Theories of the Mind

 

the Freud lectures

1. Introduction

1.1 Sigmund Freud

In the English Department, when you work on a literary text, you have two jobs to do. One is evaluation, and the other is interpretation. Of these, much the most important is interpretation.

Why is interpretation so important? Why does the English Department spend all its time doing it? Why does the English Department do interpretation at all? We can't we leave poems alone, just let them mean what they say?

One way of answering these questions is this. It is because a man called Sigmund Freud, in 1900, published a book called The Interpretation of Dreams. Die Traumdeutung. In that act he created psychoanalysis: the act of interpreting the mind. With that publication he established what we now take for granted: that any mental activity is not necessarily what it seems, that it can be interpreted. That any mental activity, whether speech, or dreams, or art, or literature, anything at all, may have a meaning that is hidden from us, a secret that a skilled interpreter can read.

Freud made interpretation central. This lecture is about Freud. At the end of it, you should have enough knowledge to apply Freud to certain kinds of literature. In the second lecture, I will show you some bits of literature, and show you how to apply Freud to them.

1.2 Reading the dream

For Freud, literature was a kind of dream: mysterious, enigmatic, central to our lives. The first two lectures will be about Freud himself. In the third and fourth lectures I look at the strange kinship between literature and dreams, and show you a method of dream interpretation that also works well for literature. This method derives from the work of a Swiss psychologist who was Freud's best friend, but later became his enemy: Carl Gustav Jung. I will explain Jung's theories, and show you how to apply them to Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness. You will get a lot more from this lecture, the fourth, if you've read that text beforehand.

1.3 Lacan: an introduction

The kind of Freudian interpretation that is mostly practised in literary criticism now derives from the work of a French follower of Freud: Jacques Lacan. Now, the main thing about Lacan is this: he was outrageous. To understand him you have to follow the sources of this outrageousness, which are twofold: one is in a branch of surrealism known as dada, and the other is in a theory of language associated with the Swiss linguist Saussure. The fifth lecture explains the extremely radical conclusions about interpretation that Lacan derived from his combination of Freud, and Dada, and Saussure.

The last lecture explains Lacan himself, and shows how he can be applied to literature, with examples. The whole lecture series is called Theories of the Mind.

But now: Freud.

2. Dreams, stories, neuroses

I would like to give you, first, some examples of what Freudian analysis is for: the kinds of things it works on.

2.1 Neurosis / psychosis

Some people don't like spiders. I myself couldn't comfortably pick up a spider. But for some people, it's a lot more intense than that. They can't bear to be in the same room as a spider, and have panic attacks: strong physical symptoms: nausea, trembling, shortness of breath, an irresistible urge to leave, to go somewhere where the spider isn't. In this country, spiders are completely harmless: everyone knows that. We are afraid of a fiction. What is happening? Why is there this extraordinary disparity between the cause of the emotion and the emotion itself: why is it that at some level we accept this fiction, that spiders are fearsome, as real?

Let me give you a technical term in psychoanalysis. The word is affect. Affect is the mental consequence of some outside stimulus. If I see a spider, I feel nervousness and a certain revulsion. That is the affect. If the affect is in excess of what might reasonably be expected from its cause, then what we have is neurosis. My reaction to the spider is neurotic: it's an emotional reaction that's not justified by what causes it, the harmless spider. But: I'm aware that this reaction is irrational. That's where neurosis differs from psychosis. Supposing when I saw a spider I thought it was part of a big thinly-disguised conspiracy of aliens, all directed against me, and passing me messages through the nine o'clock news, then this would be psychosis. Psychosis is when the affect is excessive, but the person experiencing it thinks that this is perfectly reasonable and everyone else is wrong. Madness, said George Orwell, is a minority of one.

So psychosis is an incredibly elaborate fiction, that everyone apart from the sufferer thinks is completely absurd. The sufferer knows it to be true.

There is another component of psychosis: let me give a more serious example. Supposing someone hears voices. These voices are completely real, as real as any other thing you can hear, but you can't find the speakers, and you can't shut them out. The speakers are inside your head. Suppose these voices are monstrous: they speak nonsense, but in that nonsense they keep telling you, from intimate knowledge, that you are worthless, that everything you do is complete shit. Suppose this is ruining your life: at any point, whatever you are doing, the voices can sound, drowning out whatever else you can hear, whoever you might be talking to, insisting that what you are doing and what you are is completely useless. As a result, you can't function: you suffer terribly. This is one of the commoner forms of schizophrenia.

