Psychoanalytic Theory (Literary Theory)

Theory: The How's and Why's of Literature

Psychoanalytic Theory - Part I

While many of the theories we have encountered so far have both their adherents and detractors, and while all have garnered at least some controversy, perhaps no theoretical approach to literary studies can elicit such a powerful response, positive or negative, as Psychoanalytic Theory. This may be an unfamiliar term to many of you, but even if you have not heard of Psychoanalytic Theory, you have likely heard of psychoanalysis, the method of psychology developed by Sigmund Freud and practiced by him and his followers up to the present day. You might be wondering why I don't simply use the term psychoanalysis throughout this article series, since it is more succinct and certainly more familiar. However, there is an important distinction that needs to be maintained between psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Theory. The former refers to a specific method of treatment of patients with certain kinds of psychological problems, and psychoanalysts are professionals who get paid to help patients with these problems.

Psychoanalytic Theory, on the other hand, is the theoretical foundation upon which psychoanalysis is based. All psychoanalysts need to know this theoretical material, since psychoanalysis is the application of Psychoanalytic Theory in the treatment of patients with psychological disorders. It is obvious, then, that since I am looking at this theory from the perspective of literary studies, psychoanalysis itself is not something that I will be considering; as useful or interesting as it might be, the treatment of patients has little if anything to do with literary texts. Note also that Psychoanalytic Theory is not usually capitalized. I do so here merely in order to remain consistent throughout this series on literary theory. Just as I capitalized Feminism and New Criticism, so too will I be capitalizing Psychoanalytic Theory, both to underline its nature as the focal point of this current discussion, and to stand it on equal footing with the other theoretical approaches featured in this series.

Whether or not the terms Psychoanalytic Theory or psychoanalysis are familiar to you, it is highly likely that you have heard the name Sigmund Freud (pronounced "Froid"), if only in the most general terms. He has become a generic name for a psychiatrist or, even more commonly, a friend who insists on telling you what your psychological problems are and how to solve them. ("Since when did you become Sigmund Freud?") Freud's name has also become well known in English through the term which bears his name, the "Freudian slip," a phenomenon which involves a person substituting one word accidentally for another, but in the process saying what he or she is really thinking.

Freud's ideas have exerted a far more powerful and wide-ranging influence than the previous examples which employ his name indicate by themselves. For instance, if you have ever heard the term Oedipal complex, anal-retentive (or just anal), penis envy, ego, or libido, you have been exposed to Freud's work, and have thus been influenced by his thought. Many of the terms which have made it into and survived in popular parlance have been altered or turned to different ends, as we shall see as we explore these terms in more depth. Penis envy, for instance, is now often used as a term which indicates a man's jealousy of another's man's larger penis, or as the perceived general jealousy women have of men. In its original manifestation, however, the term referred to a very specific stage of female sexual development, and was only later taken up by non-psychoanalysts and non-Psychoanalytic Theorists to refer to very different things.

The adoption of Freudian terms by society at large has resulted in a general confusion about Psychoanalytic Theory, as the many pieces that have made it through the transformation of everyday language do not cohere in any unified structure, and do not seem to have any relation to one another. This is one factor that causes a lot of people, both academics and others, to roll their eyes when someone begins talking about Psychoanalytic Theory. Another factor that leads people to doubt Freud's work is a general stigma surrounding clinical psychology and psychiatry; it is very telling that the most common slang term for any professional who helps individuals with psychological problems is "shrink," as in "I heard Billy is seeing a shrink." This nickname might seem fairly innocuous, and it has become so common that most people likely don't even consider its roots, which makes it, at the very least, a curious term which doesn't seem to say much at all. However, it derives from the longer, former slang term which is no longer in such wide use, "head shrinker," which might seem more related to the task of mental health professionals (which work on the head, or brain, at least), but which still makes little sense on its own, without a little more etymological digging.

Confusingly, we refer to people who think too much of themselves (who are conceited, in other words) as having a swollen head, but this has nothing to do with the origins of the term "head shrinker." Instead, we have to look at tribal cultures which anthropologists in the 19th and early 20th century so vividly presented to the public imagination. These "savages" lived in societies very different from our own, which were run not according to democratic principles of government or the rule of law, but rather on the basis of physical strength and familial inheritance. They also featured figures who acted as the tribe's spiritual leaders, who were something of a cross between priests and doctors. They were known by a host of different nicknames, including shamans, medicine men, and witch-doctors. In certain tribes, these witch-doctors wore adornments gained from various battlegrounds, which consisted of the heads of their enemies; they used certain techniques to shrink and embalm these heads, giving them a highly grotesque appearance. This practice cemented the connection between the witch-doctor and head shrinking, which is still an image that arises from time to time in popular culture, especially in the movies.

The connection between head-shrinkers and psychologists or psychiatrists now becomes a little clearer. The shamans were individuals who combined the spiritual aspects of the individuals within the tribe with their physical aspects. They could cure disease, for instance, by performing certain rituals, or exorcise someone's demons if that person was possessed (and therefore acting "crazy"). Because the psychiatrist or psychologist attempts to treat visible, often physical problems through mental avenues, and since both try to help people who are acting "crazy" (though we don't attribute this behavior to demons anymore), the label of "witch-doctor" was applied to these professionals, and since shrinking heads was associated so closely to witch-doctors, it wasn't much of a leap to begin referring to mental health professionals as "head-shrinkers." Needless to say, this is not a flattering term by any stretch of the imagination, and was intended to disparage psychology as some kind of arcane, false magic or primitive voodoo. Fortunately, psychology has come a long way, as have people's perceptions of it, but the original stigma against it still adheres in the seemingly innocent term "shrink" that many of us still use to this day.

