible but fundamentally influential unconscious mind, allowed Freud privileged access to knowledge. Psychoanalysis here becomes a technology of power.
As cringe-inducing an experience as reading “Dora” has been, I am glad to have read this work, and I look forward to giving Lacan his due in due time.
Chandler Griffith
Chandler Griffith
Reflection Paper
11/05/12
Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis and Fragment of an Analysis on Hysteria (Dora)
In An Outline of Psychoanalysis and Fragment of an Analysis on Hysteria (Dora), Sigmund Freud delineates both the foundations for contemporary understandings of psychic development and the capacity with which psychoanalysis can brandish consciousness and neuroses. Freud posits the cultivation of the Es, Ich, and Uber-Ich (the id, ego, and super-ego), through progression between the oral, anal, and phallic phases of sexual development, as part of a “natural and orderly development” of the human psyche (8). This teleological explanation of psychic development, akin to Karl Marx’s stages of economic development, can be used to support the broad misapplication of theories regarding gender-based difference, race thinking, and biological determinism we have previously encountered in this course. Perhaps the pervasiveness of Freud’s psychoanalytic theories stems from the fact that they are all encompassing. By this, I mean that all psychic phenomena, through varying degrees of contortion, can be presented as either manifestations, disruptions, or regressions of the tautological propositions put forth by Freud.
Homosexuality, as the most heralded of sexual perversions, is discussed as resulting from a disruption to normal sexual development (11). As troubling as this pathological perception may seem to a self-identified homosexual, it is preferable to epidemiological notions of homosexuality that focus on contagion and containment. Still, this framing of perversion, as stunted or inverted growth, nurtures ideas that all abnormalities can be “fixed.” Freud states that the patient grants the analyst the power that “his Uber-Ich exercises over his Ich,” thus giving the new Uber-Ich the power to “re-educate the neurotic (30).” Though these corrective tactics have no doubt led to the successful treatment and alleviation of countless suffering patients, they also lend themselves to ugly campaigns of re-education and social correction throughout modern history.
Freud’s portrayal of the neurotic Dora, as an 18 year old girl suffering from ignorance of her unconscious desires and fears, precludes any notion that her social and environmental surroundings could be the source of her problems. Freud claims that he focuses on Dora’s dreams because, since dreams are encountered by virtually everyone, this focus weakens accusations that psychoanalysts base their “picture of the normal psyche” on “findings in pathology” (19). This claim appears to be antithetical to his focus on Dora’s neuroses as well as the generalizability that he alludes to when he asserts that the doctor has duties “not only to the individual patient, but to science as well (436).” Frankly, the argument that Dora’s revulsion to the unwanted sexual advances of her father’s friend is merely an “affective reversal,” and proof of her neurotic defects, says more about Freud’s problematic views of gender norms than the hidden desire of a 14 year old girl (453). Freud’s insistence that practically everything can be reduced to a representation of genitalia, evidenced by his inclination to see vaginas at every corner, leaves me inclined to turn Freud’s analysis upon himself. However, Freud couches any external critique of his work by stating that “only the person who has repeated these observations on himself and others has set about being able to pass his own judgment on them (1).”
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Joanna Weidler-Lewis
Joanna Weidler-Lewis
Sigmund Freud: An Outline of Psychoanalysis, and Dora
In An Outline of Pscyhoanalysis Freud is offering a "dogmatic conspectus" of psychoanalysis in which he details the structure of the "psychical apparatus" as well as the energies within this apparatus and how they serve the preservation of the species (p. 12).
Structurally, the psychical apparatus has three parts the Es, Ich, and the Über-Ich; each of these parts has different forces or energies, and psychical processes can be conscious, preconscious, or unconscious. The Es is the biological and unconscious source of sexual drives and irrational impulses (i.e., the libido) that attempts to satisfy any innate needs. The Ich mediates the desires of the Es and external reality, or the constraints of the world. The Über-Ich is a third authority the Ich has to account for as the internalized voice of authority. As children, parents play the role of the Über-Ich, later parental substitutes contribute to the Über-Ich. The Es and the Über-Ich have one thing in common: they represent the influences of the past" (p. 4): the influences that are inherited and the influences of other people. Psychosis occurs when the Ich is unable to balance conflicting desires with the external world: "when either reality becom(es) unbearably painful, or the drives becom(e) extraordinarily intensified" (p. 57). However, since most of these drives are unconscious, only through the aid of a psychotherapist can one overcome psychosis.