This is the other component of psychosis: suffering. I mention this because it's important to remember that Freud didn't devise his theories in order to give us something to talk about in the English Department: he devised them to alleviate suffering, and that was the whole point of his life's work. Whatever you may think of Freud, you should remember that. And, also, remember this: the question he asked of neurosis is this: how can we interpret it? Freud's greatness was exactly in that he asked that question: he was the first from within Western science who listened to the voices of the mad, who allowed those voices to speak their nonsense, their non­sense: he asked, what do these fictions mean?

2.2 Dreams

Let me give you another example: dreams. Everyone dreams. Every night each one of us visits imaginable and unimaginable worlds, that have no other existence than inside our heads, but which, when we inhabit them, are a complete reality. Sometimes we remember them, but mostly we forget. Dreams, we might think, are irrational, unreal, mere dreams, trivial. Fictions. Freud sought meaning in the unconsidered theatre of the dream: he asked, what does this mean? How can we interpret this magical, powerful, meaningless material? How can we read the dream? He was the first person from within the Western scientific model to ask this question, too.

2.3 Myths

Cultures, it seems, have dreams: we call them myths. Myths, like psychoses, are fictions that someone else believes to be true. In fact they are the ruling patterns along which any society, including ours, organises its deepest hopes and expectations and ways of coping with the world. In a rational world, they don't make sense. A rationalist would tell us that there can't ever have been a snake who seduced a woman called Eve with an apple. Or a woman who was raped by a god disguised as a swan, and laid two eggs, from one of which came Helen, who destroyed the city of Troy with her amazing beauty. Freud asked: what does this non­sense mean?

2.4 Fiction

Then there is fiction itself. In the novel Jane Eyre, at the beginning, a young girl is locked up in a red room. Her terror is such that it transforms her whole life: it is the beginning of her entry into the world. It is the crucible from which a tough intelligent completely uncompromising woman emerges. The affect is extreme: it makes no sense. What does this fiction mean?

2.5 Poem

Here is a poem.

A man and a woman
are one
A man and a woman and a blackbird
are one.

This poem, like any poem, means more than it says: what is that extra meaning? How do we find it? What does it mean?

3. The essence of Freud

3.1 The unconscious mind

Freud attempted to answer all of those interpretive questions. He invented a method of interpretation that became a vast and elaborate structure: psychoanalysis. Freud's complete works runs to about 20 volumes. But Freud was a thinker of extraordinary clarity, and the structure, though elaborate, isn't difficult to understand. Moreover all of it, the whole edifice, is based on one very simple idea, and if you grasp this idea, you have Freud: you've got the basis for a complete understanding. So I will now explain this simple, essential idea.

We start with the unconscious mind. Freud didn't invent the unconscious: this is a nineteenth century concept that was well established by the time he started thinking about it. What is the unconscious mind? It's where we put things when we forget about them. It's where we dredge things up from, when we remember. So I'll give you an example of something that all of you are now completely unconscious of, but when I mention it, you'll all be able to recall it without effort: your mother's maiden name. It was nowhere; now it is in your mind. It came from the unconscious, and will shortly go back there.

3.2 Why do we forget?

But what Freud was interested in was not this easily recallable material, but the stuff that is deep in your unconscious that you can't recall. And the question he asked is this: why do we forget? Why do we put things at a deep level of the unconscious, so that only under extraordinary circumstances can we dredge them up, and then, maybe, only in disguised forms. Why do we forget? Why is the unconscious material unconscious?

3.3 Because we cannot bear to remember

And here is the answer that Freud gave, that is the essence of his entire enterprise: unconscious material is unconscious because we can't bear it. In forgetting we repress that which we can't confront. We repress it because it is unbearable. From this, everything else in Freud's theory follows.

So firstly, you can say psychoanalysis is about remembering: you could say that it is the story of how we begin to remember.

Secondly. Supposing you are trying to get something out of the unconscious: how will you know when you've got it? How will you know that what you have is the genuine unconscious stuff? Answer: because it's disgusting; because you find it unbearable. Only if it is terrible, is it true, the real thing.

3.4 The unbearable is sexual

For Freud, and for his patients, in 19c bourgeois Vienna, the unbearable was the sexual. He said that inside each of us there are sexual desires that we cannot afford to admit. Pedophilia. The explicit erotic desire of a son for his mother, a daughter for her father, a parent for a child. Issues that even now, a hundred years after the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, at the end of the century that Freud began, we are just beginning to confront, to be frightened by.

Freud's image of the mind is terrible. In the mind of each of us, there is a cellar, and in that cellar, the unspeakable is acted out. This is happening all the time, to all of us, and all of us are completely unaware of it. This is what he believed.

4. Reading the dream

4.1 The unconscious in disguise

How can this be used for interpretation?

I will explain Freud's interpretive method by applying it to dreams: dreams, said Freud, are the royal road to the interpretation of the unconscious. Here is Freud's explanation of the mechanism of dreams.