Aside from the more general stigmas facing Psychoanalytic Theory in the form of biases against psychology or psychiatry of any kind is a more specific problem; when people think of Psychoanalytic Theory, if they know anything about it at all, they invariably associate it with sex. This might not be a problem if the theory was designed to deal specifically and only with psychosexual disorders, but since Psychoanalytic Theory attempts to account for human psychological development in general, many people are highly uncomfortable with its sexualized focus. Most disturbing for many is the fact that Freud uses sexuality and sexual foci to describe the development of infants and children. We most often choose to think of children as "innocent" of any sexual thoughts and desires, and as any combination of children and sexuality as the ultimate perversion. As a result, Freud's theories are resisted by many because they are "simply scandalous," and are considered completely unacceptable because they combine two things which are considered by many to be morally and ethically incompatible - childhood and sexuality.

This point of view is understandable if one only knows as much about Psychoanalytic Theory as I have presented here so far (which is almost nothing specific); if one studies it in slightly more detail, however, one can see that Freud was not being perverted or somehow inappropriate. His descriptions of the influence of sexual forces in childhood places them largely in the realm of the unconscious mind, and even when he does make reference to the actual sexual functions and sensations infants and children experience, he does so in a way that accurately portrays those physical sensations. Children do not understand their sexual feelings and sensations as such, and so even Freud is not attempting to rob childhood of its innocence in a way that could be construed as disgusting or inappropriate. One can argue that he is wrong in total, or that his focus is off, or that he gets some facts wrong, but the argument that his theories are perverted or morally despicable is a much more difficult one to support.

There are other aspects of Psychoanalytic Theory that have been hotly contested throughout the course of its history, and I will present some of these arguments here. However, as has been the case with the other theoretical approaches I have presented, I will do my best to present Freud's work as he did, or at least in a way that followers of his would find unobjectionable. Like most of the theoretical approaches I have presented, Psychoanalytical Theory is not a single, monolithic approach, and many eminent psychoanalysts and Psychoanalytic Theorists do not agree with one another on aspects of the theory and its implementation in practice. Therefore, my approach here will be practical and limited in scope. I will present Psychoanalytic Theory in terms Freud himself used, to show how the theory originated, and to show the common basis for the various developments of his work that have taken place. After laying out Freud's work, I will then turn to look at its specifically literary applications, as one might see them in the literary academy today. Psychoanalysis does not have as wide a following as it once did (especially in the 70s and 80s), but it nonetheless remains a vital set of concepts for any student pursuing literary theoretical studies. In taking this approach I am leaving out the work of several notable psychoanalysts (Carl Jung foremost among them), and while I encourage you to learn more about their developments of Freud's work, time and space restrictions do not allow me to treat them in sufficient detail to justify their inclusion at all.

Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Theory were born in Vienna in the 1890s, where Sigmund Freud was attempting to treat patients with what he termed neurotic disorders or neuroses. These disorders were defined as psychological problems which caused a person varying degrees of distress, but which did not impair most psychological capacities, such as reason and memory. Neuroses also did not generally impair people in their day-to-day lives, and so were not debilitating or greatly life altering. Despite their nature as a relatively minor psychological problem, neuroses attracted Freud's attention because he saw them so frequently in his practice; most the patients who came to him, regardless of what else they had to deal with, or what their age or social position, suffered from some degree of neurosis. As a result, Freud determined to find the nature of various neuroses, and to find a suitable and effective treatment.

Freud did come up with what he believed was the general cause of all neuroses; neuroses were physical and mental manifestations of distress caused by the repression of desires and the internal conflict between these desires and the internalized social norms that caused the patient to suppress them in the first place. Of course, this is as complicated as it sounds, and Freud actually devised an entire system or model of childhood development into which all of the elements above fit together. This model progressed as Freud continued working on his theories, going from the relatively straightforward, to the most difficult, but perhaps also the most refined, formulations. I will present Freud's theories in the same order, which will give you a good grounding in his thought process; the latter developments of the theory should be far easier to understand in the light of the former aspects. Note that the earlier models he uses are generally not simply discarded. Rather, they are subsumed into the later models, which stretch, expand, and categorize in more detail what came before. Again, I will not sketch any of these models in all their complete detail, and I will skip some intermediary steps in the evolution presented here, because this is an introductory series. I do encourage anyone who wants to know the details in their most fine-grained form to consult Freud's own texts, preferable in the order in which he composed them.

One of Freud's first model employs a well known metaphor to understand the human mind: the iceberg. According to Freud, people tended to give far too much credit to consciousness, and to our conscious selves. It does seem like consciousness is the dominant and largest aspect of our mental lives, but this is merely a matter of perception. We are only able to access what happens in our consciousness, but this represents only the part of the iceberg which is above water, which is only about 10%. The bulk of our minds are unconscious, which is represented by the 90% of the iceberg that is below the surface of the water. In this model, it is obvious that consciousness is only a representation of a small fraction of what is actually going on in the mind, and so it becomes clear that Freud's theories are going to focus on what he termed the unconscious, rather than the consciousness. The consciousness consists of what has made itself available to our awareness, and of what we have permitted ourselves to be aware of. This idea of permission, of allowing ourselves to be aware of things, is a central aspect of Psychoanalytic Theory which is pivotal to all of Freud's work.

Just as the consciousness is the part of us that is aware, and consists of the aspects of ourselves about which we allow ourselves to be aware, the unconscious is that part of our mental activity that we are not aware of, and which we do not allow ourselves to be aware of. In Freud's work, and in Psychoanalytic Theory in general, the standard way we now have of thinking of unconscious mental activity does not apply in such broad terms. For example, functions like breathing and the regulation of hormones in the body are all accomplished by the brain, and are all done automatically, whether we consciously will them to happen or not. However, this is not what Psychoanalytic Theory has in mind when it talks about the unconscious. The unconscious consists of those memories, behaviors, desires, fantasies, and possibilities about our lives and ourselves that we refuse to notice or acknowledge. So, the unconscious is not merely a place where mind functions in ignorance of consciousness (thought it is that too); it is a place where those aspects of mind consciousness refuses to recognize exist. The unconscious is repressed by consciousness, and as a result, we are kept unaware of its activity.

