Freud

The works of Freud presented in The Critical Tradition are excerpts from The Interpretation of Dreams [‘The Dream-Work”], papers entitled “Creative Writers and Daydreaming” and “Medusa’s Head and The Uncanny.

Freud hypothesizes the existence of an unconscious mind which has desires (perhaps drives) and a language of its own. It wants pleasure and power but can only get them in the world on a limited basis.  Society stands in the way, so to speak, though what the unconscious primarily encounters is its owner’s conscious mind which does its best to control the unconscious albeit with various kinds of repressions; refusals even to recognize what the unconscious desires since they are so disruptive if not downright ‘insane’. The unconscious is a kind of infantile being which barely comprehends the limits of the world as it exists and is in the thrall of primitive, largely undifferentiated desires associated with basic biological functions such as eating, defecation and other components psycho- sexual economy of feeling.

In “The Dream-work” Freud outlines  the relationship between the unconscious and conscious mind, the mechanisms of condensation and deflection which constitute the system of communication (repression and sublimation) that exists between them when it comes to the matter of interpreting the content of dreams. Dreams have a latent content the full particulars of which, Freud suggests, we will never fully know. It is easy to imagine, however, what happens when the infant’s inchoate psychic energies become detached from his/her original objects of desire and are set loose in a world of many possibilities or roads to go down. Attachments and aversions to particular objects or events tend to a certain arbitrariness or individuation which are difficult to disentangle and reveal even in a therapeutic situation, that is, with the assistance of formal analysis. Actually the only real clue to the latent content  of dreams is their manifest content ( how we remember and later analyze them) which already have transformed the latent content into a relatively acceptable form, except in the case of neurotics from who Freud was able to detect these very processes of denial, deferral and repression. One comes to understand ‘what’s there’ in latent content by what’s ‘not there’ in the manifest content. It’s not a question of discovery the uninhibited desires for pleasure and power in the unconscious, for Freud that’s a presupposition, but unwinding the  particular objects of these desires and how they are either being blocked or released, what incidents in the past or present are setting up the almost invariably unresolveable conflicts between the conscious and unconscious mind.

In these writing Freud wants to suggest that through psycho-analysis  the manifest contents of dreams can have the effect of transforming the latent content of dreams though to what extent he is uncertain. He has simply observed in his patients that this could be the case, that patients become aware of the conflicts that occur within themselves; that they are better able to deal constructively with their everyday affairs, something we might call today ‘reconciliation’. Freud hardly states this hypothesis of ‘reconciliation’ in a direct fashion (at least in these papers) and his reluctance to do so is reflected in his highly digressive expositional style, in keeping with his notion, born of experience, that psycho-analysis is always an ongoing business, the ‘dialogue’ ( albeit with several partners in the conversation including the diverse and sometimes contradictory and always evolving manifest content as well as formations such as the superego) is never ‘finished’.

Freud’s most telling statement in ”The Uncanny”  is that, indeed, he would not be surprised to hear that psychoanalysis, which is concerned with the laying bare of of the hidden forces of the psyche (which seem nevertheless all too familiar) has itself become uncanny to many people for just that reason. “ In one case”, he writes, “after I had succeeded – though none to rapidly- in effecting a cure in a girl who had been invalid for many years, I myself heard this view  expressed by the patient’s mother long after her recovery.”

Although Freud initially received an enthusiastic reception in America and some seminal figures in the field of psychiatry such as Karl Menninger took up the banner of psychoanalysis in opposition to behaviorism, most  practicing  psychologists  today reject it out of hand in favor of what they call the cognitive approach. They like to deal with what their patients know and say directly, not as clues to the unknown and intractable so-called Id.  It is easier to form a rationale for their practice on that basis. Cures can be assigned when patients start knowing and saying differently to the extent that their inner conflicts and non-conforming behavior seem less pronounced and some modicum of happiness can be declared.


On the other hand, Freud’s influence on Literary Criticism/ Aesthetics  was as profound as any theory could possibly be. Although his hypothesis of the existence of an unconscious mind was by no means original, his systematic, humanistic approach to its contents and language opened a virtual Pandora’s box that many others in a huge variety of ways have been exploring ever since.