When we sleep, we relax. As we relax, the censor mechanism, that keeps the unbearable down in the cellar, relaxes too. And so the terrible contents of the unconscious start to emerge. But if they were to come out into consciousness, even dream consciousness, in their full form, we would wake up: we couldn't bear it. So, they can't be permitted to do this because otherwise we wouldn't be able to sleep, ever, and we would die. Therefore, said Freud, they are changed into acceptable forms: and this acceptable version of the unconscious material is what we experience as the dream.

4.2 The fulfilment of repressed wishes

What is it, exactly that is trying to surface in the dream? Desire. The essence of the dream is desire: wishes. Usually sexual. So for Freud the dream is a disguised drama, and the real plot, the true meaning, is the fulfilment of a repressed wish. Something that we really want, but can't bear to admit it. Every dream enacts the fulfilment of a repressed unconscious wish.

5. A diagram of the dream

5.1 Latent content

Here is a diagram of the dream. The latent content is the actual unconscious components of the dream: what the dream is really about.

5.2 Manifest content

The dream that the dreamer experiences, the disguised drama, is called the manifest content.

5.3 Dreamwork

The mechanism that does the disguising is called the dreamwork. The dreamwork goes on working not just during the dream, but after it is over. When you wake up the dreamwork will be working to make you forget it: dreams are hard to remember, and even those vivid dreams that fill your consciousness when you wake up have a habit of disappearing, and leaving a strange gap in your mind. Supposing you do remember the dream: the dream you remember is not the dream you experienced. It will have been further disguised by the dreamwork.

5.4 Secondary elaboration

And in all probability the dream you tell your friend about, or indeed the dream you tell your psychoanalyst about, will not be the same dream either: the work of disguise, of protection, continues. This secondary process, the disguising after the dream has taken place, which is part conscious, part unconscious, is called secondary elaboration. For Freud, the whole of literature is secondary elaboration of an original inspiration from the unconscious.

5.5 Free association

So how do you get back to the latent content? How do you read the dream? The main method is known as free association. In practice what that means is this. In classic Freudian analysis, you use the couch. The famous couch. The analyst sits at the head, where you can't see him or her. There is just this voice, which doesn't say very much at all. Don't think of psychoanalysis as a conversation. Don't get the idea that you go in and tell the analyst your dream and the analyst then gives you back an interpretation. No, not at all. The most powerful weapon of psychoanalysis is silence.

So there you are on the couch, and the analyst encourages you to enter a dreamy, half-conscious state, where your resistance is low. This can take some time. This is OK by the analyst, because analysts are paid by the hour. You're then encouraged to free-associate, to say whatever comes into your head, without resistance. The idea is to beat the censor by reversing the process of the dreamwork: you take an item in the dream and free-associate in a relaxed way until you get back to what the item represents. How do you know when you've got there? That's what the analyst is for. He or she will listen, in silence, as you babble on, and then, just when you don't expect it, will intervene. This disembodied voice suddenly interrupts: it says: 'ah'. Or 'Yes...?' Or something equally illuminating. And then you have to do the work of working out what's going on. 'Oh, so you mean that what the dream is about is this...' Silence. 'Or maybe this...' Silence. 'Well, it can't be this, can it.' Silence. 'Can it?' 'Possibly. That is the end of the session. Same time next week?'

For literature, we can't do that. The patient, who in psychoanalysis is called the analysand, is not there to give you his or her associations. So what can you do?

6. Mechanisms of disguise

6.1 Symbolisation

Let me explain a bit more about how the dreamwork works. It has three mechanisms: condensation, displacement, and symbolisation.

I'll deal with symbolisation first, since that's the one that everyone knows about. Symbolisation is when the image in the dream has some direct physical resemblance to the thing it represents in the unconscious. So, as all the world knows, anything that's longer than it is wide can be a penis. Anything that's even remotely concave can be a vagina.

Freud was embarrassed at the way the world took up the concept of the Freudian symbol, and so am I, sometimes, when I mark essays on this subject.

So Freud insisted that most of the symbols in a dream are in a private language known only to the dreamer: that to interpret them you have to work out this private language, by the method of free association. This is a big problem for Freudian literary criticism, because we don't have the author's associations: we can't put Shakespeare on the couch. What we can do, however, is to try and read in to the private unconscious language of the author. It's difficult, but it's possible, and when it works, if it works, it can be very interesting.

6.2 Condensation

Condensation is when a number of unconscious components are all represented by the same element in a dream: that element is then said to be overdetermined.