There are many reasons why consciousness might repress certain memories and desires; some would cause constant pain, whereas others would be considered shameful and disgusting by society, and might lead to actions that would be similarly negatively evaluated. Thus consciousness functions to habitually repress the memories and desires that we would find it difficult to live with on a daily basis. These buried aspects of our selves, however, do not merely remain quietly buried. They can surface into our lives, though always in a different, transformed shape. Distress for no apparent reason, or a seemingly irrational fear or hatred of an individual or object, can be traced back, in Freud's theory, to the suppression caused by consciousness. These symptoms of repression are the cause, Freud claimed, of neuroses, and the best treatment for them was to undergo psychotherapy with a trained analyst, who would use various techniques to make these unconscious conflicts available to conscious thought.

This might seem like a complete contradiction, on first examination. After all, if the unconscious is, by definition, that aspect of mind to which the consciousness has no access, how could any kind of therapy make any part of the unconscious apparent to consciousness? Freud believed that, since unconscious conflicts were capable of causing distress, which certainly existed in a form that was available to consciousness, then there could be other ways by which the unconscious made itself apparent, even in an unrecognizable form, to consciousness. One of the main ways Freud saw of getting to the unconscious was through the analysis of dreams. In dream states, the normal inhibitions which suppress certain memories and desires is not functioning, or is functioning in a far less vigilant way, which means that these normally inaccessible aspects of the unconscious can present themselves. Of course, the censor of consciousness is never completely disabled, and thus dreams often present repressed thoughts in metaphorical forms; parents, for example, can be represented as kings and queens, several individuals can be combined into a single figure, and each character in a dream can be taken as an aspect of one's self. Because of his belief that dreams revealed aspect of the unconscious, Freud spent a great deal of time studying them, and attempting to discover the various types of transformations that were possible between the dream image presented to or reported by the dreamer, and the actual repressed content of the unconscious which was being transformed.

Aside from dreams, which received, and still receive, a lot of attention in psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Theory, Freud also believed the unconscious could be made more visible in what we might now term free association. Freud would ask a patient to relax and clear the mind. He would then present them with a word which they would respond to immediately, so that they had little or no time to consciously consider a response. When a response arose that seemed telling, in the opinion of the analyst Freud, he would question them about it, and in so doing attempt to dig deeper into the patient's unconscious motivations for making that association. This concern for language manifests itself in another way Freud saw into the unconscious of his patients, which was through something he called parapraxes, or what we would now call the Freudian slip. In his original inception of the term, Freud saw parapraxes as being the unconscious expression of a thought that was repressed by consciousness. The most obvious, and most telling examples, occur in modern sitcoms and films when an individual calls his or her spouse by the wrong name, especially during sexual intercourse. This indicates that the person who uttered the wrong name is actually unconsciously fixated on the individual he or she named, rather than the individual he or she is with.

A very well known example of this phenomenon occurs in the sitcom Friends, in the episode where Ross (a central character), is marrying Emily, a woman he has been seeing for some time. He has had a long standing interest in another central character, Rachel, for many years, and the two dated for stretches of time over the years. She refused to come to the wedding, as she felt it would be awkward, and, we assume, she still harbored unconscious feeling for Ross. However, as the wedding begins, Ross notices that Rachel is in the audience, having just arrived. The ceremony begins, and the priest asks Ross to repeat after him "I, Ross, take you, Emily, to be my lawfully wedded wife." Ross responds with the show-stopping "I, Ross, take you, Rachel, to be my lawfully wedded wife." His bride is mortified, as is he when he realizes what he has said, and although they finish the wedding, the marriage is doomed to be remarkably short-lived.

Ross reveals more than he means to here, and, a psychoanalyst would argue, more than he even consciously knows. He has convinced himself that he loves Emily most, and that he no longer has feelings for Rachel. However, through his Freudian slip, he reveals both to others and to himself that his unconscious feelings for Rachel are profound. A Freudian slip can, and often does, occur in this kind of verbal display, but Freud did not limit it to verbal utterances. Misreading some text, for instance, so that you believe it says something very different from what it does, also points to the emergence of your unconscious fixations into your conscious activities. Even certain physical activities, like accidentally slapping one individual instead of another, or moving in a completely wrong direction in response to a given stimulus (like a bridesmaid's unconsciously backing away from a bouquet thrown at a wedding, even though she believes that she actually wants to catch it), can be considered Freudian slips. Essentially, any time your actions, be they verbal, purely mental, or physical, cause you to react in a way that seems contrary to what you believe about yourself, the odds are good that your unconscious is poking through the surface of your conscious life.

One of the major tenets of psychoanalysis, as we can see from Freud's concern with aspects of the unconscious that bubble to the surface, is to make apparent to the neurotic patient those hidden, unconscious drives, desires, fantasies, and memories that are being repressed by consciousness. The theory is that, by exposing the troublesome aspects of the unconscious to conscious examination, the conflicts which they are causing, and the neuroses which are the result, can be treated effectively. It is plain to see that self deception is a cornerstone of Psychoanalytic Theory, and that the reveling of such self deceptions to the self deceiving individual is a key to the effective treatment of neuroses. Of course, this all makes sense on its own terms, but several questions still need to be addressed. One of the most pressing of these is where these unconscious drives, desires, and memories come from in the first place. It is one thing to merely assume that they exist and to expose them, but it is another to show how it is that they come to develop in the first place. After all, treating an illness or disorder is doubtless a good thing, but being able to identify the causes of such disorders and to prevent them from arising in the first place is far better. Freud was not remiss in attempting to explain these causal considerations, and it is in his explanation that the well known psychoanalytic focus on childhood and children's development comes to the fore.

