From 1897, Freud based his psychoanalytic theory research on the reading of literary works, especially Oedipus the King and Hamlet, and connected it with patients and himself. After the discovery of Oedipus plot, psychoanalytic literary criticism method appeared. Today, this method of literary criticism has gone through nearly a hundred years, and its existence value is undeniable. At the same time, we cannot deny the greatest contribution of psychoanalysis-unconsciousness. However, in order to recognize the contribution of psychoanalysis, we must consider its involvement in literary criticism and even art.
However, Freud's practice in literary texts also shows that it is very difficult to use a simple outline of "practical psychoanalysis": on the one hand, psychoanalysis is based on the field of psychopathology and is only related to clinical symptoms; On the other hand, we must use the scientific experience of psychoanalysis to criticize in a completely unfamiliar field of cultural products.
In fact, after reading Freud's book, we find that the practice of psychoanalysis is actually an experiment of speech and discourse. Literature is also the practice of language, which can create a special space that is not restricted by ordinary communication. Psychoanalysis and literature are actually based on the intersubjectivity of language and imagination. Therefore, it is necessary to discuss the contribution of psychoanalysis to literary criticism, rather than simply treating psychoanalysis as a collection of explanatory points.
Gilbert Lascault put forward two tendencies of analysts: the first is to find a simple explanation of its theme in literary works, and the second is that literary criticism seeks ready-made theories in psychoanalysis to reveal the "truth" of the text. He believes that "real reading", that is, real psychoanalytic criticism, must find the unconsciousness caused by the text in the reader's mind and explain it at the same time.
1, the basis of critical methods
Can psychoanalysis be used in another field, that is, literary reading, and if so, under what conditions? In order to discuss this problem, we must first understand the principles of psychoanalytic practice.
[Basic Rule]: Between the sofa and the seat
1892, Freud began to practice "talk to cure", so that patients can "say what they want to say" with their own desires without the intervention of doctors. Freud discovered the medical efficacy of speech and wrote it in A Study of Hysteria.
-Patients: Free Association Rules
Doctor: Unstable attention rules
Psychoanalysis is an experience that exists only in language.
This kind of psychoanalysis has the nature of intersubjectivity, even if the patient can't see the psychoanalyst, even if the psychoanalyst doesn't speak: "There are no unanswered words, even if only silence meets the words, but the words have listeners ... This is the core function of analysis" (Lacan, on Lacan). The analyst is a double other, who is both the witness and the target of the speaker's speech. The latter can be said to be exactly where the patient's speech is projected, which is what people call "empathy".
Unconscious/unconscious
Unconsciousness is not the opposite of simple consciousness, but refers to the thinking activities that most people can't reach consciousness through pre-consciousness, and these thinking activities can only be indirectly reflected in consciousness through special methods. It can be said that unconsciousness is the basic concept of psychoanalysis and the most important contribution to contemporary thought. In his first extension (dividing mental space into three systems: unconsciousness, pre-consciousness and consciousness), Freud defined "another logic" that constitutes the unconscious process. He studied the dynamics of unconsciousness related to "desire" and "inhibition" and distinguished the weight of unconsciousness in spiritual products. Related works include dream interpretation, psychopathology in daily life, jokes and their unconscious relationships.
Another logic
Freud found the way to the unconscious when he systematically analyzed dreams. He compared the "obvious content" (explicit meaning) and "potential content" (implicit meaning) of dreams, and with the help of the analysis of free association, he focused on the "dream work" of dreaming. In the "dream work", there are four factors that constitute the dream:
-condensation: condensation is a factor in the correlation chain between dreams and potential content, which can be a person, a painting or a word. This factor is determined by many reasons.
-replacement: injecting visual intensity and amazing emotional impact into seemingly meaningless appearances. Emotion is separated from the original representation and replaced by another representation, which becomes incomprehensible. "In the process of dream formation, these basic elements that seem to have the strongest interest are of little value, and their dream positions are replaced by other elements, which are of little value in dreams." Freud believes that association leads to the confrontation of desire and the childhood memory of lust.
-Imageability (visualization)
-Secondary processing (retouching).
The curtain of aesthetics or reason covers up the naked truth of the unconscious.