For instance: Macbeth fantasises that he sees a dagger, its handle towards his hand. He is trying to find the courage to murder the old King, Duncan. The dagger is phallic: Macbeth, as his wife keeps telling him, is trying to become a man; to work out what it is to be a man. Becoming a man in Freudian terms means overcoming sexual rivalry with the father: both the father and the son want to sleep with the mother, and there is jealousy between them. This is why the dagger is not only phallic, it is sharp, cutting, lethal: it is a penis that wounds. The sexual act that Macbeth dreams of is with Duncan, who is like a father to him, and whom he in Freudian terms wishes to castrate, so that he can take the father's role: can be the king. So, Macbeth becomes a king, acquires the dagger, is a man; but this perverted phallus cannot procreate, it can only destroy, and Macbeth himself, along with half of Scotland, is destroyed by it. All this in one symbol: the dagger, a Freudian would say, is over-determined. Of course you might equally say that this Freudian critic is giving himself a blank cheque to say pretty well whatever he likes about the dagger using the excuse of condensation. You must choose.

6.3 Displacement

Displacement is different. Supposing at an early age someone had witnessed the primal scene, which in Freudian terms means observing his parents in the act of sex. Supposing this young boy was completely freaked out by this--Freud speculated that the boy would think the father was in the act of murdering the mother--that he might misinterpret her pleasure as pain--and so he repressed it. But suppose on the bedside there was a red alarm clock, and later in life the young man dreams, with very considerable and totally inappropriate affect, of red alarm clocks. This, Freud would say, is because he has displaced the affect from the primal scene onto the alarm clock.

The bizarre thing about Freud is that it really does work. Do not get the idea that this whole thing is some ridiculous fantasy and can't work in practice. It does. If you talk to a Freudian they can come up with quite startling insights. Therefore talking to an intelligent Freudian is quite a high-risk procedure.

The nun's story.

7. Freud's map of the mind

7.1 The ego

I will now try and sketch out the Freudian map of the mind.

Originally for Freud the mind had three parts. The id, the ego, and the super-ego.

The ego is that part of us that is conscious; what we think with. The other two are unconscious. In Freud's original German, the ego is das Ich: the I.

7.2 The id

The id, das es, the it, is the cellar: the mass of unconscious and largely instinctual desires that are constantly seeking gratification.

7.3 The super-ego

What stops them is the super-ego, das über-ich, which is also unconscious: it is an introjection of the father figure, and corresponds, very crudely, to the conscience, but is far more severe and demanding. Introjection is the opposite of projection: it means that you take some outside real life entity, for instance your father, create a distorted image of it in your unconscious, and, because you are unconscious of it, you have to allow it to take you over: to govern all your actions. If we are unconscious of something, it has power over us, because we are not aware of it. This is called the return of the repressed. Projection, on the other hand, is why people don't like spiders: Freud would say they are projecting some unconscious image, perhaps (said Freud) the mother's vagina, on to the harmless creature, and seeing it as something that it isn't.

So for Freud life for the ego is miserable: caught always between the conflicting and totally irreconcilable demands of, on the one hand, the id, and, on the other, the super-ego: what the ego obscurely feels it wants, its id-derived desires, it can't have, nor can it even admit that it wants them; what it feels it must do, the fierce imperatives of the superego, it can't, nor can it even admit these imperatives into awareness. The result is suffering: anguish. The cause of the power that causes the suffering is unawareness: unconsciousness. So the cure, said Freud, is to become aware. To interpret. To see things as they really are. The only way out for any of us is interpretation. As we shall see.

7.4 Eros

The energy that derives this machine is called Eros: sexual desire. People tend to think of the mind in terms of the state of the art hardware of the day. We think the mind is rather like a computer. Freud thought it was like a steam engine. The fire whose heat powers the whole hydraulic system is desire: the sexual impulse. Eros.

7.5 Oedipus

Another way of looking at the mind is to say that it is locked in the primal drama of childhood. This is the drama of Oedipus. In the Greek play Oedipus was fated to meet his father at a crossroads, and, without knowing who he was, kill him. He was then fated to meet his mother, not knowing who she was, and marry her. This double tragedy, says Freud, is what we have all tried to enact: the famous Oedipus complex. 'We' in this case, is 'we males', by the way. Freud (who was the clearest of thinkers) is rather vague about the female version of this.

Note: actually, he's not. I think I just repressed his account of female psycho-sexual development.

So the little boy, says Freud, becomes aware, perhaps in the bath, that his little sister doesn't have a penis. He instantly concludes that this is because daddy has cut it off. He jumps to this startling conclusion because he feels guilty: what the little boy really wants is to sleep with his mother; to recreate sexually the initial sexual union of baby and mother at the breast. But daddy is in the way. Daddy, he suspects, will castrate him if he finds out about these terrible, overpowering, impossible wishes. He therefore develops death wishes towards Daddy. He wants to kill him, to remove the threat of castration and leave a clear field so that he gets go to bed with the mother.

