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Psychoanalytic Criticism
THE UNCONSCIOUS
Psychoanalytic criticism is a form of applied psychoanalysis, a science concerned with the interaction between conscious and unconscious processes and with the laws of mental functioning. It should not be confused with psychotherapy, which is concerned with treating mental illness and behavioral problems, although many psychotherapists use various kinds of analysis in their work. Rather, psychoanalytic criti- cism is one of many different forms of study that use psychoanalytic concepts to understand particular subject matter. Thus there are psy- choanalytically inclined sociologists, anthropologists, and political sci- entists, as well as critics, and all of them use concepts and insights from psychoanalytic theory in their work. Freud did not discover the unconscious; Plato, Nietzsche, Bergson, and many others discussed it before Freud. However, Freud devel- oped the concept most thoroughly, and it is with Freud that all neo- Freudians, post-Freudians, anti-Freudians, and non-Freudians must come to grips. He was a seminal thinker of incredible power and scope, and his ideas and insights have fueled the work of generations of schol- ars in numerous fields. What I offer in this section is not a full-scale explication of Freudian thought, but a selection of some of Freud’s most important concepts—concepts that can be applied to the media
to help clarify how they work and how they affect us. Freud was most interested in helping people, but in the course of his amazing career he wrote on many other subjects, such as folklore, humor, and theater— pointing the way toward the development of psychoanalytic criticism. One of the keystones in psychoanalytic theory is the concept of the unconscious. As Freud writes in his essay “Psychoanalysis” (1963):
It was a triumph for the interpretative art of psychoanalysis when it succeeded in demonstrating that certain common mental acts of normal people, for which no one had hitherto attempted to put forward a psychological explanation, were to be regarded in the same light as the symptoms of neurotics: that is to say they had a meaning, which was unknown to the subject but which could eas- ily be discovered by analytic means.... A class of material was brought to light which is calculated better than any other to stim- ulate a belief in the existence of unconscious mental acts even in people to whom the hypothesis of something at once mental and unconscious seems strange and even absurd. (pp. 235–236)
We are not, then, aware of everything that is going on in our minds. Not only that, we are aware of only a little that is going on in our minds—only a small portion of our mental lives is accessible to us.
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Figure 3.
It has frequently been suggested that an individual’s mental life can be represented by an iceberg. The tip of the iceberg, that part seen
Conscious Proconscious Unconscious
Let me interrupt here to ask what you think this “basic reason” might be. The answer most people would give would be “That’s obvious—to light cigarettes.” But that is the conscious, or “manifest,” reason. The basic, or “real,” reason and the “latent” and unconscious reason are sometimes entirely different. Let us return to Dichter, who tells us why people use lighters:
The basic reason for using a lighter [is]... the desire for mastery and power. The capacity to summon fire inevitably gives every human being, child or grownup, a sense of power. Reasons go far back into man’s history. Fire and the ability to command it are prized because they are associated not only with warmth, but also with life itself. As attested to by the Greek legend of Prometheus and many other myths, the ability to control fire is an age-old symbol of man’s conquest of the physical world he inhabits. A cigarette lighter provides conspicuous evidence of this ability to summon fire. The ease and speed with which the lighter works enhances the feeling of power. The failure of a lighter to work does not just create superficial social embarrassment, it frustrates a deep-seated desire for a feeling of mastery and control. (p. 341)
Thus cigarette lighters are important to people because lighters fulfill powerful but unconscious needs and desires. The same can be said of many of the films we see, television programs we watch, novels we read, and other art forms we find so necessary to our lives. All of these things feed our unconscious lives, our psyches, in ways that few people understand. But the need for mastery and power is only part of the story, for at a deeper level there is something else connected with the humble cigarette lighter. Dichter explains:
Research evidence suggests that at a still deeper level the need for certainty that a cigarette lighter will work matters as much as it does because it is also bound up with the idea of sexual potency. The working of the lighter becomes a kind of symbol of the flame which must be lit in consummating sexual union. (p. 341)
This leads us to our next important subject—sexuality. Many people are aware that Freud was interested in sexuality, but they may
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know little more than that. And often the little knowledge they have of Freud’s views is simplistic, which leads to absurd misconceptions.
