CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION

Transcription

1 CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION 1.1 Psychoanalysis and Literature The conjunction of psychoanalysis and literature came into existence the day that psychoanalysis was introduced to the world by Freud. As the founder of psychoanalysis, Freud repeatedly acknowledged his indebtedness to literature, mythology, and philosophy. As everyone knows, Freud turned to literature and found, in that field, conflicts corresponding to psychical anxieties in real life which are the main objects of study --- for instance, the Oedipus complex in Sophocles Oedipus Rex, the uncanny in Hoffmann s The Sandman. Freud then combines the inspirations of literature with the observations in clinical study to form the basic structure, founding a whole psychoanalytic system. From the start, the exchange between the two disciplines was direct. In his works, Freud quoted extensively from Sophocles, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Dostoevsky. When he was considered for the Nobel Prize, it was not for medicine but for literature. The first psychoanalytic criticism in literature was conducted by Freud on Oedipus Rex and Hamlet. And yet Freud s literary criticisms have not been welcomed by all creative writers, mainly because of his allegiance to science rather than art. 1

2 Despite his admiration for art, he viewed the artist as an introvert, not far removed from neurosis. In Creative Writers and Day-dreaming (Freud, SE, 9: ), Freud compared the imaginative activity of creative writers to child s play. The writer, he said, was just like a child at play --- he creates a world of his own and rearranges everything in a way that pleases him. He takes this fantasy world seriously, investing large amounts of emotion in it; and after all this, he separates it sharply from reality. By doing so, the writer can retreat from reality, where his desires, or at least some of them, cannot be satisfied. He can move into the makebelieve world of literary texts to enjoy fame, honor, power, wealth, love of women and anything else he is denied in reality. Little wonder, then, that few artists have been pleased with Freud s pronouncements. However, Freud never lost faith that psychoanalysis could cast light upon a wide variety of academic subjects. In the short essay On the Teaching of Psycho-Analysis in Universities (Freud, SE, 17: ), he maintained that his new science has a role not only in medical schools but also in the solutions of problems found in art, philosophy, religion, literature, mythology, and history. The fertilizing effects of psycho-analytic thought on these other disciplines, Freud wrote enthusiastically, would certainly contribute greatly towards forging a closer link, in the sense of a univerditas literarum, between medical science and the branches of learning which lie within the sphere of philosophy and the arts (Freud, SE, 17:173). 2

3 How, then, can we apply a theory once devoted to the study of the unconscious to the solution of problems in literary criticism as Freud so confidently predicted? The answer is that psychoanalysis, beyond its function as a therapy in treating disease and symptoms, can provide us with an understanding of how the whole mind works and therefore offers a method for understanding a creative writer when he tries to create his fantasy world by words, and drawing on all his resources, both conscious and unconscious, in doing so. In Creative Writers and Daydreaming, Freud explains creative writing in the following way: something happens to the creative writer that reminds him of some childhood memory, which in turn awakens a repressed old wish; so, the writer makes up a story to fulfill this wish, using fresh material as well as the memories in order to accomplish the fulfillment (Freud, SE, 9: ). This explanation leads us to one of the most important tenets of psychoanalysis --- the theory of repression 1. From the very beginning, man has suffered from the compulsion to repress. Human existence is resignation, sacrifice and repression --- one gives up the breast, which is the greatest pleasure for a child, in order to be a subject and sacrifices the phallus to acquire language 2, the only means 1 A more detailed review of Freudian theories of the formation of the unconscious, the repressed, and the return of the repressed will be brought up later in this chapter and will also be applied to my investigation of Stephen King s novels in Chapters 2, 3 and 4. 2 Lacan emphasized the significance of the Oedipal complex and castration anxiety in a child s language acquisition. For Lacan, castration is the pivotal moment in which the child effects the transition from a predominantly imaginary mode of functioning to a predominantly symbolic one. As Lacan sees it, the castration complex concerns the relationship between the child and the phallus which 3

4 we have to express ourselves. However, the compensation for our sacrifice is not enough since there are still so many things that remain unspeakable. They are unspeakable because we are adults and to be an adult is to know the distinction between fantasy and reality, passionate longings and pragmatic limitation. Yet as adults we do not give up any infantile wishes: we simply become more cautious and clever in shaping those early desires into forms that we find acceptable, and which may even be applauded by our society. As we all now know, all repressed desires are not completely abandoned, but instead are stored in the unconscious with censorship guarding the exit to the conscious. It would be wrong if we thus imagine our unconscious mind as a messy basement full of repressed ideas idly sleeping and waiting to be awakened by the magic word. The truth is these repressed wishes ceaselessly look for their expression at the conscious level, though they usually present themselves in a disguised appearance if they finally succeed. Disguising is a necessary procedure from latent wish to manifest utterance, from past to present. In dreams, we use condensation, displacement and various representational modes as tools to rework our desires into the stuff of dreams, in which we can safely experience what we do not want to will turn around a to be and to have. Since Freud, we have known the child s desires for his mother. Realizing that the penis is the distinguishing mark of the father and symbolizes the desire of the mother, the child, who, in pre-oedipal period, always wants to be the privileged object of the mother s desire, wishes to be the phallus in order to satisfy that desire. This pleasure of being what the mother lacks is soon interrupted by the rival father who carries the threat of castration. The acceptance of castration anxiety is an acceptance of separation, of the giving up of the imaginary unity of the ego and a tolerance of the absence of the object which is constitutive of linguistic signification. From this point, the child tumbles into the dimension of language, the Symbolic Order. 4

