[HPforGrownups] Freudian/Lacanian Support for H/H (long)

[Pam Hugonnet]

No: HPFGUIDX 7471



Ebony wrote:

> WARNING:  This is extremely long.

Yes.  But a very nice read.

When I read this, I began composing a very long reply about some of the
finer points of the Freud/Lacan viewpoint.  I then re-read what I had
written and decided that it was too off-topic and slightly self-important to
waste bandwidth on :)
/me suffers flashbacks from the trauma of graduate school...

>  I've been working on finding the
> evidence all semester.  The following is prewriting/brainstorming for
> the paper I talked about so much earlier this fall.
>

Am I right in remembering that you did not get topic approval for this
paper?  That might be a good thing.  You might want to save this up for a
dissertation.  If you come at it from a *slightly* different angle, you
could have a very intersesting critical examination of psychological
phenomena in the HP series.

>  Freud
> and Lacan were my Waterloo this semester, and it took a long time for
> me to wrestle with their worldview and prevail.  :)
>

I'm not surprised if you've got a post-modern take on things.  The Freudian
and Neo-Freudian (of which Lacan is one) world-view is very pessimistic and
deterministic; students often chew me a new ass when I introduce Freudian
theory and *try* to convince them  of its importance.

<fairly long portion snipped here>

> What we have here is a narrative that from all indications is
> personal.  It is fantasy, which means that it is highly symbolic—-
> fantasy is pure imagination or *id*.  The last 6-7 chapters of PoA
> read like a dream to me, more so than any of the other sequences.
> (Here I inserted long paraphrases from Freud's "The Pleasure
> Principle" and "The Interpretation of Dreams" to prove my
> point--I'll
> spare you.)

Not pure id.  We'd be terrified if someone gave us pure id--it would be like
reading American Psycho.  What we get in dreams (not nightmares)  is a more
prettified version of our base desire.  Remember the ego isn't turned off
when we sleep, it's just less effective.  Kinda like when mom's on the phone
and the kids can manage to get away with a few things.
Read also the end of Lecture XXIII, "The Paths to Symptom Formation,"  in
The Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.  Here Freud talks about the
artist as the exception to a life too rooted in fantsy that leads to
neurosis.  But what he says is that the successful artist takes his
fantasy,  presents it in a way that is not threatening ( I believe his word
is repulsive) to himself or to others, and thereby acheives the fantasized
ends.   You might want to read (if you haven't already) "Creative Writers
and Day-Dreaming," in  Five Lectures.  More Freud, but very interesting
stuff.


<more snipping>

> 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.
>

The process is kind of what we (psychologists) call creating a psychological
autopsy.  I've always been facinated by lit-crit simply because sometimes
there are sweeping generalizations made about the meaning and significance
of an  authors work based on assumptions from fairly  thin evidence.
Having said that, I do find it facinating that JKR had the burning desire to
write about Harry at a time of significant turmoil in her life--failed
marriage, single parenthood with a very young child, the humiliation of
having to be on welfare.   I think there is something to this idea that the
fantasies that sustained her in this period of crisis are what we are seeing
in  these books.  I also have the fear that as her quality of life improves
(in Freudian terms, as she gains the fantazied ends), the pressure (drive)
of her fantasy life will decrease and the quality of the books willl
decrease as well.

Let's all keep our fingers crossed that JKR is a healthy neurotic and will
experience some significant degree of anxiety and conflict over the
achievement of her fantasy.

Sorry this post was so  long.
drpam





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