"Visible text" is like the "obvious meaning" of a dream, and its symbolic meaning is closely related to the "hidden meaning" of the unconscious.
Desire and inhibition
Freud put forward the theory of unconscious dynamics because he regarded dreams as the spiritual liberation of desires in a repressed state, but this is only the realization of disguise. Because the unconscious desire to seek satisfaction conflicts with the repression of consciousness and even pre-consciousness. In this way, all spiritual products are the result of compromise between desire and consciousness suppression. The concept of "psychological conflict" refers to the conflict between desire and taboo, unconscious desire and conscious desire, unconscious desire and unconscious desire.
Freud believed that all spiritual changes have the same process and conflict: dreams, slip of the tongue, out-of-control behavior, symptoms, artistic creation and so on. Although they are obviously different, they have the same structure, "illusion": in this imaginary plot, the subject is present and expresses the realization of desire in a way that is more or less deformed by the defense process.
explain
The explanation link is to reveal the potential meaning of the material, clarify the way of defensive conflict, and strive to find the desire expressed by all unconscious products. Here are four main points:
For analysts, every discourse is a mystery, because it is related to the process and meaning of unconsciousness and consciousness.
Psychoanalysis is much like the work of a detective, which is to collect unknown clues, classify them and find out the relationship between clues. An action, a sentence, a tone, a coincidence and so on can all be clues. Both jobs need to reconstruct the story, and the goal is to seek the uncertain truth.
The solution to the problem strengthens our thirst for knowledge: our interpretation constantly changes the interpretation of others. In psychoanalytic texts, a case can have dozens of different versions of interpretation, and we will constantly change our interpretation. Because the possibilities of explaining the meaning of words, experience and concrete imagination are infinite.
-Carole King Ginzburg put psychoanalysis in the semiotic system of knowledge, based on the interpretation of "symbols" (or "marks" and "traces"). This kind of research is different from quantitative science, but related to "indirect, indicative and speculative knowledge". Carole King zburg emphasized the dilemma of humanities: "Either weak scientific laws are used to obtain important results, or strong scientific laws are used to obtain unimportant results."
Psychoanalysts hesitate between these two positions. And we choose to explain the concepts of conjecture and operability, so that this subject becomes a technology and a brand-new interpretation theory.
Psychoanalytic reading
Literary criticism of psychoanalysis is an explanatory criticism.
Psychoanalysis is an analysis of psychology, and we can see that new words that mark the particularity of this method emerge one after another: psychoanalysis, semantic analysis, text analysis, psychological reading and so on.
Psychoanalytic criticism is a special interpretation practice.
Compared with other critical methods, psychoanalytic criticism has its limitations, and its choice, purpose and method should be pointed out every time.
-Analysis and criticism are the practice of change.
This "change" has nothing to do with the author and the work, but with the "read work". Criticism should be drawn from the subject of the discourse to be interpreted and the subject to be interpreted, that is, the author and the reader who criticizes the article.
We can compare the scene differences between psychoanalysis and reading: private speech/public writing; Confused language/structure and even thoughtful writing; Physical proximity/distance, even historical distance; The existence of free association as the object of explanation. In addition, the author's demand for imaginary or real readers is not the demand of psychoanalysts, nor is the expectation of readers the expectation of psychoanalysts. Finally, as Lacan said, psychoanalysts are "practitioners in the field of symbols", but writers are not.
2. The need of psychoanalysis for literature
Literary texts play the role of media between medical clinic and theory: condense generated speculation, prove it, and finally find the universality of special discoveries in the medical field. Freud found a recurring motive: love and hostility to his parents by linking the patient's association with his own association, Oedipus and Hamlet.
Freud read King Oedipus.
First, from the story of Oedipus, Freud discovered the "impersonal or plural expression" of personal desire. Although Freud's discovery is put into our modern cultural background, it is a new network formed by Freud's analysis of patients, dreams, diseases and speech, so its universal applicability is guaranteed.
B, the protagonist of the tragedy has become a symbol of the child's desire.
C. The tragic protagonist has a dual identity: he is both the subject and the object of investigation. Therefore, Freud integrated himself with Oedipus, equating psychoanalysis with the painful blind search for truth, and met the unknown other in the search.
Freud read Hamlet.
