Sigmund Freud: Psychologist; father of psychoanalysis

Some major works:

1901- The Interpretations of Dreams—Freud believed that a psychoanalyst could listen to your dreams and solve your problems based on symbolic meaning and emotions in your dreams.

1905- Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality—Freud presented his theory on child development.

Iceberg as a metaphor for the mind:

90% is beneath the surface: the unconscious. The part of the mind you can’t access.

The id is in control of your unconscious.

It is governed by two drives = sex (anything that brings pleasure) & aggression.

The tripartite identity: at the level of the individual, this conflict between the desire for pleasure and civilized disapproval results in a war of consciousness, with the ego (our waking sense of who we are) mediating a continuous warfare between the realm of the pleasure principle—id (or libido)-- and the force of societal censure: the super-ego

Psychosexual development stages (child development)

0-2 years of age. Early in your development, all of your desires were oriented towards your lips and your mouth, which accepted food, milk, and anything else you could get your hands on (the oral phase). The first object of this stage was, of course, the mother's breast, which could be transferred to auto-erotic objects (thumb-sucking). The mother thus logically became your first "love-object," already a displacement from the earlier object of desire (the breast). When you first recognized the fact of your father, you dealt with him by identifying yourself with him; however, as the sexual wishes directed to your mother grew in intensity, you became possessive of your mother and secretly wished your father out of the picture (the Oedipus complex). This Oedipus complex plays out throughout the next two phases of development.

2-4 years of age. Following the oral phase, you entered the sadistic-anal phase, which is split between active and passive impulses: the impulse to mastery on the one hand, which can easily become cruelty; the impulse to scopophilia (love of gazing), on the other hand. This phase was roughly coterminous with a new auto-erotic object: the rectal orifice (hence, the term "sadistic-anal phase"). According to Freud, the child's pleasure in defecation is connected to his or her pleasure in creating something of his or her own, a pleasure that for women is later transferred to child-bearing.

4-7 years of age. Finally, you entered the phallic phase, when the penis (or the clitoris, which, according to Freud, stands for the penis in the young girl) become your primary object-cathexis. In this stage, the child becomes fascinated with urination, which is experienced as pleasurable, both in its expulsion and retention. The trauma connected with this phase is that of castration, which makes this phase especially important for the resolution of the Oedipus complex. Over this time, you began to deal with your separation anxieties (and your all-encompassing egoism) by finding symbolic ways of representing and thus controlling the separation from (not to mention your desire for) your mother. You also learned to defer bodily gratification when necessary. In other words, your ego became trained to follow the reality-principle and to control the pleasure-principle, although this ability would not be fully attained until you passed through the latency period. In resolving the Oedipus complex, you also began to identify either with your mother or your father, thus determining the future path of your sexual orientation.

7-12 years of age. Next followed a long "latency period" during which your sexual development was more or less suspended and you concentrated on repressing and sublimating your earlier desires and thus learned to follow the reality-principle. During this phase, you gradually freed yourself from your parents (moving away from the mother and reconciling yourself with your father) or by asserting your independence (if you responded to your incestuous desires by becoming overly subservient to your father). You also moved beyond your childhood egoism and sacrificed something of your own ego to others, thus learning how to love others.

13 years of age onward (or from puberty on). Your development over the latency period allowed you to enter the final genital phase. At this point, you learned to desire members of the opposite sex and to fulfill your instinct to procreate and thus ensure the survival of the human species.

PLEASURE-PRINCIPLE AND REALITY-PRINCIPLE :Respectively, the desire for immediate gratification vs. the deferral of that gratification.

Quite simply, the pleasure-principle drives one to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. However, as one grows up, one begins to learn the need sometimes to endure pain and to defer gratification because of the exigencies and obstacles of reality: "An ego thus educated has become 'reasonable'; it no longer lets itself be governed by the pleasure principle, but obeys the reality principle, which also at bottom seeks to obtain pleasure, but pleasure which is assured through taking account of reality, even though it is pleasure postponed and diminished" (Introductory Lectures 16.357).

SOURCE: Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. 24 vols. London: Hogarth, 1953-74.

Freudianism and literature

Like Marx's theories, those of Freud provide various means of investigating human culture and its artifacts, including literature. First of all, his findings have led critics to treat literary works from the vantage point of psycho-biography, inquiring about personality traits or traumas that shed light upon an author's work. (Is there, for instance, a link between Virginia Woolf's suicide, her psycho-drama, and the themes of her work? Do Dickens's childhood psychic traumas shape the plots, characterization, or themes of Great Expectations?) A second mode of approach looks within the work itself for "obsessive" repetitions. This mode of analysis, for example, has led some commentators to discuss Swift's supposed "scatological vision." Thirdly, and perhaps most interesting from a theoretician's point of view, Freud's work on the language and structure of dreams, which emphasizes that all human thought and discourse is fundamentally symbolic, has produced fruitful comparisons between dreams and poetic language by showing that both rely upon metaphor, simile, and synecdoche to say one thing in terms of another. Lastly, one may examine works of authors influenced by Freud just as one may examine Pope or Wordsworth for influences of various scientific and philosophical theorists upon their work. (In what different ways do you think Freud's emphasis upon unconscious mental processes, biological drives, and the multidetermination of human phenomena affect Woolf, Joyce, and Lawrence? How does Freudianism shape conceptions of character? narrative? symbolism? literary diction? poetic and novelistic structure?)