Freud divided the development of children, both male and female, into four different stages which correlate with the different body parts upon which they fixate at different stages of development. These stages include the oral, the anal, the phallic, and the genital, and stretch temporally from the child's emergence from the womb to the onset of puberty. Freud calls these the stages of psychosexual development, and while he was particularly interested in how the failed resolution of these stages caused neuroses later in life, he was one of the first to pay attention to the different stages of childhood development which we take for granted today.

When a child is born, it is basically not much more than a seething cauldron of desires and needs, and it will do whatever works efficiently to achieve these ends without ever being really aware, consciously speaking, of what it is doing. The infant is motivated exclusively by the libido. We use libido today, in popular jargon, to refer exclusively to adult (or post-pubescent) sex drive in individuals, but Freud's conception of the term was significantly different. He uses libido to refer to all sexual and survival instincts that motivate behavior, including hunger, fear, and lust. The mind is driven most essentially by the libido, making it the force that motivates all our behavior and thought. As we shall see, it is not given free reign throughout the lives of healthy children and adults, but in the life of the infant, no other forces exist to curb its constant appetitive seeking of pleasure. The infant is guided solely by what Psychoanalytic Theory refers to as the id, which is the aspect of mind that is concerned with seeking out sensual pleasure and satisfaction. The id is the first of the three aspects of personality that Freud describes in his later writings as the structural model of mind, and knowing what these are is important to understanding how the others aspects of his theory of childhood development operate.

In his later writings, Freud made further distinctions in his iceberg model of personality that we discussed previously, which resulted in his creation of three distinct aspects of mind which participated in conscious and unconscious thought to varying degrees. The id, as I have mentioned, is the aspect of personality concerned with pleasure and desire, and is the seat of libido, which motivates all other behavior in the most primitive of ways; it drives aggression, anger, sexual desire, hunger, and all the appetites. As a person develops, the pure selfish drives of the id are counteracted by the rise of the superego. The superego is the aspect of personality that arises when the developing person is able to comprehend social norms, which first occur, according to Freud, in the presence of the father figure. These norms serve to suppress the previously free-ranging desires of the id, and cause individuals to behave in ways that are socially acceptable. The recognition of these norms results in the individual curbing their thoughts and behavior to align with them, and as a result, through habitual suppression of behaviors and thoughts, the person eventually internalizes these norms, which creates the superego within the individual. Once these norms are internalized, the person no longer has to be presented with punishments or rewards from following the norms in order to act in accordance with them, since they become an integral part of the person's personality. Thus, the superego is a person's conscience, their sense of morality, which allows them to interact productively with other individuals in society. It provides a guide to appropriate behavior, outlines the taboos of the society, and gives the person feelings of guilt and shame when that individual defies the internalized norms.

The third and final aspect of personality in this structural model is the ego. This is another term that has come to have different meanings and associations in common speech than Freud intended. We speak of an individual as an "egomaniac" or as having an inflated ego if the person is conceited, or thinks too much of him or herself in an arrogant way, thinking only of him or her self and not of others. In Psychoanalytic Theory, however, the ego is defined far more specifically, and is considered to be the aspect of personality that mediates between the id, superego, and external reality. The way Freud describes the ego is in terms of a rider of a horse. The id, superego, and external reality constitute the forces that are at work in and upon an individual, and all are elements that are largely or entirely operating independently of the person's conscious desires (after all, the way the world around me operates, for instance, is something I can do little to control). The ego is the rider of this unruly horse, and steers the individual on a path which takes all the other forces into consideration and takes action in the way that steers the best possible course, given what it has to work with. The ego can be seen as a person's rational faculty, the seat of caution and deliberation which grows more robust and potent as a person matures. The ego can also be seen as the person's sense of self, although Psychoanalytic Theory is careful to note that all of the other considerations of personality play a role in the formation of this sense as well. The ego leads the way as far as consciousness is concerned, but the self that emerges is not reducible to ego alone since the other aspects of personality have such a powerful influence.

With regard to the iceberg model of consciousness discussed previously, ego partakes in consciousness most, though a great deal of it is also not available to our conscious penetration; after all, if we were completely cognizant of all the ego did, we would be in far more direct contact with the workings of the id and superego, since the ego has to mediate between these. Instead, the ego operates at least in part beneath the level of consciousness, and decides which aspects of our experience we come to consciously know about. The conscious aspect of ego is the result of what, unconsciously, the ego has decided will be presented to awareness. It is the mediator of the other forces that are at work in personality, but all we really know is the result of the mediation, not the process that brought it about. Of course, the ego is not perfect in its censoring duties, and so the phenomena we spoke about before, like the Freudian slip and the results of free association, are able to rise into conscious awareness in an inadvertent way.

Now that we have seen the developed mind in the terms Freud laid out, it is time to turn back to the phases of childhood development and uncover, in more specific terms, how the three vital aspects of personality come to be in the first place. The first stage, as we have mentioned previously, is the oral stage, and anyone who has had or even seen very young infants knows where the title for this stage comes from. As was mentioned previously, children of this youngest age are entirely constituted by the id, and want nothing other than their desires and needs to be gratified. Having little motor control, the child is completely dependent on its parents, especially its mother, for providing everything it needs. The infant's primary contact point with the external world is the mouth, and it derives pleasure and satisfaction through suckling, tasting, and eating. An infant will thus attempt to suckle at its mother's (or any woman's breast) for both sustenance and comfort, the latter of which is shown to be important when we consider that, in the absence of an actual nipple, the infant will be pacified with a rubber or plastic substitute, or if these too are absent, their own thumbs.

