Long OT Re: Freudian/Lacanian

[Rita Winston]

No: HPFGUIDX 7353

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, "Ebony " <ebonyink at h...> wrote:

> The following is prewriting/brainstorming for the paper I talked
> about so much earlier this fall.

I'm glad you finally explained the paper that you were tantalizing 
us with hints about. Your description was interesting. I previously 
had not known anything about Lacan.

> At the center of Freudian psychoanalytic criticism is the concept
> that the human mind is divided into three separate yet interacting
> parts.  Say them with me... the id ("inner child"), the ego 
> ("rational mind"), and the superego ("conscience"). 

Child, Adult, and Parent in Transactional Analysis (in which the 
Child is valued more than Freud's Id). Can we match them up with 
some more ancient three-way division of a person? Body/flesh, mind, 
soul? Animal, human, angel? 

> ***Thus began the trend amongst English types to understand
> literature by determining the content of the author's id.***

One of the reasons that I hate English and Literature as subjects is 
that, once we were out of sixth grade and writing essays about the 
"theme" (actually, the "moral", as in "the theme of this story is 
that prejudice is unfair") of the assigned story, the next seven 
years (required Freshman Comp was the LAST English class I ever took, 
hallelu-ilat!) was writing essays about the Freudian symbolism in the 
assigned story. Cranking out identifications of things as Freudian 
symbols is an easy enough mechanical exercise that I got Bs (if it's 
longer than it's wide, it's a phallic symbol; if it's wider than it's 
long, it much be a vaginal symbol).

But I have never been able to see ANY value in it. Even if it 
accurately discovers the author's neuroses, it is the book that I 
care about, not the author. It doesn't teach us why some stories are 
objects of beauty that take one's breath away and last 'forever' and 
why other stories are loved in one era and considered unreadable 
garbage by other eras. And it doesn't teach us anything about the 
human condition: not about honor, not about envy, not about battle 
fatigue....

Which is working up to, somewhere in this post, I will ask you what 
is that lit-crit stuff good for? 

Lee once responded to this complaint of mine by lending me Northrup 
Frye, ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, which I read through and turned over and 
started again at the beginning -- for four consecutive reads, on the 
fourth of which I made extensive notes. Now THAT was lit-crit that 
help me better understand the stories!
 
> Children have no concept of self until they are able to understand
> the word "I" (known as the Lacanian Mirror Stage), 

['Ego' is the Latin word for "I am", right? And Latin is a language 
in which the pronoun can't be there without a verb, right? And Joseph 
Campbell wrote that the Pali word translated 'ego', as the error that 
must be removed from the mind to find Nirvana, is literally "Saying 
I". I used to remember that Pali word, but now I am too sleepy to even 
look it up.]

So if they never learned the word "I", they would never develop a 
sense of self as separate being. I suspect that it works the other 
way: if they never developed a sense of self as separate being, they 
would never learn the word "I". But taking it as written, we seem to 
be in Sapir-Whorf, where the words and grammatical structures that we 
know control what reality we perceive. Which would be somewhat 
contradictory to your much emphasized point that we can always 
perceive more reality than we can put into words.   

> Before this point, an infant's identity is  wholly wrapped up in a
> feeling of oneness with his or her mother.

Arrgh, I've lost my memory. Who was the Frenchman who called it 
"participation mystique" (which means Mystical Participation, and 
authors in English who use that French phrase without translating it 
just get their readers all confused with long-gone memories of The 
Feminine Mystique), explaining it as the source of the Animist 
beliefs of 'savages'? The point is, Union with God, becoming One with 
Everything, whatever they call it, is a highly praised mystical 
experience of the most advanced religions. (As well as an excuse for 
sex acts.)

> ***In Lacan's logic an individual's unfulfilled desires are
> an  attempt to rejoin the inexpressible that is lost through
> linguistic signification.*** 

How about unfulfilled desires like Enough Food? Make this sabre tooth 
tiger stop biting me?

> he is the expressed projection of her aggregate unconscious
> desires-—for publication, for a change in socioeconomic status, for
> a place in the annals of time,

I don't see any reason to assume that those are UNconscious desires: 
they seem the type of desires that people have quite consciously.

> but this type of reading requires that you know some "dirt"... at
> least the tinest speck.  Remember, you must fish around in the 
> author's id according to Freud and Lacan to make sense of anything
> they write.

This is what I was saying before, What Good Is It? A lit-crit system 
that makes no distinction between the literary merit of (name your 
classic: The Illiad, Romeo and Juliet, HP and the Philosopher's 
Stone) and the rambling messages about CIA conspiracies, Mafia, JFK 
assassination, baccarat betting systems, fixed horse races, etc, that 
one of my friends leaves on my voicemail when he has had too much to 
drink?