Absurd, isn't it, this story. However, literary critics have found it quite difficult to find a better explanation of why Hamlet behaves as he does. Freud thought, you see, that if the father does actually die the child might think the death wishes have come true, and this can actually (though not inevitably: only in some cases) lead to guilt and despair. Added to this, suddenly having a clear field to go to bed with the mother is terrifying, because the tabu becomes breakable: as Hamlet finds out in a well-known bedroom scene with his mother. This makes Hamlet incapable of normal sexual relations, drives his girlfriend mad, and leads him to kill his father-in-law: he stabs him in his mother's bedroom. With a sword. Killing people with swords, and cups, (he poisons his mother with a cup) is the only kind of action that Hamlet is capable of. Freud was very inspired by Hamlet.

7.6 Repetition compulsion

After the first world war, Freud had a problem. He treated many soldiers who returned from the front suffering from what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. One of the common symptoms of this is the compulsion to repeat: to relive the horror, in vivid detail, either in dreams or in uncontrollable waking fantasies; the sufferers are forced actually to live through the unbearable, repeatedly, without remission or any chance of repression. This is a problem for Freud because it is very difficult to see that as the fulfilment of a repressed wish of any kind whatsoever, let alone a sexual wish.

7.7 Thanatos

He therefore revised the theory. The force that powers the whole machine of the mind is now no longer just Eros, the life-urge, the sexual procreative force; Eros, said Freud, has a dark twin. This is Thanatos: the urge to death. We have inside us a compulsion towards life; also a compulsion towards death. Eros compels us forward, to procreate, to make new life; Thanatos pulls us back, compelling us to repeat old pain. Eventually it makes us repeat the blissful original inertia of dead matter. So we die.

Freud called this process, of push and pull, desire and loss, ending in death, after a child's game. He called it the fort da. I will explain.

Freud was watching one of his grandsons, a very small child, play. The child had a toy. He pushed the toy away, so that he couldn't see it any more, and pretended to lose it: when he did that, he cried out (in German, of course): "Fort!" It means "Gone!" Then the boy pretended to find the toy again. This time he cried out "Da!", which means "There!", as in "There it is!". And then the little boy would start the whole process again, and again, obsessively repeating it: fort, da, fort, da, and so on. Cats really like this game. Freud, who had a bizarre imagination, who was, in his way, a great creative writer, took this trivial plot, this simple binary code, and made it the centre of this theory, the centre of all our lives: a baby's game of loss and desire, endlessly, endlessly repeated, until we die. The fort da game: the game of eros and thanatos, of sex and death.

8. Transference and cure

8.1 The talking cure

So how does psychoanalysis help? How does it cure? Well, by talk. Psychoanalysis was called the talking cure. What kind of talk? At first, Freud thought that interpretation was enough. He thought that the simple act of exposing the underlying causes, the real meanings, of the fictions of neurosis, would free the neurotic from their suffering. He thought that the clear light of reason, the logic of analysis, would destroy the demons. He soon found out that this was wrong. Try explaining to an alcoholic that the reason why they like to drink is because they are fixated at the oral stage of childhood development, that really what they want is milk from the mother's breast. Do you think they would immediately stop needing to drink? No, neither do I. It just doesn't work. Reason is not enough.

Freud found that it is not enough to shed light on the darkness of the unconscious desires: to reveal that the problem is not, say, the red alarm clock, but the child's mistaking of the act of sex for murder, and then repressing and displacing it. All those films and fictions where the wise psychoanalyst reveals the language of dreams and symbols and the patient, enlightened, is cured: forget it. That isn't how it works. Interpretation, finally, is not enough: to be cured, you must repeat, with insight.

Freud found that what was needed was to meet the demons in their own territory, the dark territory of the depths of the mind, and defeat them there. You must go where the monsters are real in order to overcome them. The dream is felt as real, as non-fiction, to the dreamer; to the neurotic, the symptom is real. The solution must also be a fiction that is real. You must learn to suspend disbelief.

This suspension of disbelief is called the transference: this is the crucial and climactic act of the analysis. The transference is a drama: a kind of theatrical event.

8.2 The transference.

The patient--the analysand--must locate the source of his or her suffering: the father, the mother, the elder brother, or some composite of any of those or any others. It's almost always a family drama. That composite is then projected on to the analyst, the disembodied voice sitting behind your head. I said drama, and that's what it's like from the outside: the two are in a play, and the family drama is acted out and resolved. But from the inside it's not like that. This is crucial: from the inside, it must be real. Really real. To be cured, you must relive. Your unconscious must really believe that the analyst is your father, or mother, or both.

