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Beyond Pleasure

Introduction to Freud

• In Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926): In the restaurant the Dadaists would come when short on cash, in a corner you hear “a gentleman flaunting his second-rate subconscious and the whole unedifying mess of his lamentable existence” (93)

Based on Terry Eagleton’s chapter in _Literary Theory _

• Eagleton: Although the feeling that culture is full of anxiety and change is not knew, what is new about modernity that that “such experiences become constituted in a new way as a systematic field of knowledge.” (131)
• Eagleton on child development: child isn’t a discrete object, but feels itself as if caught helpless in a “shifting field of forces”
• Freud: “The motive of human society is in the last resort an economic one.” (Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis)

What is Repression

• Pleasure principle: We want to gratify our needs immediately, experience pleasure and leisure
• Reality principle: Understanding that we must not gratify some desires (and assuming that we will have delayed gratification later on)
• Repression leads you from the pleasure principle to the reality principle
• The Oedipus Complex is the first mechanism by which the reality principle wins
• Too much repression = neurosis

Repression and Culture

• Sublimation: channeling illicit desires into a socially acceptable channel (like architecture and poetry)
• Sublimation builds History, Civilization, and Culture
• Your identity results from your repression
• The human race is “the neurotic animal”

The Unconscious

• The unconscious doesn’t just exist; it is produced by the expulsion of desire
• Unfulfilled desires retreat to the unconscious
• Dreams are the “royal road” to the unconscious

Dreams

• Symbolic fulfillment of wishes
• Symbolic: so you don’t recognize the actual nature of the wishes
• Condensation: tons of images or desires get lobbed into a single one
• Displacement: feeling for an object is displaced onto another objects

Child Development

• Stages overlap, are not just an inviolable sequence
• Stage one: oral (incorporate objects)
• Stage two: anal (expel or destroy objects) (sadistic) (desire for control or retention)
• Stage three: genital (finally)
• Children are unruly, wild, need to go through Oedipal complex to learn discipline and be fit for society

Oedipus Complex

• It is the complex, how you get from ruffian to Person, from Nature to Culture, from Family to Society
• Kid wants mom, fears castration by dad, renounces mom, finds wife
• Girl wants mom, fears dad’s competition, shifts desire to dad, shifts desire to husband

Drives

• Drives are flexible, changeable, replaceable
  • Cathected: taken as an object of desire
  • Cathexis: invested with desire
• Death drive: “masochism” that the ego directs towards itself
  • Escape from difficult life (cruel superego, mean id)
  • Into blissful unconsciousness of death

Problems

• Linguistic expression of desires
  • Parapraxes: slips of the tongue
  • Jokes (reveal aggression, sexuality)
• Neurosis
  • Stubborn desire refuses to go away; superego won’t stop blocking it
  • Symptoms of this struggle emerge
  • Symptoms meant to cover up the desire, but really reveal it
• Psychosis
  • Ego cannot control id
  • Alternative reality: fantasy life
  • Paranoia, schizophrenia

Psychoanalysis

• Uncover hidden causes of neuroses to clear up the problem
• “Talking cure:” you interpret your own life and problem
  • You make a coherent narrative, and you’re cured

Cathexis

• Investment of mental/emotional energy in a person, object, or idea
• Libido creates charge of energy (like a steam engine) (mechanical theory)
• Anticathexis: ego blocking desire

Freud’s Method or Style

• Uncertain and theatrical
  • Reads like a novel
  • As if the author doesn’t know what’s going to happen next
  • Walks you through trains of thought (instead of enumerating FIXED ideas)
• “Idiographic”
  • Instead of presenting laws, “seeks to describe and understand individual events”

Significance for Modernity/Modernism

• We are split subjects
  • Ego: our identity
  • Superego: our conscience (society telling us what not to do, what to do)
  • Id: our desires
  • This schema replaces his earlier conscious, unconscious, preconscious division
• Talking cure
  • Making stories will heal us
• Modernity as hard to take
  • Felt that modern life was too tyrannical
  • Modern societies are too repressive

Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Economic Approach

• 21, 32, 37, 63, 78
• Pleasure is a net decrease of stimulus, while unpleasure is a net increase in stimulus: it’s like a Profit and Loss statement
• Desire, like capital, can be “invested” (cathexis)
  • You can switch stocks (reinvest it: mobile energy)
• Energy of the libido is the universal equivalent
  • Like money, the invisible medium of exchange
• Fear about Jung is about finding this universal medium (92-4)
  • Freud: 93: “It was not our intention to find these results.”
  • ie, that the ONLY type of instinct or energy is libidinal
• “Is it all about sex?” is an economic question
• Contextualizes Freud historically
  • Not universal psyche forever and ever
  • But interpreted within modern social sciences (economics as a modern field)

What kind of science?