Other aspects of Freud's theory detailed in this first selection are made salient in his psychoanalytic account of a patient in Dora. Dora is an 18-year-old woman diagnosed with hysteria. From what I infer from his depiction, her particular hysteria is a sporadic cough with no known other origin. Through psychoanalysis it revealed that Dora has a distant relationship with her mother, her father is having an affair with the wife of a couple who serves as surrogate parental figures, and the husband of this duo has made several advances on Dora at a young age. Freud's theory of the female Oedipal complex (which others have labeled the Electra complex), his idea of transference, and his belief in the interpretation of dreams, are all present in Dora. In Greek mythology Oedipus kills his father and marries his mother; for Freud this represents the bond between mother and son that begins infancy. For females, the subject of their desire is turned towards their father. Similarly, in transference, patients displace their feelings towards their father onto the therapist. To further justify his diagnosis of Dora, Freud posits that the dreams she shared in their sessions provided evidence for the fact that she repressed memories of her parents' sexual encounters in the night as a child, and that she was a bed wetter. (Oh, and her clamshell purse was a representation of female genitalia.)
I realize that Freud was very influential on modern Western thought; however, I am struggling with why it endures other than an exercise in absurdity and to laugh about penis envy. Even if we set aside the patriarchic and misogynistic themes in his work, what evidence does he provide for his theory other than a three-month case study with one woman? What is the scientific basis for an interpretation of dreams? The major difficulty with Freud's work is that there is no empirical test for its validity; it is not falsifiable, and therefore, cannot be considered scientific. Perhaps, we do not need to consider any Freudian contributions to science; after all, we are concerned with social theory, however, this feels unsatisfactory to me.
mikeszub
Freud Reflection Michael Szuberla
If I were to summarize my response to Freud’s psycho-analysis in a single phrase I could do no better than Wittgenstein’s epigraph to the Freud Reader which declared it “a powerful mythology” (vii).
Dora and An Outline of Psychoanalysis open a Pandora’s Box of neurosis, repression and “hysteria”. I was simultaneously impressed with Freud’s imaginative abilities and repulsed by where his imagination led. Most specifically I disliked his general willingness to exonerate and participate in the domination and manipulation of a young girl (Dora)).
Freud did not hide his periodic suggestive dominance over Dora. Like Dora’s father and Herr K., Freud utilized her for his own purposes (specifically Freud attempts to use Dora as a surrogate mother for his theories). At the center of Freud’s theoretical framework was the notion that every symptom derives from sexual dis-ease and inner-conflict. Thus Freud, for the most part, ignores Dora’s dysfunctional relationship with her mother (mentioned briefly on p 447) and instead pursues (or invents) pathologies that fit his psychosexual framework (p 435). For Freud, you can’t make an omelet without thinking about ovaries (p 470) and you can’t have hysteria without a uterus.
Freud’s major method for engaging the unconscious involved the interpretation of dreams. Dreams, for Freud, are a manifestation of psychosis (p26) but they were also the key to “understanding the psychical disturbances” (p50) because they gave free play to the psyche and fully display psychoses. Dream analysis has many obvious limits. It is safe to say that Freud’s patients dreamed in a procrustean bed. Dora, for instance, is little more than a Rorschach inkblot whose meaning can be shaped and interpreted to suit his purposes. If Dora had revealed a different story/set of symptoms it’s safe to assume that Freud’s conclusions about her would have been fairly similar. Freud, in fact, admits the “unavoidability of touching upon [or manufacturing of] sexual themes before undertaking a treatment of hysteria” (p470).
