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Psychoanalysis

The document discusses Freud's structural theory of the mind, focusing on the dynamics between the id, ego, and super-ego, and how these contribute to mental states like obsession, melancholia, and hysteria. It also explores the interpretation of dreams and fairy tales, particularly 'Little Red Riding Hood', through a psychoanalytic lens, revealing underlying desires and familial dynamics. Additionally, Jacques Lacan's extension of Freud's theories into cultural criticism is highlighted, emphasizing concepts like the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic, as well as the Oedipal Complex and the notion of human lack.

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9 views3 pages

Psychoanalysis

The document discusses Freud's structural theory of the mind, focusing on the dynamics between the id, ego, and super-ego, and how these contribute to mental states like obsession, melancholia, and hysteria. It also explores the interpretation of dreams and fairy tales, particularly 'Little Red Riding Hood', through a psychoanalytic lens, revealing underlying desires and familial dynamics. Additionally, Jacques Lacan's extension of Freud's theories into cultural criticism is highlighted, emphasizing concepts like the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic, as well as the Oedipal Complex and the notion of human lack.

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lj506
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Id, Ego, and Super-ego (Structural theory of the mind)

 Revealed by a negative therapeutic reaction: A guilty conscience that pleasures in


suffering, that believes that the ego needs to suffer for giving in to its love object
 In melancholia, the ego has internalised the love object and accepted the need for
guilt. Super-ego is completely given over to the death instinct and could even lead to
suicide.
 In obsessional neuroses, the sense of guilt, while strong, cannot justify itself to the
ego. The object is external to the ego, and id has regressed. Results in external
aggression. (Ego – Sense of self)
 In hysteria, or hysterical type states, the conscious represses the guilt, and therefore
the super-ego, along with the id and love-object.
 The ego assailed on three fronts: reality, conscience of the super-ego, and desires of
the id. The ego seeks to please all three. If it believes that it is falling in getting love
from all of the three, it commits suicide.

Obsession, Melancholia and Hysteria

Freud and Fairytales

 Dreams are where the repressed urges emerge


 The psychoanalyst can only analyse these with context given by the dreamer. Co-
creative process.

The Little Red Riding Hood (LRRH)

Woods of virginity

Red Cape – Purity; Grandmother - Thanatos

 Wolf: the father (the threat of castration), Mother & Grandmother: the mother
 LRRH desires the wolf to remove the mother: the only time in Grimm’s telling that
she gives an exact address
 Wolf eating the grandmother and LRRH: Displacement for sex
 The Huntsman: Post-Oedipal father who delivers LRRH to a post-Oedipal world where
normal familial ties have been restored.
 Freudian symbols: The Woods, The Red Cape, the Wine Bottle (which will break if
LRRH strays into the woods).

Force the Red riding hood into heteronormativity

Wolf and the Huntsman are both the love object that are also threatening

Wolf is the pre-oedipal father

Jacques Lacan

 Seeks to extend Freud’s overtures into cultural criticism


 Re-reads Freud to anchor psychoanalysis in the cultural rather than the biological.
 We are all born with ‘lack’: an inexpressible human condition. This is also a fixed
signified
 This lost object- l’ objet petit a (the object small other) – signifies an imaginary
moment
 The Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic
 Mirror stage, Fort-da, The Oedipal Complex

1. The Real: We simply are. We do not know where we end and where everything else
begins. It is both in the ‘outside’ reality, and the inner psyche.
2. Mirror stage: The beginning of the imaginary; when a child sees itself in the mirror
and sees a coherent whole where they had previously experienced a fragmented
entity with libidinal needs. (It is not a realm)
3. The Imaginary is the internalized image of his ideal. The ego at this point is situated
around the idea of coherence.

Maya is illusion, Moh is desire

Sublimation

The Symbolic: An intersubjective network of meaning, a structure that we must enter

‘Objective reality’ thus is actually the symbolic organization of the Real.

Fort-da games: throwing away and reappearing, is the beginning of the entry of the child
into the Symbolic

Oedipal Complex: Child’s encounter with sexual difference

 Enforces the transition from imaginary to symbolic


 Also compounds our feeling of lack: We will continue trying to figure out lack but it
will be an endlessly deferred quest.
 Desire is metonymy

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