OSE 2015: Psychoanalysis

Freud and the Unconscious

Jean-Martin Charcot

Pierre Aristide André BrouilletA Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière1887

Psychoanalysis

Is a body of ideas (philosophy) and description of the development of the personality in a particular cultural context as well as a clinical practice

Is concerned with desire and its role in childhood development

Is based in an analysis of the relationship between the child and its parents or carers from birth onwards.

Psychoanalysis 2 Child's first relationship is with mother. Has not yet

established bodily boundaries

Experiences satisfaction of desire in the form of food (breast feeding)

Relationship with the breast is traumatic

Child experiences feelings of loss (of a part of itself) when breast is denied.

As it grows, child begins to learn techniques for asserting control (toilet training)

At the same time, child is discovering pleasure in its own body (masturbation)

Psychoanalysis 3 Parents (particularly father) prohibit treats as punishment

Through association with parents, child learns gender difference

Boy child learns that girls/women are castrated (do not have penis, therefore must have 'lost' it)

Father possesses fully grown penis. Therefore boy child must learn to be like father. Is now ready to learn to conform to cultural prohibitions.

BUT mother is first love object and is possessed by father. Hence the Oedipus complex

Psychoanalysis 4 Repressed desire forms part of the unconscious (NOT

subconscious!)

Is in dynamic relationship with conscious mind

Is necessary to 'normal' functioning (without the unconscious we would not be driven to action)

Emerges in dreams, jokes and 'slips of the tongue' (parapraxes)

Is implied in the way language makes meaning

Psychoanalysis 5 ID: That part of the unconscious which is

pure desire EGO: That part of the unconscious which is

repressed in order for the conscious mind to function

SUPER-EGO: That part of the unconscious through which the rules and regulations of the culture are internalised.

Psychoanalysis 6

Dreams are 'royal road to the unconscious'

Consist of :o Condensation – several desires are

represented by one imageo Displacement – images stand in for

something elseo Secondary revision – when the dream is

related it is in the form of a coherent narrative

Simon Jenks:

'Desire was seen by the Surrealists … as the manner in which true nature makes itself known to humanity … The exposure of desire is therefore a further implement of revolt, and such action demystifies the bourgeois consciousness'

'In sum, a lot of Surrealism's images are naughty, and purposefully so'

Grete SternThe Dreams / Domestic Appliances1948 - 50