In King Oedipus, the children realized their fantasies, while in Hamlet, the children's fantasies were all suppressed, only when the character's neurosis broke out. This play is based on Hamlet's hesitation. He is afraid that he can't finish the task entrusted to him by his father's death. He wants to get back at a man who fulfilled his childhood wish by killing the king and marrying him. This is his repressed desire when he was a child. Hamlet's delusion and hatred of sex are all his unconsciousness. Subsequently, Freud analyzed the unconscious origin of Hamlet from Shakespeare's personality.
Nowadays, people criticize "practical psychoanalysis", study the psychology of characters, make judgments with clinical medical knowledge, interpret works without careful reading, and discuss the similarity between writers and characters, but the accuracy of psychoanalysis has not been questioned. In fact, Hamlet is not only a paranoid Freud, but also tortured by himself. It can be said that the analysis of Hamlet is closely related to his self-analysis: Shakespeare wrote Hamlet after his father's death, while Freud read Hamlet by himself, one year after his father's death. Freud's explanation includes himself, which enriches psychoanalytic reading. In this way, literary works are neither symptoms nor analyzed words, but provide us with a symbolic form of looking at problems from the perspective of unconscious psychology.
Lacan and Poe's Stolen Letters
Lacan's anthology begins with the study of edgar allan poe's Stolen Letter. Lacan tried to construct a brand-new theory of unconsciousness and the rules of the relationship between subjects, and sought the relationship among unconsciousness, intersubjectivity and truth. His analysis of The Stolen Letter is to show that the novel has its own set of rules, just like a symbol of the world that makes consciousness orderly. He combined Freud's theoretical text with Poe's novel type text to obtain "truth".
Intersubjective drama
There are two scenes in the novel, one is that the minister stole the queen's letter in front of the king, and the other is that Dupont, a private detective, stole a letter in a cardboard folder in a conspicuous place in the minister's room and replaced it with a fake letter in order to divert the minister's attention. Lacan put aside the psychological study of characters and carried out structural reading. In his view, the second scene is a repetition of the first. The queen, the minister and DuPont were linked by the same incident, that is, stealing letters, and it was the same letter. So he focused on logic.
-the relational logic of truth
Lacan thinks this is a game of respect. Here, seeing equals knowing (voir=savoir). The novel1* * includes three lines of sight: the first is the line of sight of the king and the police, but it is omnipotent but can't see anything. This is the same as the delusional self being confused by its own mirror image and being taken away by the mirror image and losing sight. The second is the sight of the queen and the minister. They saw that the former didn't see anything, trying to hide the letter and eliminate its hidden traces, but they couldn't act at first sight. The third is the line of sight of the minister and DuPont, seeing that the former intentionally hid the letter and stole it.
-the logic of intersubjectivity
The point is that the letter in the stolen letter is material property, that is, something stolen from the beginning. The game is manipulated by three symbol positions centered on letters. The transmission of letters manipulates people and determines their subjectivity. Believers are dominant, and all subjects obey the "symbolic order", regardless of their social status, gender or talent.
Lacan established the universal law of intersubjectivity around Fuehles: the king holds the power given by Fuehles, while the queen has no power, only the right to transfer power. She must be loyal to the king. She is the king's sujette. It can be seen that unconsciously, this law is in harmony with the law of a patriarchal society. Lacan's interpretation of the story turned Oedipus into the universal logic of the subject in the homologous order.
Through the analysis of The Stolen Letter, Lacan reveals the deep structure of the novel: the automaticity of repetition. Freud's theory emphasizes sex, and Lacan also emphasizes penis, but Lacan's penis has nothing to do with sex. It represents a signifier, a "metonymic existence", which means absence or absence, that is, a desire that can never be reached. The penis is not only a symbol, but also the thing itself. As a symbolic structure, it is an independent life movement system, which can constantly transform itself through the intermediary of metonymy, and generate new interactive relations with the other, the world and the self through the intermediary of symbolism. "Lacan's most important discovery is to replace Freud's Oedipus plot with penis effect. He believes that only by examining the symbolic signifier of penis can we reveal the terminal roots and basic motives of people's various desires. " [ 1]
Literature as theoretical basis
Literary text and psychoanalysis confirm and explain each other, but at the same time, we should also consider the particularity of literature. In the discovery of psychoanalysis, literature is of great significance to the construction and proof of its theory. In the continuous reading, we can also make new discoveries, because the ever-changing literature provides various imaginative forms, symbols and words for the clinical research intuition that is still wandering. Or we just want to learn, which is how Freud proved his theory about dreams and delusions in Zhan Sen's Gradiva.