Let’s slip Freudian analysis into our discussion without exploring his relationships with his mother and governess or his likely suppressed homosexual impulses. Freud chose the pseudonym “Dora” for his patient. Why? What does (the name) Dora symbolize? After watching Freud transform seemingly mundane details into a detailed narrative we can be certain that every-thing is pregnant with meaning. The appellation “Dora” derives from “gift” and this seems quite apt. Like a gift box (insert vaginal references here) Dora is passed from Herr K. (who sexually harassed her) to her father who pushed her into therapy with Freud, who forced her into his conceptual framework.
We might also think of Freud, in Foucault’s terms, as one of the ultimate “technician[s] of behavior” (D&P 294). Psychoanalysis can be viewed as an attempted über-disciplinary technique that worked to “cure” deviations from the “norm”. This leads me to question whether it is even possible (in Freud’s view) to be well-adjusted and normal in this society. Does civilization’s repression of instinctive drives ensure neurosis? (p40) Is Freud correct when he suggests that health and happiness are more likely to be enjoyed by those outside of civilization?
Reading Freud decades after his time can lead to a quick dismissal of many of his ideas. But Freud’s influence is obvious and ever-present. For better or worse, psycho-analysis still has enormous influence over psycho-therapy. I worked for several years in the mental health field with abused and neglected teenagers and recall how therapists devoted a great deal of effort to detect symbolic meaning behind their client’s behaviors. For the purposes of our course, Agamben’s “thanatopolitics” (HS p142) is clearly indebted to Freud and Lefebvre’s notion of “phallocentric space” undoubtedly owes Freud a footnote.
Joel
Joel Correia
4 November 2012
GEOG 5100
Response Paper
Freud: An Outline of Psychoanalysis and Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria (Dora)
Though highly problematic, the psychoanalytic theory Freud explicates in these readings has clear influences on notions of deviance and social norms today. Hence, in this paper I outline the basic tenets of psychoanalysis, discuss connections between Freud and the “deviant” whom Foucault devotes much attention to, and finally critique this reading for its manifold faults. Nevertheless impacts from Freud’s works are evident in medical treatments, psychology, and commonplace western social norms today.
Perhaps the most influential of Freud’s contributions is psychoanalysis, a method used to analyze, characterize, and potentially “cure” those who exhibit deviant behavior or psychosis. At its root, psychoanalytic theory argues that within the human mind there is a fundamental relationship between the es, ich, and uber ich, or unconscious inherited influences, conscious actions that mediate both one’s relations with the world and between the es and uber ich, and external influences, respectively (pp. 2-3). These three elements of the human psyche are in constant relation and to some degree vie for control of the person. Drives to unite (eros) and destroy, derived from the es, are in constant struggle to influence the ich; they directly influence the psyche and cause all activity (pp. 5-6). The ich must regulate between not only the es and uber ich, but also between desires to satisfy or constrain both drives. Freud posits that the regulation or repression of (sexual) desires leads to hysteria, psychosis and/or deviant sexual and social behaviors. He also argues that one’s sexuality is developed at an early age through relations with the mother and father (pp. 8-10). Hence, the Oedipus (p. 42) and Electra (p. 48) complexes stem from these relations and significantly influence the norms of social and sexual development of the individual.
In deviance there lies an interesting relationship between Freud and Foucault. In the Foucauldian sense, Freud’s psychoanalytic method is essential to coding or judging individuals as abnormal or perverse, thus in need of treatment. Freud’s assessments define particular activities or attributes of a patient as outside the acceptable norm and therefore constitute hysteria (pp. 37-88), for example with the case of Dora. One passage in particular that elucidates this point is Freud’s comment about Dora’s reaction to Herr K.’s sexual advance in the attic. Freud states, “[t]hat was surely a situation that should have produced a clear sensation of sexual excitement in a fourteen year old girl who had never been touched by a man” (p. 452). Freud’s normative judgment about what a young girl should want and what “normal” sexual behavior is factors into his social role as a scientist with significant political implications as a creator of knowledge and consequently as a man with the power to discursively create what social norms should be. Similar judgments are evident throughout the text, but especially as he comments about homosexuals (p. 11), sexual degenerates (p. 8), and perversions in the form of fetishism (p. 57). The point that I am trying to make is that much of Foucault’s analysis in Discipline and Punish (1995) is aimed at power relations between those who create and legitimate notions of deviance and the deviants, deviants who are defined as such by persons of social and scientific power like Freud.
