Freudian/Lacanian Support for H/H (long)

[Caius Marcius]

No: HPFGUIDX 7465

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, "Ebony " <ebonyink at h...> wrote:
> WARNING:  This is extremely long.
> 
> --- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, Penny & Bryce Linsenmayer 
> > The biggest problem I have is that JKR has no authorized 
biographical 
> material out there in book form.  The interviews from Publisher's 
> Weekly, Time, etc. were accused by one of my colleagues as 
> being "carefully constructed fabrications straight from Joanne 
> Rowling's publicist."  There's no way to do this type of
> analysis 
> with credibility unless your sources are watertight. 
> 
> You see, it's easy enough to do a Lacanian analysis of a
> fantastic 
> work like say, Frankenstein... but then, Mary Shelley's been dead
> for 
> quite some time now and we know plenty about her.  JKR is still 
> living and values her privacy.  I respect that... 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.


I'd have to disagree with that, although what you are saying is a 
pretty common distortion of  Freud.   I think what a musician once 
said about Mozart – that he's too easy for beginners, and too 
difficult for virtuosi – applies equally well to Freud.  It's easy – 
even for people who've never read a page of actual Freud – to pick up 
a few general ideas about his theories, and then apply – or misapply –
 their simplistic understanding of them As Hans Zinnser wrote, "Freud 
is a great man. But it is dangerous when a great man is too easily 
half-understood. Freud's high explosives have been reworked into 
firecrackers for the simple to burn their fingers. It is easy to make 
a noise and a bad smell with materials compounded by the great 
discoverer for the blasting of tunnels." Chances are, the Freud you 
think you know is an imposter, a community college professor, or talk-
host wannabe on Polyjuice.  (I've read several of the responses to 
this thread, and I think they're all directed at the Polyjuice Freud 
as well)

Ebony, you mention reading Interpretation of Dreams:  You may 
remember in "Dreams" (Section 5b) that Freud did a rather extensive 
analysis of both Sophocles' Oedipus The King and Shakespeare's 
Hamlet , despite the fact that we know virtually nothing about the 
former author, and frustratingly little of the latter (Freud later in 
life subscribed to the crackpot theory that Shakespeare's plays were 
actually written by the Earl of Oxford: despite this, he never 
altered the Hamlet section of Dreams, although he did extensively 
revise the book in a couple of later reprintings)

 Rather than "decide" how Freud might have interpreted a particular 
work based on a half-baked understanding of some of his theories, why 
not start by looking at Freud's actual literary criticism?  Freud 
uses his theories in his essays, but he is not bound by them: some of 
his most penetrating insights have nothing to do directly at least 
with his theoretical models.  He even admits that psychoanalysis 
cannot penetrate art's ultimate mystery: "Before the problem of the 
creative artist analysis must, alas, lay down its arms." (Dostoevsky 
and Parricide").  

His 1915 essay "Some Character-Types Met With in Psychoanalytic 
Work, " is one of his best: he offers a brilliant analyses of 
Shakespeare's Richard III and Macbeth, without any of the glib 
superficial interpretations that our friend the Polyjuice Freud is 
always "supposed" to be finding (e.g., he does not interpret the 
hallucinatory dagger  as a "phallic symbol").  Again, his analysis 
devotes nothing to Shakespeare the man, but is full of admiration for 
Shakespeare the artist:  His 1913 essay , "The Theme of the Three 
Caskets– also rooted in Shakespeare (this time, King Lear and The 
Merchant of Venice) – ranges far and wide over world mythology with a 
breadth that would put most contemporary "multiculturalists" to 
shame, and reminds us that Freud, like Jung, was also a believer in 
the "collective unconscious."    Again, all this is without recourse 
to "fishing up dirt" on the individual artist.  (BTW, if anyone is 
interested, I have e-texts of these two essays, which I'll gladly 
pass along to anyone who wants to request them - e-mail me directly).

Freud has more to say about the artist an individual in his stunning 
The Moses of Michelangelo (1914) or his 1928 essay Dostoevsky and 
Parricide (Parricide is of course a theme for which JKR provides 
abundant material).  However, the central focus remains on the work, 
and Freud does not endorse a "deficiency" model of artistic creation 
(i.e., the idea that a work of art merely reflects the assorted 
neuroses and frustrations of its creator).  Freud did lapse at times: 
his 1909 essay on Leonardo dwells at length upon a childhood trauma 
that L da V suffered when he was attacked by a bird of prey: Freud 
makes this the fons et origo of Leonardo's  art.  This regrettable 
reductionism is the exception in Freud, but is alas the rule for the 
Freudians. 

I suspect what Freud would find most fascinating in JKR – and rest 
assured he would read Harry Potter (his English was impeccable, he 
was an ardent Anglophile, and read everything from Shakespeare to 
Macaulay to Kipling to Agatha Christie, in the original) would be the 
familial relationships: Harry's yearning for his dead parents, who 
were murdered by Voldemort  - his arch-enemy, and yet somehow his 
twin

. "There are strange likenesses between us, after all. Even you 
must have noticed. Both half-bloods, orphans, raised by Muggles. 
Probably the only two Parselmouths to come to Hogwarts since the 
great Slytherin himself. We even look something alike

."  But Freud 
would have attributed the power of these Oedipal overtones to their 
embedding in our collective unconscious, not to anything specific 
about JKR the individual.   I think Freud would have also been  
fascinated by the manner in which HP originated – JKR's epiphany of  
seeing the train-bound Harry on his way to Hogwarts.  He would have 
correctly noted that the strength and power of the HP narrative stems 
from the fact that it is coming from a place deeply rooted in our 
collective psyches.

I could go on at inordinate length on this topic, but hopefully you 
get my drift. Just one final thing: I do have a major problem with 
Lacan (and Derrida, too) who you mention with admiration (I'm not 
deeply acquinated with either of them,but from what I know, my 
subjective reaction to them is like Winky to Ludo Bagman "Very bad 
wizards!") Lacan is a highly subjective interpreter of Freud's 
legacy, and many Freudians, and friends of Freud – myself included  - 
would strenuously reject his interpretations.   Lacan, typically of 
the French intelligentsia of his day, is overly enamored of the 
discredited Marxist ideologies,  whose Utopian fantasies Freud found 
completely alien to the austere and stoic spirit of psychoanalysis: 
Nevertheless, Lacan devoted considerable energy to papering over 
their differences, failing to do justice to either thinker in the end.

	- CMC