3. Take literary works as the research object.
This time, literary texts are no longer the media between medical clinic and theory, but psychoanalysis plays the role of media between works and readers.
The identity of the work/author
Freud wrote at the beginning of Zhan Sen's Fantasies and Dreams that he emphasized the superiority of poets and thought that they were creators, full of inspiration that ordinary people did not have. But in the end, the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis is reversed: the analysis of novels does not supplement the study of dreams, but contributes to poetry creation. In fact, psychoanalysts can "discover" what writers are restricted to express, and always know much more than writers, because psychoanalysts are the only masters who explore the truth of desire and unconsciousness. Analysts should consciously observe abnormal psychological processes in others, with the purpose of guessing or stating the laws. Self-analysis disappears, but scholars and others exist. The artist is close to self-knowledge, and he can understand what we want to know through others. This silent confrontation gives the poet an uncertain identity between a doctor and a psychopath. To be precise, there is such a situation that he can be regarded as a patient who takes writing as a small support or outlet.
Therefore, literary phenomena are ironically suspended between pathology and medicine through analogy, and aesthetics is no longer a symbolic work, but a curtain to cover up the truth, which should be left to aestheticians to study. On the other hand, literature has become a huge material library for clinical research of psychoanalysis. Literary works are attached to the knowledge of psychoanalysis, as if only psychoanalysis can present the truth of novels, and interpret and evaluate literary texts in the name of unconscious "science", forming a critical model. Psychoanalysis, like other literary disciplines, has a vague relationship with the text and is regarded as an empirical research method of truth or model produced by theory.
Pathology of people and works
The characters in novels always have something in common with real people, and when analyzing works, works are often directly related to the writer's psychology. The stylization of the writer's works distinguishes his works from the statements of ordinary patients. However, there will be a writer's spiritual catharsis and self-awareness in the novel, which will affect readers. The curtain of aesthetics avoids its direct conflict and opposition with reality.
The following are several different key locations:
Freud read the memoirs of President Schreiber, constructed his paranoid theory, and created a medical concept by taking a passage as an example.
-La Vogue (René La Vogue, a student of Freud) failed to write Baudelaire, which led the writer to move from morbid writing to morbid learning. He translated the poetic language into medical language word for word, and simplified literary creation into the direct expression of neurosis.
Lacan regards characters as real people and analyzes them by symbolic interpretation.
In Black Sun, Julia Kristeva devoted himself to the psychiatric diagnosis with the theme of depression. She studies the dialectics of melancholy aesthetics and analyzes that Duras's works are indirect expressions of this kind of pain. When exhorting vulnerable readers, she said that death and pain are the spider webs of Duras' text, and readers who feel the same will be unable to resist its charm.
Psychological biography (psychological biography)
Psychoanalysis cannot avoid the subject problem, and writers and works are bound to be related. The philosophical concepts of unconsciousness and psychological conflict can clarify the origin and development of individuals, creative activities and works.
-the basis of spiritual and historical research
The study of spiritual history is based on Freud's research.
Princesse marie tried to define Poe's neurosis, especially necrophilia. After studying the same structure of a large number of works, she reveals various forms of psychological conflicts in imagination, composition and symbol of the text.
Lacan greatly praised andre gide's Youth written by Jean DeLay, and summarized Gide's personal case: Gide raised a very personal problem, the problem of existence and appearance, and his novel describing the family became an example of the subject falling into the mother's trap and the father's words disappearing. On the question of whether Holderlin is still a father, Laplanshi reveals the reason of his madness through Holderlin's life and poems: losing power, losing power in the name of his father.
Dominic Fernandi redefined the history of spirit, saying: "What kind of children there are, what kind of works there are". At the same time, he also stressed that people are the source of works, but people can only be understood in works. His research is based on Bonaparte's model. The first part analyzes the biography in detail, and the second part analyzes the main body of the work. According to his point of view, the works are determined by the contradictions and conflicts of the writer when he was young. This linear determinism was criticized by Sarah Kofman, who proposed an opposite causal relationship, "Works form writers".