None of this is particularly surprising or groundbreaking, nor was it even in Freud's time, but what he claims can happen if the child does not progress through this stage properly is not so intuitive. The conflict at this stage arises when the child is weaned from breastfeeding; the source of a child's comfort and sustenance is taken away from it, and it must redirect its desires to another source. If a child is not able to do so, he or she will become fixated on the oral, unable to break this deep-seated attachment. This manifests itself later in life in a transformed, metaphorical way, and may lead to an individual's developing an oral fixation to gain comfort, in ways as diverse as nail biting, eating excessively, drinking alcohol, smoking, and so on. This orally fixated individual may also have problems with dependency, since he or she did not successfully accomplish the transition from being totally dependent on the mother to being more self-sufficient, which is what the weaning process is all about. Other issues are also attributed to oral fixation in Psychoanalytic Theory, but for our purposes, those that have been presented are the most direct and relevant.

Just as the oral stage was primarily focused on the mouth and its associated actions, the anal stage, as you might have guessed, is focused on the anus and all its functions and products. At this stage of development, the libido is still the prime mover of personality, and its focus is on bowel and bladder movements. A child in this stage of development is concerned with his or her controlling the bowel and bladder, and the major conflict arises in the form of toilet training. The id, still the primary component of the child's personality, wants nothing more than the desires of the body to be met, and so when the child has a desire to defecate, he or she will naturally do so to satisfy their urge. However, when it comes time to be toilet trained, the id is no longer given free reign, since the child's parents expect him or her to begin using the bathroom instead of a constantly attached diaper. The ego's formation is certainly one of the results of this process, as the child is expected not merely to give in to their natural functions and urges, but rather to control them. Directing and controlling the self, especially the id as we discussed earlier, is the function of the ego, so successfully passing through the anal stage is vital to the development of a child into a healthy adult.

In Freud's estimation, the parents have a very important role to play in toilet training which can either result in children's successful transition from one stage of psychosexual development to the next, or in their being caught at the anal stage and harmed in a way that will remain with them throughout their adult lives. If the parents are too permissive about toilet training, Psychoanalytic Theory suggests that the child will likely develop an anal-expulsive personality, which is destructive and wasteful. If the parents are too strict, and punish the child for his or her failures in an excessive way, the child will likely develop an anal-retentive personality, which is uptight, rigid, and inflexible. This is one term that has survived almost completely unaltered despite its wide adoption in contemporary popular culture. We are more likely to refer to a person as being "anal" rather than "anal-retentive," but the root is the same, and I remember a time in the 80s when "anal-retentive" was the more common popular term, which makes sense, since "anal" is merely a shorthand version of it, and the long form almost always precedes the short. Ideally, parents would reward their children for their accomplishments and monitor them closely, providing the children with encouragement that leads to a sense of accomplishment and pride. When this is the case, the child has the best chance of making a successful, healthy transition from the anal to the phallic stage of psychosexual development.

The phallic stage of development, as you again probably already guessed, is one where the libido is focused on the genitals. However, as we will see a little further on, this is not the same as the genital stage of development, where the focus is overtly sexual and rooted in the developments of a sexually mature body. It is at this stage where children become acutely aware of their genitals, and where, Freud posits, children learn the differences between male and female genitals, and begin to develop ideas about these differences. This stage is of pivotal importance to Psychoanalytic Theory, since it is here that the processes which initiate the Oedipus complex, penis envy, and many other key concepts are located.

As we have just mentioned, the phallic stage of psychosexual development is one that leads to the development of the Oedipal complex, which is so foundational and important to Psychoanalytic Theory that it deserves as lengthy a description as I have space in this series to give it. To begin with, the term Oedipal may not be familiar to many of you; however, once you know the story of the character from whom it takes its name, Oedipus, you will see precisely why it has the name it does. In ancient Greek myth, Oedipus was born to Jocasta and Laius, the king and queen of Thebes. There was a prophecy declaring that he would kill his father and marry his mother, which, needless to say, unnerved the king and queen. So, they bound the babe through the ankles and gave it to a servant to leave exposed in the wilderness. The servant set out, but simply could not go through with it, so he handed the child off to a shepherd, who took the child in and raised it as his own son. The word Oedipus, for those of you with etymological inclinations, comes from two Greek words meaning "swollen" and "foot," an appropriate name considering that his infant ankle binding left him with permanent scarring.

As time passes, Oedipus grows into a young man, but he hears tell of the prophecy attached to his fate, that he will kill his father and marry his mother, and is, understandably, upset. He decides that he has to leave his parents and never return, so that he is certain he will not perpetrate the terrible actions which have been predicted. Far outside the city on his travels he comes across a small party of men coming in the opposite direction who speak rudely to him, and there is an altercation which results in Oedipus killing the men, one of whom is, unbeknownst to him, his birth father Laius, the king of Thebes! He makes his way to Thebes where he is able to solve the riddle of the sphinx which breaks a curse that had been plaguing Thebes, and as a result, he is made king. As is fitting, he marries the widowed queen, Jocasta, who is, as you will remember, his birth mother, and in so doing fulfills the second part of the prophecy. There is a little more to the story, but for our purposes, I will end by saying that when Oedipus finds out what he has done he gouges out his own eyes, and casts himself out of Thebes. Jocasta commits suicide, and the house is cursed for several generations.

Turning back to psychosocial development, Freud believed that the progress of male and female children was different through the phallic stage, but that a similar process guided their differing developmental journey. In the case of boys (about which Freud seemed far more certain), he proposed that the libido, in the phallic stage, is primarily concerned with the genitals, which promotes the boy to be sexually attracted (in a way that cannot really be considered conscious) to his mother, who becomes the object of his desires. The mother is the source of the fulfillment of all the child's needs, and so it makes sense that he would also look to her as the logical target of his libidinal desire. However, at this point the boy also becomes acutely aware that the mother's attentions are not his alone, and that she also grants some of her time and attention to her husband, the boy's father.