The power of Freud’s psychoanalytic theories is evident today. The methods that he developed to assess, judge, and “cure” are still used along with normative notions of what constitutes “acceptable” sexual behavior in western societies. However, Freud’s theories are clearly problematic for many reasons. First, as a product of their time they are patriarchal, overtly masculine, and deny agency or consideration to the perspectives of women and anyone who falls outside the “norm” of sexual behavior. Read today, Freud’s views are extremely antiquated. Moreover, the examples that he draws from (particularly the case of Dora) are weak and lack an exhibition of rigorous methods, measurement, and support. Rather than based on scientific principal, his assessments appear blurred by subjective claims rooted in male-dominated historical time period. Finally, I struggle to find use for Freudian theory in geography outside of acknowledging its influence on the creation of social norms. Though it is arguable that psychoanalysis provides a potential method to analyze symbols, I would sooner turn to deconstructionist scholars or discursive analysis to interrogate for this task. Thus, I close this paper with some questions. How do we, as geographers, employ psychoanalysis in our discipline to further our research and understanding of the world? Is there a space and utility for psychoanalysis in our work? If so, what is it?
Lauren Gifford
Lauren Gifford
An Outline of Psychoanalysis and Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria (Dora)
(Sigmund Freud)
4 November2012
GEOG 5100
In “An Outline of Psychoanalysis,” Freud details the three “physical provinces”: Es, Ich and Uber-Ich. The Es, which is the most hidden part of one’s psyche, encompasses the libido, which Freud describes as not solely sexual but a force of human behavior. The Es and the Uber-Ich, while inherently different, represent influences of the past while the Ich (ego)mediates between the Es and the outside world. In this paper, I will focus on the Uber-Ich as a form of parental and authoritative influence and how it seems to be present in the development of Foucault’s ideas on observation and governmentality.
The Uber-Ich is constituted from the collective influences of authority figures over a person when he or she is a child. The Uber-Ich, writes Freud, initiates aggression in the ego. That aggression manifests itself in deviance, perversion and other “self-destructive” behaviors (6). It is this idea that there is a sub- or un-conscience power that influences behavior that we see Freud at the root of Foucault’s scholarship. Foucault never goes into where this power comes from, he just assumes its omnipresence. In Freud we see that power is defined on the scale of the individual, and that it comes both from outside, authoritative forces (as Foucault contends) and internal, psychological composites of early developmental experiences.
Switching gears, “An Outline…” offers some context for the intellectual tangents Freud takes in “Dora.” The case study also gives us an opportunity to see the holes in Freud’s ideas, including his heteronormative discourse and how his all-encompassing ideas of human sexuality allow him to be blind to Dora as a victimized child (from both her parents and, mostly, Herr K). Instead, Freud blames Dora for her illness, and accuses her of being ambivalent and misleading to Herr K. While the narrative of Dora’s experience is interesting, the intellectual merit in this section lies in Freud’s asides and musings on the bigger pictures. He writes about “the symptom” being separate from “the motives of illness,” that a sick person may be resistant to treatment because they symptom may provide benefits or experiences that health does not (454-5). He then applies this theory to Dora and how her Uber-Ich-driven ego causes her to be sick to avoid spending time with Herr K (not to mention his sexist and offensive implication that the sickness is a manifestation of Dora’s sexual desire for Herr K.).
The Dora case is important for us to see that while Freud’s ideas on the production of power make sense in the hypothetical, in practice they require narrow-mindedness to maintain their integrity and mask contradictions. The Uber-Ich for Dora stems mostly from her father and Frau and Herr K. All these adults have abused her in some way and inflected lasting trauma. Fraud, ignoring those points, maintains that Dora is a deviant (she knows too much about sex!), though he places little onus on the adults, particularly the men, who have mistreated or neglected her.