-autobiographical analysis and research
In Autobiographical Contract, Lejeune inspected the autobiographies of Rousseau, Sartre and Levinas, and put forward two basic questions: the authenticity of memory and the narrative activity. He analyzed the memory of his childhood and studied the formation and condensation of compromise between inhibition and resistance. The factors of truth and fantasy in different periods of childhood have no personality, but they have strong emotional value. Therefore, text network analysis should be used to deconstruct autobiography, because autobiography is a rewriting or rewriting of childhood and life, and it is textual. He analyzes the work of the writing subject between imagination and language by studying the narrative content, the subject of statement and the subject of statement activity. As a result, the analysis began to focus on the text itself.
4. New direction
Now, the combination of psychoanalytic criticism and other disciplines has produced new reading methods, new text theories and text creation theories. The theory of imbecile has been inherited and developed. Anne Clancy devoted herself to the analysis of unconscious personality and poetic symbolism, and regarded the text as a female reader (empathy/anti-empathy). Yves Gohin and Sergei Dubrovski studied "psychological reading" and the relationship between the conscious structure and the unconscious structure in the extreme particularity of the text. MarcelleMarini (the author of the paper) discusses the activities of presentation, the illusion freed from the fixed fantasy expression, and the distance and contradiction brought by presentation.
These analytical methods are different from thematic reading. They study what is suppressed but not implied, that is, the unconsciousness caused by sexual desire in infancy. Sartre's Idiot in the Family is a great development of Flaubert's research, but Sartre did not specify the psychoanalytic methods contained in it.
Jean Bellemin-Noelle (Jean Bellemin-Noelle? L) "Unconsciousness of text"
Bellemain Noelle's "textanalyse" is a reading strategy close to spiritual reading, but it rejects the author and "human myth" as "too humanized". He put forward a unique method-"L 'Inconclusive D 'Unerivance" to keep the theme away from the text and the author absent. The danger is that the subject of reading replaces the subject of writing, and the subject of theoretical research is regarded as the only interlocutor.
However, he wrote a beautiful sentence to put his criticism into practice: "Dialogue between semi-deaf him and semi-deaf me". Writers write for their inner readers, and readers shape writers in reading.
Julia Kristeva's Symbolic Analysis
Based on symbolic analysis, Kristeva created a theory that includes all modern knowledge and combines semiotics with psychoanalysis.
-the opposition between symbol system and symbol system
Symbolic system (the perspective of text generation) is related to impulsiveness and language activities in childhood or schizophrenia, and is regarded as maternal-female. Symbol system is related to language rules (symbol arrangement, syntax, linear semantics, discourse) and is regarded as paternal-male. This dichotomy of western philosophy (mother-body-nature/father-language-culture) is the basis for Kristeva to read poetry texts. Through symbolic analysis, she released the impulsive power in poetry (musicality, the explosion of meaning, meaningful works, speech imitation).
-The subject in the process
Based on Lacan's theory, Kristeva links the development of subject with the development of language. She saw the inherent characteristics of the subject in the process in modernist poets: the only freedom of the speaker comes from his unpredictable special game with symbols. She believes that psychoanalysis must pay attention to the sudden changes in meaning, subject and structure. She refused to sexualize cultural products and divide them into men and women, because the host would deliberately avoid this classification in the production activities. The purpose of a writer's writing is to get rid of the unchanging angle and description.
Orthodox criticism denies the social historicity of psychoanalytic criticism, and defines the social historicity of human development with its classic Oedipus plot. Vernant, Levi Strauss, Green and Lapland all have their own views on this. The author himself believes that the blind worship of these concepts makes it difficult for us to listen to the changes in literature, ignoring women's works and marginalizing men's works. Literary criticism theory should be regarded as a diversified research field, even sometimes contradictory, which is not realized by modern literary criticism theory and is also the core of the problem.
[1] Elizabeth Wright: Lacan and Post-feminism, translated by Wang Wenhua, Peking University Publishing House, 2005, p. 10 (Introduction to Lacan).