SEXUALITY
Many people are negative or even hostile toward Freud’s work because of his views on sexuality. I believe, however, that much of this hostility is based in misunderstanding of Freud’s theories and also that it is related, in the United States at least, to extreme sensitivity to the topic of sexuality. We Americans resist intrusion into this most private and personal aspect of our lives and may even repress—refuse to admit to consciousness—ideas and insights that would explain sexuality in general and our behavior in particular. Freud calls the “force by which the sexual instinct is represented in the mind” the libido. This term should be understood broadly, and not as being restricted only to sexual relations; that is, libido refers to various kinds of sensual pleasures and gratifications. According to Freud, all individuals pass through four stages in their development: the oral, the anal, the phallic, and the genital. In The Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis these stages are described as follows:
The mouth represents an erotogenic zone for the infant. Sucking and later eating represent the gratification of oral needs. The fact that the infant often sucks a pacifier indicates that he is not only concerned with the incorporation of calories. When the infant begins to have teeth, the need to bite expresses his sadistic desires. The second stage of development is usually referred to as the sadistic-anal, and is characterized by the infant’s interest in excret- ing or retaining his stools. Finally, the third stage is referred to as the phallic, in which the boy is interested in his penis and the girl in her clitoris. The boy’s interest in his penis appears to be respon- sible for his positive Oedipus complex, which is finally dissolved by the fear of castration. The girl reacts with penis envy, if she considers her clitoris to be an inferior organ to the penis. Freud pointed out that the stages are not clear-cut, and that the fourth stage, the genital phase, is achieved only with puberty. (Eidelberg, 1968, pp. 210–211)
During infancy and childhood, an individual’s sexual life is rich but dissociated and unfocused. Focusing occurs at puberty.
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on October 15, 1897, to Wilhelm Fliess, he described how he came to recognize the existence and importance of the Oedipus complex:
Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise. Only one idea of general value has occurred to me. I have found love of the mother and jealousy of the father in my own case too, and now believe it to be a general phenomena of early childhood, even if it does not always occur so early as in children who have been made hysterics.... If that is the case, the gripping power of Oedipus Rex, in spite of all the rational objections to the inexorable fate that the story presupposes, becomes intelligible, and one can understand why later fate dramas were such failures. Our feelings rise against any arbitrary individual fate... but the Greek myth seizes on a compulsion which everyone recognizes because he has felt traces of it in himself. Every member of the audience was once a budding Oedipus in fantasy, and this dream-fulfillment played out in real- ity causes everyone to recoil in horror, with the full measure of repression which separates his infantile from his present state. The idea has passed through my head that the same thing may lie at the root of Hamlet. I am not thinking of Shakespeare’s con- scious intentions, but supposing rather that he was impelled to write it by a real event because his own unconscious understood that of his hero. How can one explain the hysteric Hamlet’s phrase “So conscience doth make cowards of us all,” and his hesitation to avenge his father by killing his uncle, when he himself so casually sends his courtiers to their death and despatches Laertes so quickly? How better than by the torment roused in him by the obscure memory that he himself had meditated the same deed against his father because of passion for his mother—“use every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping?” His con- science is his unconscious feeling of guilt. (quoted in Grotjahn, 1966, pp. 84–85)
According to psychoanalytic theory, every individual passes through a stage in which he or she desires the parent of the opposite sex—all of this, of course, on an unconscious level. Most people learn to master their Oedipus complexes; neurotic individuals are plagued by theirs. In little boys this mastery is aided by an unconscious fear of castration—castration anxiety—and in little girls it is aided by jealousy of men and what is termed penis envy.