This theory and practice divide raises questions for me about Freud, his conceptions of how power is created, and his possible influence on Foucault. Does Freud believe individual power comes from something other than the Es, Uber-Ich and the ego? If so, where and how? Would Foucault agree with those origins of power? And, most importantly, if power comes from an individual, where does state power originate and how is it re-constituted and maintained? Does state power really influence each person differently, as a personal manifestation of our individual experiences with our own Uber-Ich? (meaning state power does not exist and is a construct of our super egos)
Ahn Lee
Ahn Lee
Geog 5100
Freud: An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria (Dora)
Freud’s An Outline of Psychoanalysis offers a brief introduction to his theories regarding the human personality, its origins, “abnormalities”, and defense mechanisms. An Outline of Psychoanalysis introduces a number of now-commonplace terms that have come to characterize the modern psyche: the conscious and unconscious, for example, as well as the notion of repression. Beyond a description of the psychical apparatus, as he terms it, and its disharmonies, Freud also necessarily outlines for the reader a particular definition of (particularly sexual) normativity. Given his incalculable influence on modern self-thought, as well as on the therapeutic practices, Freud’s theories and methodologies (as we see in Dora) open themselves up to an important discussion of different “ways of knowing” and techniques of powers. Foucault, in particular, enables such discussion.
Freud writes, “Neurosis and psychosis are the states that express disturbances to the function of the [psychical] apparatus” (37). By this, Freud is referring to the relationship between the es, the Ich, and the Über-Ich. The es, of course, is the element of the unconscious or instinctive mind. It operates only to fulfill pleasure (libido) and houses both the Eros drive as well as the destruction-drive, or death-drive. The Ich, then, serves to mediate between the es and the external world, avoiding excessive pain, adapting to stimuli, and moderating the demands of the drives. This is the realm of partial consciousness. Finally, of course, there exists the Über-Ich, the “third authority” (the others including the es and reality) that the Ich must take into account (3). The Über-Ich represents parental figures, and according to Freud, the “familial, racial and national traditions they hand down, along with the demands of the particular social milieu they represent” (3). Ailments of the psyche, namely neuroses, stem from disharmonies between these psychical elements. Most disharmonies, according to Freud, begin in the early stages of sexual development, when the child and his or her sexuality are closely tied to their relations with parental figures.
Psychoanalysis is the technique by which Freud relates to his patients, encouraging the transference of emotions and relations to him (or the therapist), and the “re-education” of the patient in regards to his or her repressed sexual desires. In the case of Dora, we see Freud’s psychoanalytic methodologies at work on an 18 year-old girl suffering from hysteria. The psychoanalytic technique is such that Freud interprets the girl’s dreams, memories, and conscious thought in the context of her somatic symptoms and with regard to what he understands to be her actual reality. The conclusion he draws through these sessions is that Dora is responding to not just the sexual aggression of an older man, but to a repressed desire for that man, for her father, and in fact, a confused love for her father’s lover—whom she both resents and admires. (The very end of the case study also suggests that Freud perhaps identified an element of sexual desire in their own, doctor-patient, relationship, which would not be surprising given her transference of emotions to him). Importantly, over the course of three months, Freud succeeds in convincing Dora of the validity of his conclusions and this, by definition, constitutes the success of psychoanalytic therapy. Re-education is the goal.