The How's and Why's of Literature

Psychoanalytic Theory - Part II

At this point, when the boy realizes that he and his father are both competing for the same resource - the affections and attentions of the mother/wife - he grows uncomfortable and fearful. After all, the father is a powerful figure in his life and in the household, and the boy cannot hope to win versus such an opponent. Appropriately then, the condition where a male child is sexually attracted to his mother and in competition with his father is known as the Oedipal complex; the child, of course, does not attempt to kill his father or have sex with his mother, but the basic drives are analogous to the inadvertent behaviors which doomed Oedipus himself. Afraid of the consequences of his desires, and the punishment which might arise from them in the anger of the father, the boy (in the phallic stage, remember), having noted the differences between male and female genitals, believes that females have had their genitals cut off, and posits that this was likely done as punishment by the father for desiring the mother. The boy then grows afraid that his father will castrate him as punishment, suffering what Freud called castration anxiety. This anxiety causes the boy, who identifies with the father as he who possesses the object of his desire (the mother), to shift the libidinal focus from his mother to women more generally conceived. Psychoanalytic Theory refers to this shifting process as displacement, and it is one of the most important ways childhood experiences are transformed into adult behaviors.

As I mentioned previously, the developmental path for boys and girls is significantly different, in Freud's conception, during the phallic stage, since the libidinal focus is on the genitals, which are one of the earliest criteria for children to differentiate between the sexes. Girls, like their male counterparts, begin during the phallic stage to see their mothers as appropriate targets for their libidinal drive, and begin to be sexually attracted to them. The problem, of course, is that the girl, when she becomes aware of the differences between male and female genitals, realizes that she is not able to have a sexual relationship with her mother, since she does not have the requisite penis. As a result, she desires a penis, which would give her the power to have the desired sexual relationship with her mother. She thus looks to her father, who is equipped with a penis, as a solution to her problem, and wants to obtain his penis. This desire to possess her father's penis leads to her having sexual desire for her father, which is a crucial step in developing normal sexual drives. Like boys, who realize that their fathers will likely be angry with them for competing for the love of the mother, girls begin to feel that their mothers will be angry with them for competing for the love of the father. This results in the girl's developing the belief that she has been castrated by her mother, as a punishment for being sexually attracted to her father, which in turn leads to her abandoning her mother as an object of sexual desire, and focusing exclusively on her father. Since her mother is a rival, she desires to dispose of her and take her place, so she models herself after her to achieve these ends. However, she fears further retribution from the mother, and, like her male counterpart, employs displacement as a defense mechanism, shifting the target of her desires from her father to men in general.

The idea of penis envy emerges from this stage of development as well, at the point where the developing female child realizes that she does not have a penis, and desires to have one. For Freud, this is a pivotal moment in the psychosexual development of females, which often results in feelings of powerlessness or inferiority in women in their adult lives. It almost goes without saying that this is one area where Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory and Feminism collide head on, but I will say something about it here because the clash is an important one in the realm of literary and cultural theory. Freud had a distinctly male-centered view of psychological processes and development, and so while his story of male childhood development seems plausible (relatively speaking), his account of female development seems forced, if not simply incorrect. The basic idea that women, lacking penises early in their development and feeling this lack, are envious of those who possess them and doomed to feel less powerful than men as a result, is simply taken as a slap in the face by many Feminists, who do not believe that women, unconsciously or otherwise, somehow naturally feel inferior to men, in any respect. They believe that any such feelings are attributable to culture, and to the social structures the patriarchy has erected to maintain male domination and ensure women believe they are inferior to men.

This only begins to scratch the surface of the problems Feminism has with Freud, and of course I have only illustrated a single view, whereas Feminists are not a monolithic group. In fact, some later Feminist schools, especially those rooted in Poststructuralism, work extensively with Psychoanalytic Theory, although their primary reference point is the work of Jacques Lacan, whose developments of Psychoanalytic Theory modify and depart from Freud's in many important respects, including a more metaphorical treatment of the key developmental milestones and stages, as well as a focus on the linguistic implications of psychoanalytical concepts.

Continuing with the groundwork of Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory, once a child, male or female, has passed through the phallic stage of development, the superego is finally in place. In the case of the boy, the father forms the outside influence which is the source and embodiment of social strictures and values, limiting the free reign of the id which had previously defined the child's personality and behavior. For the first time, the child has been able to both see the potentially terrifying consequences of violating taboos, and to internalize this fear and the values which must be upheld to prevent it from manifesting. In short, the boy internalizes the father as a forbidding source of powerful authority, and this constitutes the superego in the young child. For girls, a similar process is at work, although, in Freud's model that I just described, the mother is the source of value and fear. In both cases the child comes to associate the internalized, daunting rule of the father and mother with more general societal norms and expectations, creating a superego that is more broadly functional and inclusive. Most children lose the fear of their parents at some point in their progress to adulthood, so it is imperative that they have internalized their early experiences and do not reply on threats of direct punishment to avoid inappropriate behavior.

If a child has problems making the transition through the phallic period, Freud identified several possible effects that he saw as serious problems. Homosexuality is one of these possible outcomes, as are various problems with authority, and the rejection of gender roles considered appropriate to the individual male or female. Again, this is an aspect of Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory that has been widely and vehemently criticized by both gender and queer theory, since it identifies homosexual and transgender individuals as suffering from a psychological disorder. Freud's theories of childhood development, already severely criticized for their treatment of female development, is seen as being especially deficient when it comes to accounting for individuals who do not fall into traditional heterosexual patterns. The notion of appropriate gender roles, as well, is highly controversial, for it assumes that men and women are naturally attuned to behaving in a given way based on their sex. This supports the idea that men and women should occupy definite positions in the social structure, an idea that Feminists see as limiting and simply incorrect. They would be inclined to explain traditional gender roles on the basis of cultural and social structures, all of which are human constructions, not psychological or biological imperatives.

Turning back to Freud's theory of psychosexual development, we now move into a transitional period. After the tumult of the earliest stages of childhood development, and before the powerful changes that will accompany puberty, there is a period of development which Freud refers to as the latent period. In this stage, the dramatic shifts that have occurred so far and the structures of mind they have instantiated (the ego and superego) are left to develop in a gradual way. It is a time of relative psychic stability, since the libido, with its accompanying sexual drive, is kept in close check by the ego and superego. The sexual energy of the phallic stage is still present, but it gets redirected into other pursuits like play and the development of friendships. This latency stretches from about the time a child enters school until puberty, and it composes what most would consider to be the purest expression of childhood.

The period of latency ends with the onset of puberty, and begins the final stage of psychosexual development, the genital stage, which will continue throughout a person's life. Like the phallic stage, the genital stage focuses the libido on the genitals, but this time with a mature, active sexual drive. The sexual energy characteristic of the earlier stages of development returns, but this time the target of desire becomes members of the opposite sex. Sex becomes a strong motivator, to be certain, but this is not the only form of expression the genital stage facilitates. To this point, children's only real concerns were for themselves and their own bodies. At the genital stage, there is a marked out-turning of interest, and the individual begins to pay close attention to other individuals, becoming far more involved with them in a way that allows for the formation of close bonds, ranging from deep friendship to romantic love. Thus, the extroversion of sexual desire is accompanied by the extroversion of the individual in a more profound way, which, if the stage is entered into successfully, should result in a person becoming loving, unselfish, and generous. Of course, anyone who remembers their early adolescence knows that this does not happen all at once, but the wheels are set in motion at puberty, and they continue turning throughout the rest of the person's life.

As was the case for the other stages of psychosexual development, Freud identifies problems for individuals who fail to successfully pass into the genital stage. He surmises that those who have spent too much libidinal energy in the first stages of development will not have enough left to enter the genital phase. As a result, they will not be able to turn their concern outward from the focus on themselves, their own bodies, and their parents. This means that they will have serious problems engaging in mature relationships, and will find it difficult to focus on the responsibilities and demands that come with an adult engagement with the social world. The person will remain focused on themselves and on fulfilling their own needs and desires, following the dictates of the id in a childlike fashion rather than directing its energies (through a developed ego) in a mature way.

There is a host of Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory that modifies, expands, and goes beyond what has been presented so far in this article, and, as usual, I will recommend that those of you who are interested go to Freud's own texts and explore in a finer, more detailed way his treatment of the topics I have presented here in summary form. It is certain that a specialist in Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory will note some places in this series where I have simplified a complex concept or left out something which might well be of interest to a reader, but the foundation I have laid out here will be sufficient to provide a grounding for the application of Psychoanalytic Theory to literary studies, which is, after all, my primary objective.

Literary texts hold a tremendous amount of potential for Psychoanalytic Theory, and they can be seen as a further elaboration of the same principles that operate in dreams. Psychoanalytic Theory sees dreams as presenting various aspects of the unconscious in transformed ways. Thus, dream images are often highly symbolic and representative, rather than literal and direct manifestations of unconscious drives, fantasies, and memories. One could even argue that dream analysis undertaken by psychoanalysts involves a very detailed reading of dreams, with reading taking on the meaning it has for literary scholars - the close examination of the structures and elements of the work which are combined in a system or interpretation that connects them and allows for the emergence of unified themes. One of the key differences between the reading of a text and the reading of dream, however, is that a text (taken from a New Critical or Structuralist perspective, at least) can be evaluated on its own terms, without reference to the author or other external factors. A dream, on the other hand, is not usually understood in the same way. It might be possible to do a strictly literary reading of a dream on its own terms, but this would at least in part defy the purpose of analyzing the dream in the first place. Psychoanalysts study dreams to understand more about their patients, and so rather than looking just at the dream as it is presented, they are concerned to understand it in terms of the individual's experience. By conducting such a dream reading, the analyst hopes to be able to break down the various transformations the dream presents, and to pierce to the underlying unconscious factors that lead to the images and scenarios that manifest themselves. Thus, the analyst seeks to provide an interpretation of the dream and its elements in terms of the dreamer, and so they are not even reading the dream per se, but rather the person who is doing the dreaming.

Another key difference between literary works and dreams is that dreams, according to Psychoanalytic Theory, are products of the unconscious, and as such the dreamer has little or no control over them. They seem to bubble spontaneously to the surface during sleep, and while there are rare states (such as lucid dreaming) when the dreamer is aware he or she is dreaming and can then control aspects of the dream experience, this is the rarest exception rather than the norm. A text, on the other hand, is the conscious production of the author, and, far from spontaneous, literary productions are most often painstakingly considered and arranged, according to a plan the author has in mind, which is usually designed to create a given effect in potential readers.

However, interesting results often emerge when the tenets of Psychoanalytic Theory are applied to texts which treat them as if they were dreams, and the author the patient. Taken from this perspective, the text is still considered to be an intentional product of the author, but it is seen as saying much more about the author than the author even realizes. Basically, the message or intended effect of the author is seen as being a cover or veil for the aspects of his or her repressed unconscious desires, fears, fantasies, and memories. A literary text, in the same way a dream does, encodes these unconscious drives of the author in images and language that the author is not even aware says anything about his or her psyche. As is the case for the study of dreams, each character in a given literary work, as well as their relations, and even the settings in which everything takes place, can be seen as manifestations of different aspects of the author's psyche. Thus, from one way of looking at it, the text is actually a symptom of the author's pathology, a paraphrase of a statement made by Psychoanalytic Theorist Jacques Lacan, whose work paved the way for the rise of Psychoanalytic Theory in literary studies.