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Little boys, according to Freudian theory, sexualize their love for their mothers and wish to displace their fathers and monopolize their mothers’ affection. Their fear of retaliation by their fathers then leads them to renounce their love of their mothers, to identify with the mas- culinity of their fathers, to rechannel their love outside of the family, and to direct their interest toward other females. With little girls, the situation is different. They do not have to fear castration (some theorists suggest that they believe they have already lost their penises) and so do not relinquish their Oedipal desires as quickly as boys do. But girls do fear the loss of the love of both their parents, and so avoid this loss by reidentifying with their mothers and turning, eventually, to males other than their fathers as a means of obtaining babies (and, indirectly, their lost penises). Freud also wrote about several other related complexes that are of interest here. For example, the Heracles complex is characterized by a hatred of the father for his children. The father sees the children as rivals for the affection of his wife, and so wishes to get rid of the children. The Jocasta complex (named for the mother of Oedipus) is characterized by abnormal attachment of the mother to her son; it is found in varying degrees of intensity, from simple overattachment to incestuous relations. One of the ways in which young children deal with their Oedipal anxieties is through exposure to fairy tales. In The Uses of Enchantment (1977), Bruno Bettelheim devotes a chapter to Oedipal conflicts and res- olutions in which he argues that fairy tales can help children to resolve these problems. Children identify with the heroes and heroines of such stories and learn important things about life as well. Fairy tales, Bettelheim suggests, speak to children indirectly and symbolically— the stories are often about some unlikely hero who “proves himself by slaying dragons, solving riddles, and living by his wits and goodness until eventually he frees the beautiful princess, marries her, and lives happily ever after” (p. 111). In stories that speak to little girls, there is usually some evil stepmother or enchantress who is intensely jealous of the heroine and tries to prevent some hero, such as Prince Charming, from finding his princess. Sometimes in these tales the mother is split into two characters—an evil stepmother and a good mother (or fairy godmother). Fairy tales are important because they help children cope with the psychological difficulties they experience. As Bettelheim (1977) explains:
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The story of Oedipus begins with the marriage of King Laius of Thebes to his distant cousin, Jocasta. An oracle makes a prophecy that Laius will be killed by his son, so when Jocasta gives birth to Oedipus, Laius binds the infant’s feet and orders that he be left on a mountain- top to die. Laius is unaware that Oedipus is rescued from the mountain by a shepherd and taken to King Polybus of Corinth, who raises him as a son. Oedipus believes that Polybus is his father, so when, as a young man, he hears that Apollo has said that Oedipus is fated to kill his father, he leaves Corinth to avoid harming Polybus. As he travels to Thebes, he meets Laius at a crossroads; the two men get into a fight, and Laius is killed. Oedipus then goes on to Thebes, which is being plagued by the Sphinx, a monster that looks like a winged lion and has the face of a woman. The Sphinx devours any wayfarer who cannot answer this riddle: What creature goes on four feet in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening? Oedipus seeks out the Sphinx and correctly answers the riddle she poses: The creature is man, who crawls in infancy, walks on two legs in the prime of life, and uses a cane to walk in old age. When Oedipus answers the riddle, the Sphinx kills herself and Thebes is saved. Oedipus is then welcomed into the city with great fanfare, and the Thebans make him their king. He marries the wife of the former king, Jocasta—not realizing that she is his mother—and they have two children. When the children are grown up, Thebes is visited by another plague. Oedipus sends Jocasta’s brother, Creon, to consult the oracle at Delphi to find out what might be done to lift the plague. Creon comes back with the answer: Whoever murdered King Laius must be pun- ished. Oedipus then sends Tiresias, a blind prophet (who had once been a woman), to the oracle to find out the name of the king’s mur- derer. When Tiresias returns, he at first refuses to tell Oedipus what he has learned. When Oedipus accuses Tiresias of not telling him the answer because Tiresias himself was involved in the killing of King Laius, Tiresias finally tells Oedipus, “You are the murderer.” When it becomes clear that Oedipus has killed his own father and married his mother, Jocasta kills herself and Oedipus blinds himself in his grief. This myth, Freud suggests, is a template that explains the develop- mental processes that all children undergo. The child is attracted to the parent of the opposite sex and becomes hostile toward the parent of the same sex. Most children are able to resolve their Oedipal difficulties and lead normal lives, but those who can’t end up with many psychological difficulties. For Freud, Oedipal conflicts are the core of neuroses.
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Freud’s argument is that myths have impacts on our psychological development. Another aspect of myths that is worth considering is that these sacred stories shape many of the things we do, although we are unaware of this influence. As Mircea Eliade explains in The Sacred and the Profane (1957/1961), “The modern man who feels and claims that he is nonreligious still retains a large stock of camouflaged myths and degenerated rituals” (pp. 204–205). Thus many films and television programs and many of our rituals, such as holding New Year’s Eve parties, include sacred or mythological content. Myths are an impor- tant component of our psyches, our media and popular culture, and our everyday lives.