Thus, while the above mentioned conclusion regarding Dora is of course oversimplified, it serves to highlight a few key aspects of Freudian thought. First, it exemplifies the centrality of sexual desire in the psychoanalytic interpretation of relations to others and to the self. All psychoses and neuroses, it seems, (including homosexuality) can be traced back to sexual trauma or underdevelopment early in life. Second, Freud’s conclusions about Dora’s hysteria, and about his role in her healing, subtly hints at the disciplinary techniques Foucault would come to identify in his studies of biopolitics. Though at times Freud contested the notion of psychical normalities and abnormalities (49), it is clear that his entire theoretical framework rested upon an unchallenged heterosexual normativity, which also arguably marginalized the female experience. (How else could we understand homosexuality as sexual underdevelopment, or a young girl’s repulsion at the advances of an older man as hysterical?) By extension, and somewhat ironically, then, we might understand the success of psychoanalytic thought and its integration into our collective subconscious over the years as an important contribution the Über-Ich. Or, in biopolitical terms, we might say that Freudian thought served as a disciplinary technique that reshaped the ways in which individuals understand their very nature and relations to their selves. The fact that psychoanalytical therapy held, as the yardstick of its success, the patient’s acceptance of and submission to its methods only serves to highlight the insidiousness of the biopolitical technique.
On Tuesday, October 30, 2012 5:23:53 PM UTC-6, jacquelynjampolsky wrote:
galenbmurton
Galen Murton
November 4, 2012
GEOG 5100
Response: Freud
An Outline of Psychoanalysis and Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria (Dora)
Following recent ‘top-down’ literature on how macro-level powers of the state (biopolitics, totalitarianism, sovereignty) control the individual body, this week Freud presented the inverse, a ‘bottom-up’ theory that scales from the micro-level of the unconscious self to the collective nature of mind. Through dream interpretation and psychoanalysis, Freud illuminates how neuroses and hysterias, and even many physical (somatic) ailments, are ultimately the manifestation of repressed sexual drives and psychical sublimations. Although his concepts are in many ways constrained by the Victorian period from which his writing emerged, Freud’s theories remain immeasurably influential today, and germane to several of the theorists we have engaged this semester.
An Outline of Psychoanalysis presents Freud’s “Psychical Apparatus,” his foundational construct on different levels of the mind and the root urges, complexes, and envies that drive human action. The dark Es (Id) is primordial and biological, “everything that is inherited, everything present at birth,” the unconscious mind of desire (eros or libido) and destruction (latter called thanatos) (2). Ich (Ego), mediating between the Es and the external world, is where the conscious level of mind occurs; “ruled by a consideration for security,” it can “switch on the faculty of thought” in order to attain pleasure and avoid unpleasure (53). The Uber-Ich (Super-Ego) is the parental control, a governor of social norms, cues, and considerations that prohibits and cautions, a conscience that acts in loco parentis. Freud identified the “precondition for neuroses” as the failure of the Ich to manage sexual desires, exhibited universally in the challenge to reconcile libido with socially acceptable behavior (55).
Freud’s concept of transference is a psycho-social fix that resonates with David Harvey’s theory on spatial fixes. Because of unfulfilled sexual desires, grounded in the Oedipus Complex (boy’s desire for sex with mother and death of father; or female converse, the Electra Complex), the unconscious mind creates alternative solutions, or transferences. Thus, fetishism can be seen as a psycho-social-spatial fix for the castration complex, and a girl’s desire for a baby as a response to penis envy. While these theories on sexual repression have no doubt been thoroughly critiqued in the years since they were first published, the way in which the transferences are believed to operate, even if unconsciously so, do bear a proto-resemblance to Harvey’s fixes.
Through dream interpretation and psychoanalysis, Freud argues in Dora that many physical ailments and psychoneuroses are the manifestation of repressed sexual urges and unfulfilled desires. In many ways, this ‘fragment’ of a study exhibits Freud’s own fixation that it’s all about sex: “sexuality is the key to the problem of psychoneuroses and neuroses in general” (533). In his analysis of Dora’s fixation on Herr K. and her own Oedipal/Electra complex vis a vis her father and mother, Freud utilizes symbolic objects and concepts (jewelry box, ‘wet,’ ‘fire,’ pearls, cough, etc.) to demonstrate that unconscious, sexual motives are the root cause of her physical and mental illness. Of course, it’s by no means as simple as just unrequited love or unrealized sex, for Freud even posits that Dora’s homosexual desires towards Frau K. further complicate her feelings for both Herr K. and her father. Despite the conservative nature of his time (and much of his writing), Freud was surprisingly progressive with respect to his continuum of sexuality and gender, remarking that everyone has sexual tendencies and anatomical features that preclude rigid categorization as heterosexual-homosexual or male-female.