Lacan, a French theorist, is most comfortably positioned in the Poststructural camp of literary theory, since his ideas are rooted not only in Psychoanalytic Theory, but also in linguistics, and are focused on a remodeling of structuralism. He turns Psychoanalytic Theory on language itself, and attempts to explain how meaning and language can be generated at all in psychoanalytic terms, perhaps most notably in an interesting application of Freud's Oedipal complex. As we remember from our discussion of the Oedipal complex during the phallic stage of psychosexual development, the male child sees the father as a rival for the love of the mother, and so wishes to dispose of and replace him. However, he fears castration, and so must not do that which would anger the father, which would be having sex with the mother. So, although the son desires to be like the father, and identifies with him, he can never be the father, for he can never have the mother he desires in the way he desires. As a result, the father becomes elevated into an ideal that simply cannot be reached, and Lacan posits that the father at this point goes from being a mere physical presence to a powerful abstraction, what he calls The Name of the Father. This coincides with Freud's idea of the child's internalization of the father figure becoming the superego, only described in more metaphorical, and more powerful terms. Lacan believes that this Name of the Father is pivotal not only in developing a superego, but in making meaning itself possible.

Just as the figure of the father is sublimated into the Name of the Father in Lacan's terminology, so too is the actual mother transformed into a new, conceptual form, known simply as desire. The mother represents desire on two levels that have a great deal of overlap for the infant especially. On the one hand, the mother represents the libidinal focus of the infant, and so sexual desire is one of the mother's primary meanings for the child going through the earlier stages of psychosexual development. In a related way, the union the child seeks to achieve with the mother is expressed more generally as well; when the child is still quite young, it has not yet made the distinction between itself and the world around it. The self-other distinction that is so vital to normal adult functioning does not instantiate itself until the child develops beyond the id, and into the possession of an ego and superego. In the phallic stage of psychosexual development, the child undergoes the processes associated with the Oedipal complex, which acts to make the ego bloom, and instantiates the superego upon its completion.

In this Oedipal process, in Lacan's terminology, the Name of the Father, the actual father taken as a powerful metaphysical concept, is what causes the child to be severed from the mother. Till that point, the child sees him or her self as an entity coexistent with the mother in an undifferentiated state of oceanic sameness where all needs are taken care of. However, with the imposition of the Name of the Father comes a marked separation from the mother, since the fear of castration prompts the child to separate itself from the mother, and to identify with the father. Thus, the mother becomes the longed-for perfection, the essence of desire itself, for the child feels powerfully its separation from the source of all its pleasure and sustenance, and wants nothing more than to achieve a return to this unity. This return, of course, is impossible once separation has been achieved, and so the object of desire is perfected because it can never be attained; one can never see oneself as being the same entity as the mother, and one can never possess her sexually because, first, of fear of the father, and second, because the child learns the strict taboo against this kind of union. Thus, the mother embodies the purest target of unachievable desire.

As a result, all desire is rooted in lack, or absence. Both the mother who is the target of desire, and the father whom the child eventually attempts to emulate and become, represent unachievable goals. Both of these become the preconditions for our existence in the world; we desire the unattainable, and so we desire to become that which could attain it (the Name of the Father, the ultimate phallus), but neither is ever possible. Language emerges as a structure which is rooted in these essential incompatibilities. All language is rooted in a desire to say something, to communicate, to exert ourselves on the world. Further, all language is an attempt to capture in words precisely what it is we are feeling and thinking, which is itself impossible. Finally, language relies on the belief that there is some objective power that exists outside it that makes it consistent and intelligible among different people; without this belief, any speech act would be seen as an utterly futile one. Thus, we constantly seek to achieve the phallus, the source of all power and mastery, but are doomed to fail. As a result, language is constantly missing its mark, and the desire of perfect union between thought and word is never achieved.

Lacan's work revisits and remodels Ferdinand de Saussure's work on language which we read about in previous series, which forms the basis of most Poststructuralist conceptions of language. Lacan's work itself became a popular and even dominant way of considering language, and was adopted by Poststructuralists of many types, including Deconstructionists and Feminists, to name but two of the groups we have already spoken of so far. Language, like our desires in general, is able to make reference only to itself, and is only intelligible in terms of itself and its own inherent rules and structures. That which gives language meaning, the Name of the Father, is outside the system of signification, and while it can be seen as that which gives language meaning, it is outside of the meaning creating structure and so ineffable and unpronounceable. Thus, all language, and all meaning, is centered on an essential lack or absence; this aporia between meaning and that which makes meaning possible is the generative force (and inherent contradiction) of language itself.

Needless to say, Lacan's work is probably the most esoteric and confusing of all the Psychoanalytic Theorists, and many, many Poststructural theorists have dedicated themselves to rendering his work both more lucid and more applicable to literary studies. In order to make a Lacanian reading easier to imagine, and to outline a story which is at the very core of Lacan's generation of his basic ideas, it will be most useful to present a psychoanalytic reading of the first creation myth of Genesis, where the Lord creates everything that is.

The first three words of the Bible, most appropriately, begin things in their proper chronological order, with the words "In the beginning" letting the readers know just where they stand, and when the events that are about to unfold are taking place. From here, we learn that in the beginning, the only thing there is is God, and something known as the "Word"; however, the Word, whatever it is, is with God, and the Word is God, and so there seems to be just one massively undifferentiated powerful entity or substance which comprises the universe.

With the constituents (or more properly, constituent) of the early universe now established, we can see that the Biblical idea of creation maps onto the Lacanian concept of psychosexual development in an interesting way. Everything begins with an undifferentiated character, and all those things which will later be thought of as separate things, and even that which will eventually cause the divisions to be made between all things, are contained in a single mass or substance. This maps onto the infant's sense of complete union with the world around it, and especially its union with the mother, desire itself. Everything is a part of it, and it is a part of everything else, just as the universe, at this point, is all one thing, the being and substance of God.

The Biblical account shifts at this point, and the first differentiation of the entity of God and the universe is created. God says "let there be light," and immediately, there is light. The first distinction, indeed, the first principle of distinction, is created here, and there exists the light and the darkness, whereas before there was only an undifferentiated darkness. The light allows for the development of many more things, but it also carries great symbolic significance analogous to language and speech itself.