ID, EGO, AND SUPEREGO
The id, ego, and superego are part of what is usually referred to as Freud’s structural hypothesis about mental functioning. Charles Brenner (1974) offers the following brief description of these three phenomena:
We may say that id comprises the psychic representatives of the drives, the ego consists of those functions which have to do with the individual’s relation to his environment, and the superego comprises the moral precepts of our minds as well as our ideal aspirations. The drives, of course, we assume to be present from birth, but the same is certainly not true of interest in or control of the envi- ronment on the one hand, nor of any moral sense or aspirations on the other. It is obvious that neither of the latter, that is neither the ego nor the superego, develops till sometimes after birth. Freud expressed this fact by assuming that the id comprised the entire psychic apparatus at birth, and that the ego and super- ego were originally parts of the id which differentiated sufficiently in the course of growth to warrant their being considered as sepa- rate functional entities. (p. 38)
Each of these entities—the id, ego, and superego—is extremely compli- cated, and Freud and others have written a great deal about how each develops and functions, and the importance of each to the individual’s psychic life.
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with the aim of self-preservation. The ego carries out its function by storing up experiences in the memory, avoiding excessively strong stimuli through flight, adapting to moderately strong stimuli, and bringing about changes in the world through activity. We can use the concepts of the id, ego, and superego to help us understand texts. In certain texts, characters may be seen as primarily id figures or ego figures or superego figures. For example, in Star Trek, I would suggest that Spock is, essentially, an ego figure, Kirk (in German, interestingly, the name means “church”) is a superego figure, and McCoy is an id figure. Spock, the emotionless Vulcan, represents pure rationality. Kirk, the commander of the Enterprise, more or less determines what is to be done, and so represents the superego. And McCoy, who is very emotional and often operates on the basis of his feelings, represents the id. In some texts it is easy to identify characters as id, ego, or superego figures. Superman, Dick Tracy, Luke Skywalker, and countless other heroes and heroines and caped crusaders are obviously superego figures. But others, such as James Bond and Indiana Jones, are more com- plicated; they may be more id and ego figures, perhaps, than superego ones. Villains, of course, are almost always id figures; they lack superego development and are interested only in gratifying their desires. They may be intelligent and shrewd, but they lack a sense of right and wrong. We can also examine various genres in terms of the Freudian struc- tural hypothesis. Certain kinds of films and television programs, such as news shows, interview programs, and documentaries, can be classi- fied as essentially ego texts. Texts that feature the police or that have religious messages are obviously superego texts. And soap operas and other television programs and films that involve sexuality (video pornography, MTV) tend to be id texts. It is not always possible to label a text as clearly representing id, ego, or superego, but in some cases, especially when the work is a formulaic one, it does make sense.
SYMBOLS
Psychoanalysis is, remember, an interpretive art. It seeks to find mean- ing in the behavior of people and in the arts they create. One way we can apply psychoanalytic theory is by understanding how the psyche works and learning how to interpret the hidden significance of what people and characters in fiction do. We ask ourselves questions, such
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as, “What does it mean when Hamlet says this or that?” or “What does it mean when Hamlet is unable to act?” We want to know why. This is where symbols come in. Symbols are things that stand for other things, many of which are hidden or at least not obvious. A sym- bol can stand for an institution, a mode of thought, an idea, a wish— any number of things. Heroes and heroines are often symbolic and thus can be interpreted in terms of all the things they stand for. And much of what is most interesting about symbols is their relation to the uncon- scious. Symbols are keys that enable us to unlock the doors shielding our unconscious feelings and beliefs from scrutiny. Symbols are mes- sages from our unconscious. Hinsie and Campbell (1970) define symbolism as follows:
The act or process of representing an order or idea by a substitute object, sign, or signal. In psychiatry, symbolism is of particular importance since it can serve as a defense mechanism of the ego, as where unconscious (and forbidden) aggressive or sexual impulses come to expression through symbolic representation and thus are able to avoid censorship. (p. 734)
According to this theory, then, we mask our unconscious sexual and aggressive desires through symbolization, which enables us to escape guilt from the superego. Interpreting symbols can involve a number of difficulties. (I might point out that there are many different theories in psychology about sym- bols, and they have, like many other aspects of psychoanalytic thought, generated a great deal of controversy.) First, symbols are often ambivalent and can be explained in varying ways depending on one’s orientation. For instance, some people see Hamlet’s inability to act as symbolic of the power of an unresolved Oedipus complex, whereas others believe that it symbolizes his skepticism and overintellectualism. Some think that Hamlet is paralyzed by grief; others think he is insane. (If you are inter- ested in the “problem” of Hamlet, I recommend that you read Hamlet and Oedipus, by Ernest Jones [1949]. Jones provides a fascinating, although doctrinaire Freudian, interpretation of this symbolic hero.) Symbols may be classified as conventional, accidental, or univer- sal. Conventional symbols are words that we learn that stand for things. In contrast to these are accidental symbols, which are personal, private, and connected to an individual’s life history. For example, for a man who fell in love for the first time in Paris, Paris may become an
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- Avoidance: Refusal to become involved with subjects that are distressing because they are connected to unconscious sexual or aggressive impulses.