The complex desires and drives behind Dora’s hysterical mind and sickly body were paradoxical and placed her in a ‘state of exception.’ This is not to say that she was one of Agamben’s sovereigns or homo sacers, but rather that she was situated at a psycho-sexual threshold and her neurosis was attributable to an inability to transcend that position. She loved and hated her father, loved and hated Herr K, loved and hated Frau K, and wanted to both make love and reject (if not outright kill) each of them. Because of the depth of this paradox, the only means by which Freud could reasonably approach the case, and progress towards a cure, was through dreams, “The Empire of the Illogical (23).” Such paradoxical drives as love and hate for a single man (or woman) can only be reconciled in the unconscious mind. And therein lies the challenge: the patient (an individual self) must be engaged at the conscious level, but s/he can only be healed through exploration of the unconscious mind, a world where desires and meanings have universal significance (at least according to Freud, and Jung).
On Tuesday, October 30, 2012 5:23:53 PM UTC-6, jacquelynjampolsky wrote:
Elizabeth Wharton
Elizabeth Wharton
Freud An Outline of Psychoanalysis and Dora
GEOG 5100: Social Theory
November 5, 2012
In An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Freud provides the foundational outlines of his theories on the human psyche and the basic methodology he employs in his psychoanalytic cure. The two main structures he lays out – of identity and consciousness – while distinct frameworks, correspond closely to each other. Thus the “dark Es” corresponds most closely with the unconscious; the struggling Ich – constantly working to maintain itself between the demands of the Es and the Uber Ich – is most closely identified with the pre-conscious; and the Uber Ich is most closely linked to the conscious. (Hewing to closely to this parallel structure is counterproductive, however, as clearly elements of the Ich and Uber Ich can be integrated into the unconscious, and in turn the desire and destruction drives of the Es can be consciously experienced.) With this framework in the background, Freud describes the early childhood of modern humans as presenting a fundamental conflict – with sexual drives emerging at a point when the Ich is not sufficiently formed to effectively integrate them.
Freud’s insights into the structure of the human psyche – and most importantly his recognition of the power of the unknown as a driver of human behavior – were remarkably prescient in his time. Simultaneously, he demonstrates clearly that he was very much a man of his time and place in the directions he then takes these ideas, such as in his incomprehensible penis envy argument.
We see this pull, between powerful insight and late 19th century mores, at work in his account of working with Dora. Freud’s identification of the Uber Ich is an extremely important element of his overall theory, and yet seems to be given limited consideration in his application of his techniques with her. His analysis of her “hysteria” focuses on the battle between her Es and her Ich, arguing in essence that her unhappiness is caused by the ways in which she has displaced or repressed the drives of her Es. But the picture of Dora that emerged most dramatically for me was of someone struggling to deal with the demands and expectations of the Uber Ich – not only her own internalized Uber Ich (which is perhaps the main thing keeping her in the room with Freud during her treatment period), but also the continuing operation of the external sources of Uber Ich pressures. These are certainly hinted at, but overall given too limited attention. Nowhere does this call out for more attention than in his analysis of his own role. In his relationship with Dora, Freud’s seemingly overbearing insistence that she is in love with the man who at minimum has behaved extremely inappropriately with the fourteen-year-old daughter of his friend, subjects her to significant pressure to revise her instinct to react in repulsion and rejection. Is this not the operation of a kind of Uber Ich like discipline? And could we not see her decision to end her sessions before her “cure” is complete as a healthy step to manage the tensions between her conflicted Ich and the various forms of the Uber Ich it must contend with? (societal, familial, and now psychotherapist). I am inclined to at least hope it was thus, that she recognized Herr K’s actions as molestation and an abuse of power, and rejected the disciplinary therapy that sought to excuse it.
On Tuesday, October 30, 2012 5:23:53 PM UTC-6, jacquelynjampolsky wrote: