reading for tomorrow
Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on Just a quick note that a) there are study questions to guide your reading of the Freud selection, from The Interpretation of Dreams (1900); and b) there are none for the essay by Meltzer: this piece is incredibly helpful in giving an overview of the tricky concept of “unconscious” and for explaining why psychoanalysis, which of course grows out of a clinical “talking cure” aimed at addressing mental illness, has applications for literature and vice versa.
As you read the Freud text, I think it’s helpful to think about how Freud, very early in his career, is founding a new discourse. Just as Nietzsche devised a radically new way of thinking about language as the construction of “hives” rather than a mirror of reality in the 1880s, and just as Marx revised the way we understand literature and other cultural fields as “refractions” or distortions of real conditions, Freud is introducing a radically new way of understanding subjectivity. Freud grounds this new conception of the “subject” in the terra incognita of the “Es” (in German, the “it,” lamentably translated in English as “id,” which just means “it” in Latin). This “It” is “in” us in some sense, and it our engine that provides our subjectivity with its “motive force,” but we don’t “know it” and we can only receive its transmissions indirectly. In the passage from Dreams, we’ll see Freud struggle with this problem, using dreams as (as he famously put it) the “royal road to the unconscious.” But the metaphor fails in that we can’t “go there.” Instead, we get strangely coded messages from this impenetrable realm, and Freud (in a rather Saussurean move) spends the piece looking for the “langue” that structures the “parole” the dream gives us (the part we remember when we wake up). What makes Freud’s work so challenging is that he tries to tease out the “grammar” of the “unsayable” language of the unconscious, an agent that speaks opaquely, via dreams and “parapraxes” (slips of the tongue and other “accidents”) and symptoms and fantasies and obsessions and, yes, poems and plays and novels and films.
Enough! I just wanted to give some sense of what we’re in for over the next few weeks.