- Denial or disavowal: Refusal to accept the reality of something that generates anxiety by blocking it from consciousness or by becoming involved in a wish-fulfilling fantasy.
- Fixation: Obsessive preoccupation or attachment to something, generally the result of some traumatic experience.
- Identification: The desire to become “like” someone or something in some aspect of thought or behavior.
- Projection: An attempt to deny some negative or hostile feeling in oneself by attributing it to someone else. Thus a person who hates someone will “project” that hatred onto another, perceiv- ing that person as being the one who hates.
- Rationalization: The offering of logical reasons or excuses for behavior generated by unconscious and irrational determinants. (This term was introduced into psychoanalysis by Ernest Jones.)
- Reaction formation: This occurs when a pair of ambivalent atti- tudes generates problems, so one element is suppressed and kept unconscious by overemphasis on the other (its opposite), although it doesn’t disappear. For example, a person might have ambivalent feelings of love and hatred toward another; the hate may be made unconscious and kept unconscious by an overem- phasis on love, so that it appears to be replaced by love.
- Regression: The individual’s return to an earlier stage in life development when confronted with a stressful or anxiety- provoking situation.
- Repression: The barring from consciousness of unconscious instinctual wishes, memories, desires, and the like. This is con- sidered the most basic defense mechanism.
- Suppression: The purposeful putting out of the mind and con- sciousness something that the individual finds painful. This is the second most basic defense mechanism. (Because suppres- sion is voluntary, suppressed material can be recalled to con- sciousness fairly easily, unlike repressed material, which is very difficult to bring to consciousness.)
Let me suggest how a media analyst might apply knowledge of defense mechanisms by presenting an example involving regression. In an analysis that I conducted some years ago, I contrasted Pac-Man with
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other video games that preceded it, such as Space Invaders. For more than a year, Pac-Man was the most popular video game in the United States, which is one of the reasons I analyzed it. In Space Invaders, players fly through the open skies, zapping invading aliens. Two things about Space Invaders are important to this analysis: First, there is freedom to fly about; second, the game is phal- lic. In Pac-Man, on the other hand, the play is restricted to an enclosed area, and the “attacks” involve eating. In other words, aggression in Pac-Man is oral. What we have in Pac-Man, then, is a regression from the phallic (guns) to the oral (biting) as a means of fighting and a change from the freedom to race around the skies to confinement in a maze. From a developmental perspective, Pac-Man is regressive. The significance of this regression raises interesting questions. When it is not pathological, regression often involves an attempt to escape from anxiety of some kind and is a perfectly normal kind of behavior that functions “in the service of the ego.” It may be that the popularity of Pac-Man suggested that, somehow, large numbers of American young people (although they were not the only ones playing it) were experiencing anxieties and that they were using to game to assuage those anxieties. Curiously, there is often a connection between regression and fixation, so the fact that so many people played the game over and over again should not be too surprising. Regression and all of the other defense mechanisms listed above are concepts that can be applied to the behavior of characters in films, television programs, and other texts and to various other aspects of the media. These concepts can help us to understand human motivation and can enrich and deepen our ability to analyze the media. Defense mechanisms are functions of the ego, which uses them against the id. When the id threatens the ego, generating anxiety, the ego uses whatever it can to neutralize the id. There is a considerable amount of disagreement among psychoanalysts as to what can legiti- mately be called defense mechanisms (the ego also has other tech- niques for mastering the id), but the ones listed above are generally accepted as the most important.
DREAMS
It is possible, without stretching things too much, to make a compari- son between dreams and many of the fictions brought to us by the
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psychoanalytic theory is that this kind of behavior can be explained as repression—the refusal to acknowledge one’s sexuality and other aspects of the psyche. Many of Freud’s critics take comfort in quoting a statement that has been attributed to him: “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” They generally employ this remark when someone else has used a Freudian interpretation of symbols to describe some object or artifact as a phal- lic symbol. I once suggested that the Washington monument, a great shaft erected in honor of the father of our country, is quite obviously a phallic symbol—although I don’t believe that the people responsible for creating the monument thought of it as such. “Ha!” replied a critic, who then offered the cigar quote. My point here is that if sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, at other times a cigar is not just a cigar. You can’t have it both ways. The notion that certain objects represent, to the unconscious mind, penises (and other objects, of course, represent vaginas or wombs) may strike you as absurd, but if you are going to argue that suggesting something is a phallic symbol is incorrect in some cases, you must accept the notion that in other cases, suggesting something is a phallic symbol may be correct. In any case, dreams require interpretation, and that interpretation must be keyed to the dreamer’s life. The dreamer can help an analyst to discover a dream’s true meaning by participating in free associa- tion—revealing all the thoughts that come into his or her mind—and by restructuring the dream. Fromm (1957) writes:
This true dream, which is the expression of our hidden desires, Freud calls the “latent dream.” The distorted version of the dream as we remember it is the “manifest dream” and the process of dis- tortion and disguise is the “dream-work.” The main mechanisms through which the dream-work translates the latent into the manifest dream are condensation, displacement and secondary elaboration. By condensation Freud refers to the fact that the man- ifest dream is much shorter than the latent dream. It leaves out a number of elements of the latent dream, combines fragments of various elements, and condenses them into one new element in the manifest dream.... By displacement Freud refers to the fact that an element of the latent dream, and often a very important one, is expressed by a remote element in the manifest dream and usually one which appears to be quite unimportant. (pp. 69–70)
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The process of secondary elaboration involves filling in gaps in the dream, repairing inconsistencies, and so on, so the manifest dream seems consistent and coherent. Two things make analyzing dreams especially difficult: the fact that elements in dreams often stand for their opposites, and the fact that the manifest dream is not a coherent narrative but a series of disconnected images. Thus a dream represents a formidable problem to the analyst, who must understand how dreams disguise and distort things and be able to relate what is found in dreams to the dreamer’s personal life. Jacques Lacan, a French thinker, has suggested that the semiotic concepts of metaphor and metonymy are useful for understanding dreams. Condensation, according to Lacan, is similar to what I have described in Chapter 1 of this volume as metaphor, and displacement is similar to metonymy. In condensation and in metaphor, we tie con- cepts together; in displacement and in metonymy, we substitute one thing for something else. Lacan differs with Freud over the nature of the unconscious. According to Freud, the unconscious is chaotic and preverbal, whereas Lacan (1966) argues that “the unconscious is struc- tured like a language,” which suggests that semiotics and linguistics might be useful in understanding how the unconscious works. Recently, some researchers have suggested that Freud’s theories about dreams being responses to experiences and being based on wish fulfillment might be inadequate. Whatever the case, his notions about how dreams function and the roles that condensation and displace- ment play in dreams have interesting implications for the study of how the media affect individuals and, through individuals, society. As I have noted above, many of the products of the mass media can be viewed as similar to dreams—in analyzing these products, we must look for distortions and disguises, we must concern ourselves with the unconscious and with censorship, and we must relate what we dis- cover in mediated works to the personal histories of the dreamers (which involve both their biographies and their social situations). We must also recognize the influences of the psyches of the creators and interpreters of these works. Clearly, the situation is quite complicated. We can assume that apart from the surface communication between the artist/creator and the audience/receiver, there is also communica- tion from the subconscious or unconscious of one to that of the other, so that some of the most important aspects of what we get from media may be submerged and not readily observable. This is why knowledge of the psyche and how it functions is so important.
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