The transference is very intense: it's a little psychosis, under controlled conditions. It is very dangerous for both parties: for the analyst as well as the analysand. I had a friend in America in analysis, who was working through the transference, and when he came out of the analytic hour he used to walk along, still locked in the drama, shouting at people in the street.

The danger for the analyst is that he or she might buy into the illusion, and accept the transference as true. Apparently it's extremely seductive, to have someone lying there on the couch, coming on to you as if you are a combination of god the father and god the destroyer and someone's kind mother all rolled into one. Psychosis can be catching. Many psychotherapists commit suicide. One of them, Tausk, a friend of Freud's, was expelled by Freud from the Psychoanalytical Association. He sat himself in the analytic chair, at the head of the couch, and shot himself. Through the mouth, as it happens. Tausk no longer believed in the talking cure.

8.2 The counter-transference

So buying into the transference is very dangerous. It's called counter-transference: believing that the analysand's transference fantasies are real. To avoid the possibility of counter-transference every analyst must be analysed before they can practice. That's to make sure that the analyst knows, when some hangups arise in a session, that they aren't his hangups. Only one analyst in the entire history of psychoanalysis would not submit to analysis. That was Freud. He analysed himself.

9. Freud and literature

9.1 Aspects of Alice

What has this to do with literature? I've already given you some examples of Freud in literature: Macbeth, and Hamlet. What I'm now going to do is to give some more examples, and, as I do, to try to derive some rules for the application of psychoanalysis to literature. Listen to the examples: see if you find them convincing. If you do, and if you want to learn to use Freud in your own work, pay careful attention to the rules, because Freud is dangerous: it is very easy to use Freud to produce bad readings of texts.

I will read to you from a work of literary criticism. This is William Empson, maybe the greatest literary critic of the twentieth century, talking about Alice in Wonderland. Empson's reading of Alice may come as a shock: he says that Alice is about what it's like to be conceived, and what it's like to be born.

You should now know enough about Freud to follow this without much difficulty. There's only one new technical term in it, the birth trauma. This was an idea developed by a follower of Freud, and adopted by Freud himself. He imagined how incredibly uncomfortable, agonising, and dangerous, it must be to be born: to be forced down an incredibly narrow and constricting passage and then burst, suffocating, gasping for air, into an alien world. He called this the birth trauma. Trauma is the Greek word for wound; in psychoanalysis, a trauma is an event that one cannot assimilate, that is unbearable, that one must repress.

Here is Empson on Alice:

To make the dream-story from which Wonderland was elaborated seem Freudian one has only to tell it. A fall through a deep hole into the secrets of Mother Earth produces a new enclosed soul wondering who it is, what will be its position in the world, and how it can get out. It is in a long low hall, part of the palace of the Queen of Hearts (a neat touch), from which it can only get out to the fresh air and the fountains through a hole frighteningly too small. Strange changes, caused by the way it is nourished there, happen to it in this place, but always when it is big it cannot get out and when it is small it is not allowed to; for one thing, being a little girl, it has no key.

The nightmare theme of the birth-trauma, that she grows too big for the room and is almost crushed by it, is not only used here but repeated more painfully after she seems to have got out; the rabbit sends her sternly into its house and some food there makes her grow again. In Dodgson's own drawing of Alice when cramped into the room with one foot up the chimney, kicking out the hateful thing that tries to come down (she takes away its pencil when it is a juror), she is much more obviously in the foetus position than in Tenniel's.

The symbolic completeness of Alice's experience is I think important. She runs the whole gamut; she is a father in getting down the hole, a foetus at the bottom, and can only be born by becoming a mother and producing her own amniotic fluid.

William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral
Note: the Tenniel illustrations for Alice are here.

Now, I think this reading of Alice is stunning. Firstly, it is completely true to the text: these events do happen in the book, and Empson is not making it up or forcing Freud on to the unsuspecting text. And Empson's reading does not contradict what the text is about: it seems somehow appropriate that Alice should be reborn into Wonderland.

Second, he is not diminishing the text by analysing it. This is very very important. There is in Freud a strong tendency known as reductivism. Psychoanalytic readings tend to take whatever is held to be beautiful or noble and say, that is nothing but a phallic symbol. Or, that is nothing but a desire to have sex with the mother. To reduce to the unbearable. Now, whether this is true or not, whether the insights of psychoanalysis actually work, is for you to make up your own minds about. But if you are working in literary criticism, in the English Department, I would advise you not to reduce the text, unless you definitely intend to evaluate it at a low level, to criticise it. What we do in the English Department is generally to enhance the text, to respect it.

Thirdly, Empson is not psychoanalysing the author. It would be very easy to psychoanalyse Lewis Carroll. He never married; he adored pre-pubertal girls, and liked to take photographs of them naked or partly dressed. This seems to have been an entirely innocent activity, and the photographs themselves are entirely innocent. It would be easy to say of this genius, this extraordinary writer, that his work is simply suppressed pedophilia. To say that is to say nothing: it in no way explains the power and brilliance of the Alice stories. What Empson does is to point out the sexual allegory implicit in part of the narrative and suggest that it is this that creates the power of the text: it is universal. We all suffer the birth trauma: the book speaks, says Empson, to our first memory, and this is part of its power.

9.2 The Four Rules

So here are four rules:

1. The 'nothing but' rule.

Don't reduce the text. Don't say: this is nothing but... Your reading should add to knowledge, not reduce it. Unless you actually want to use Freud to criticise the text, to lower its evaluation.

2. The relevance rule

Make sure that the Freudian reading is coherent with, or at least not totally irrelevant to, the meaning of the text. Don't simply catalogue all of the long thin objects and all of the hollow objects as genital symbols, without any reference to the meaning of the text.

3. The 'leave the author alone' rule

Don't psychoanalyse the author. However tempting that may be. You simply don't have enough information to do that. You don't have the author's free associations: he or she is not on the couch.

4. The 'don't be ridiculous' rule

And, finally, most of all, make sure your reading is plausible. It may fit all the rules, but does it make sense, or is it ridiculous? It is very easy to produce ridiculous Freudian readings, and even Freud does this: be very careful.

Ok, then what can you do?

You can look for Freudian interpretations or Freudian symbols, and try to fit them together with a coherent interpretation of the text. In the case of Alice, this means analysing the text as if it were a dream, which is obviously OK in the case of this book, because it actually is a dream. Or you can psychoanalyse a character, as in the case of the examples from Hamlet and Macbeth.

Here is another example: it involves a Freudian reading of the images in a text, which leads naturally to an analysis of a character.

I will read to you the first two stanzas from a poem by Tennyson: Maud. You don't have to know anything about the poem except that it's a monologue, and at this point, the very beginning of the poem, the speaker is in a state of extreme neurosis because of the death by suicide of his father. As a result, he is unable to love.

To make it seem Freudian, I have only to read it. These two stanzas, right at the beginning of one of the most famous and popular of all Victorian poems, are very possibly the most Freudian lines in the whole of English literature.

9.3 Maud

I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood,
Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath,
The red-ribb'd ledges drip with a silent horror of blood,
And Echo there, whatever is ask'd her, answers 'Death'.

For there in the ghastly pit long since a body was found,
His who had given me life-O father! O God! was it well?-
Mangled, and flatten'd, and crush'd, and dinted into the ground:
There yet lies the rock that fell with him when he fell.

Tennyson, Maud

The Freudian interpretation is inescapable. The hollow behind the little wood is the vagina. There is blood on its lips because of either menstruation or defloration. Both of these represent the onset of sexual maturity. For the narrator, this is horrifying, and he associates it with death. This is the castration complex, the neurotic fear that the sexual act itself will castrate--mangle, and flatten, and crush. Here the father is the penis, and his suicide completely ruins the young man's sexual development. The living phallus is replaced by a dead stone.

I am sorry to give you this unpleasant material, but it is my job to tell you about Freud, and this is Freud: he forces you to confront the unbearable, as I said right at the beginning of the first lecture.

Now, what do we think of this reading?

First, do you find it plausible? Does it pass the don't be ridiculous rule? I think that however outrageous you find the Freudian interpretation, and it is outrageous, it's impossible to read those lines without thinking of Freud.

Is it coherent and relevant? Yes, definitely. The narrator is someone who has been made mad by his father's suicide. His state of mind is deeply disturbed: it is totally appropriate that he should be producing neurotic symptoms.

Does it reduce the poem? No, not at all. The poem is incredible, in that it so devastatingly depicts a neurotic frame of mind.

Does it psychoanalyse the author? No, of course not. What this reading suggests is that Tennyson, because of an extraordinary instinct about human behaviour, can depict the imagery of sexual neurosis without having read a word of Freud in his life, and without, presumably, being at all aware of what he was doing. This, in my view, makes the poem amazing. Read it, and see if you agree.

9.4 The Red Room (Jane Eyre, Chapter 2)

Jane Eyre is a novel that presents the autobiography of a young woman.

She is an orphan, brought up by her aunt, who hates her. She gets into a fight with her cousin, the aunt's spoiled son, and as a punishment is locked in the Red Room. This is regarded as a terrible punishment. She has a kind of fit:

My heart beat thick, my head grew hot; a sound filled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings; something seemed near me; I was oppressed, suffocated: endurance broke down; I rushed to the door and shook the lock in desperate effort.