• Like positivism
  • Depends on observation (starts out empirical)
  • Strives towards an orderly system
  • Uses natural laws (physics, chemistry) as a template for the human sciences
• Unlike positivism
  • Does ask about cause, effect, ontology
  • Increases number of answers, not decreases (excuse for endless discourse production)
    • Not a monist, but just keeps inventing more terms
  • 38: Interpretation/hermeneutics
    • Transference is interpersonal
    • Is theatrical
  • He’s “mystic” even though he says he’s not
    • Only “speculating” wildly, esp towards end (exploratory)
    • Measures “the impression (phenomenological) (47)
  • 103: doesn’t even believe himself!
  • 104: scientific versus psychological language
  • Literary evidence (for example, 37)

WWI

• Freud’s problem—repetition compulsion that can’t be explained by the pleasure principle—comes out of investigating war neuroses
• Had his three sons out at the front
  • Europe lost a whole four-year slice of Oxbridge and of young, healthy men
  • One-quarter of them died (not to mention injuries)
• Janet: The effects of WWI weren’t understood immediately; it took awhile for them to realize what had really happened
• Deferral: You forget the trauma, only uncovering it later
  • The memory isn’t seen as from the past
  • Somehow, you experience it as if it were in the present

Structure

• Chapters 1-2: Sets context for the problem: The pleasure principle doesn’t describe ALL.
• Chapter 3: Directly sets problem: “Where does the compulsion to repeat come from?”
• Chapter 4: Origin of consciousness (cortex, etc)
• Chapter 5: Thesis: “The aim of all life is to die.”
• Chapter 6: Sex (mobile versus bound cathexis, narcissism, etc)
• Chapter 7: Death (protista et al): We want to return to an earlier state (conservative, not progressive)

Themes

• Nature of pleasure and unpleasure
  • Great if it’s less stimulss; bad if it’s more stimulus
• Repetition compulsion
  • Fort-da game
  • Completely against the pleasure principle (post-traumatic stress syndrome)
• Origin of consciousness
  • the “baked” cortex
  • We have protection from stimuli from WITHOUT
  • We lave less protection from our stimuli WITHIN
• Speculative biology
  • Tries to use chemistry and biology
• The right death
• Metapsychology
  • Topological
    • A geography of the brain
    • Mapping out id, ego, superego as if they were countries
  • Dynamic
    • Changing over time
    • Free, unfixed cathected energy can switch its objects
  • Economic
    • Total yield, P&L statement of net gain or loss
    • “Production” language
    • “Circulation” language
    • Desire or libidinal energy as the DOLLAR, as the universal exchange equivalent (only one kind of psychic energy, libido, like there’s only one kind of value, money)
    • Yet it’s not necessarily “pro-capitalist” b/c you’re not accumulating
    • You can “invest” energy like you can invest money; and you can also reinvest similarly b/c of the universal equivalent
    • 92-4: Freud doesn’t like that reduction, but he can’t prove that anything else exists (Jung is the one who says there’s definitely only one type)
• See pages 21, 32, 37 (also, revenge on a substitute: that’s gen equiv!), 63, 78, 92-4
• Progress
  • There is no innate drive for progress
  • There is no innate drive for perfection
  • Repression leads to Culture
  • Failure to satisfy oneself leads to growth
    • Culture says, “You can’t satisfy yourself! That’s a regressive desire! You’d better not!”
  • He even fails to answer his own question
  • Find your own way to die “immanent” to yourself
  • Do we even have to die?
• Darwin
  • Relies on Darwin’s structure of historical change
  • Denies that change is progress or for the good
  • Such a position doesn’t sound like the social Darwinists, but approximates the “true” Darwin if you read him carefully
• Science v mysticism
  • Tries to separate himself from mysticism (contemporary love for occult isn’t him)
  • Yet he doesn’t try to pin things down and is willing to speculate

Quotes

• “A crust would thus been formed…baked through by stimulation” the cortex
  • Cf Simmel
• Why do we repeat? “Each repetition seems to strengthen the mastery they are in search of.” (65-6)
  • Also suggests the instability of modern life
  • Ultimately, though it’s in order “to restore an earlier state of things” (57), a conservative impulse
    • Shows that modernization is not a happy process
• About the development of his ideas
  • “Only believers, who demand that science should be a substitute for the catechism they have given up, will blame an investigator for developing or even transforming his views.” (Last page)