The servants come, and prepare to let her out; the aunt forbids it (this is the worst thing) and she is locked up again. She blacks out--loses consciousness entirely.

Jane Eyre's whole life is somehow defined by this episode. The affect is extraordinary:

I never forgot the, to me, frightful episode of the red-room: in detailing which, my excitement was sure, in some degree, to break bounds; for nothing could soften in my recollection the spasm of agony which clutched my heart when Mrs. Reed spurned my wild supplication for pardon, and locked me a second time in the dark and haunted chamber.

Why? Because the room is associated with death. Her uncle, Mr Reed, died there, and since then it has not been touched. When the servants leave her, one of them says:

Say your prayers, Miss Eyre, when you are by yourself; for if you don't repent, something bad might be permitted to come down the chimney and fetch you away."

The Red Room is overdetermined. It is red, and there is a large bed "hung with curtains of deep red damask" in the middle of it. This suggests passion, blood, and danger; the womb, from which Jane is reborn into a new life; menstruation, through which she moves into maturity and a world in which relationships have to be made; and it is threatened by phallic intrusion, the ghost which can come down the chimney; in the symbolism of this novel, male sexuality is strongly associated with death. By surviving this horrifying threat she has overcome it; she can control it.

It is the crucible from which Jane's strength is born. At a later point in the book she uses it to defeat her Aunt: simply by reminding her of the Red Room, she reduces her to tears and silence. Later she dreams of the Red Room, but it is transformed: instead of the phallic corpse, the room is opened to the sky, rendered pure and beautiful, by what seems to be the moon, but turns out to be her mother, an image of great purity and peace. The ceiling vanishes, and

then, not a moon, but a white human form shone in the azure, inclining a glorious brow earthward. It gazed and gazed on me. It spoke to my spirit: immeasurably distant was the tone, yet so near, it whispered in my heart -

"My daughter, flee temptation."
"Mother, I will."

The temptation is sex, particularly male sexuality, and the experience of the red room is what enables Jane to overcome this. The strength of femininity, refusing the male, is Jane's strength. She refuses St. John, because this would mean a subservient role in life for her; she refuses Mr Rochester, because he is a prisoner of the irrationality and violence of passion, symbolised by the mad woman in the attic. Only when he has been symbolically unmanned, purified by fire, blinded, will she accept him, in a relationship in which she has real power. This novel, like Jane herself, is totally uncompromising in its feminism: male sexuality is dangerous, and must be controlled. A Freudian reading suggests that it is in the Red Room that Jane learns this control.

Read the Red Room chapter yourself, and see what you think.

I will give you two more short examples. One will show the power, and danger, of Freud. The other will show his limitations.

First, the power. I am about to show you a picture: a picture of a young girl, by the artist Millais. This picture is very famous, and was universally accepted in Victorian England and later as an image of complete purity. So much so, that it was adopted by Pears, the soap manufacturer, still in business today, in order to sell soap. I am going to use Freud, and say just one thing about it, that turns it into an image of extreme obscenity.

9.5 Cherry-Ripe

Here is the image. And here is the one thing I'm going to say: look at her hands. What do you think they symbolise?

Suddenly, the image is disgusting. The look on the girl's face becomes seductive. The image becomes paedophilic. I can reinforce this by saying that the title of the picture is "Cherry-ripe." Cherry is a slang word for virginity. Ripe means ripe for picking, for consuming.

Now, what can we make of this? I think this use of Freud is valid, because it evaluates. I think this picture is evil. I think the sentimentality with which it depicts the child is the sentimentality of pure hypocrisy. The sexual symbolism is so close to the surface as to be almost evident: the ambiguity of the picture, innocence and depravity, is the ambiguity of pederasty. Paedophiles claim to love, and be loved by, the children whose lives they destroy.

Freud is dangerous. He shines a cold clear light on hypocrisy, on sexual hypocrisy. He shows us horror, and forces us to confront it. That we in the late twentieth century are no longer prisoners of sexual hypocrisy, of the nightmare that this picture suggests, is due to Freud. We owe him deeply. May he rest in peace.

9.6 The blackbird

Finally, I will remind you of the poem I read at the beginning of this lecture:

A man and a woman
are one
A man and a woman and a blackbird
are one.

Freud, it seems to me, does not work for that poem. A man and a woman and a penis? I don't think so. The symbol remains locked, beyond the reach of classic Freudian psychoanalysis. When we have read Jung, and thought about dreams, we will come back to this poem, and see if we can make a better reading.

 

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