5 acknowledge (or are barred from doing so) in waking life. But, in day-dreams, we use the mechanisms of defense to construct systems that satisfy basic desires while still allowing us to function adequately in the real world. However, how far should we go from latent wishes to manifest text? How do we distinguish primal fantasy 3 from literature? The reply lies in our defense mechanisms. Defenses, once ignored by Freud, are now believed to play as much of an important role as wishes do in shaping a literary work. Our mechanisms of defense defend us not only from inner conflict but also from the conflict between self and society. Unlike simple wish fulfillment, the primal fantasy links us to the reality, supplying an alternate world which is a more nourishing substitute for reality. For this reason, it is not rare for readers to discover a repeated theme in the literary works of a particular writer. Edmund Wilson long ago provided an example when he linked the recurring scenes of childhood suffering in Dickens s novels to Dickens s own early experiences. The fictional scenes, he suggested, are an attempt to digest these early shocks and hardships, to explain them, to justify himself in relation to them, to give an intelligible picture of a world in which such things could occur 4. As the product 3 The primal fantasy is a set of ingredients or a structure of conflict rather than a finished product (Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 49: 1 18). It is not a story but a schema for a story, as one analyst described it; it is peremptory ideation about a particular conflict, with its characteristic feeling tone (often ambivalent) and its associated scenes and images, but with no fixed and final version. 4 Edmund Wilson, Dickens: The Two Scrooges, The Wound and The Bow: Seven Studies in Literature,

6 of both latent wish and defenses, literature enables writers to rework their experiences, present as well as past, within the boundaries of their texts. With the aid of psychoanalytic approaches, critics can explore the ways in which the silences and gaps in texts, the unconscious in all its inaccessibility, can be approached through a range of different psychoanalytic concepts or structures. Felman deplored the use of the and to conceal a master-slave relationship where literature is considered as a body of language to be interpreted and psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge, whose competence is called upon to interpret 5. Rather than offering criteria for critics to make true or false judgments, psychoanalysis provides a force of interpretation, an approach to solving problems of language. Yet as the language of desire is veiled and disguised, to read its indirections and to account for its effects is no simple matter. And since the ideas and images which represent unconscious wishes differ from person to person, we can never expect a black-or-white result from psychoanalysis like in the physical sciences. It has been questioned whether psychoanalysis can be considered as a science. To this question, Elizabeth Wright gave the best answer, Science itself is a highly interpretive activity, and it is as a science of interpretation --- that is, in part as a science of science --- that psychoanalysis is to be regarded 6. 5 Shoshana Felman, To open the question, Yale French Studies: Literature and Psychoanalysis, 1977, No.55/56: Elizabeth Wright, Psychoanalytic Criticism A Reappraisal, 34. 6

7 Freud himself once worried that his work read like fiction and lacked the serious stamp of science (Freud, The Unconscious, SE, 14:17). Nowadays, however, with a postmodern discourse more likely to celebrate a blurring of boundaries between disciplines and the interlocution of all texts, there seems little justification for worrying about the differences between the two fields when they clearly have so much in common. How can a writer remain untouched by Freud if he writes on fathers and sons, mothers and dreams, love and rivals, the wish to live and the longing for death, all of which have covered a large portion of possible themes of literary works? No wonder, then, why many literary works have been quoted as confirmation or manifestations of psychoanalysis. 1.2 Literature review in psychoanalysis When we talk about the formation of the unconscious, return of the repressed, Oedipal complex, castration anxiety or the Other, we are not talking about boundaries which tie the two disciplines psychoanalysis and literature together. Rather, these theories are the bridges that connect the two islands, enabling interchanges between the two fields. Since this thesis is going to be devoted to psychoanalytic criticism, it is then necessary to provide a review of these essential theories of psychoanalysis The Unconscious 7

8 The unconscious originates in infancy; however, it is not present from the very beginning. The newborn infant, as regarded by Freud, is largely dominated by instinctual drives which demand immediate gratification from the adults on whom it fully depends. As Lacan argues, humans are prematurely born. It must be remarked that the lateness of walking, a lateness correlative for the majority of bodily equipment and functions indicates in the infant a total vital impotence which lasts through the first two years We must not hesitate to recognize in the first years a positive biological deficiency, and consider it as an animal prematurely born (Lacan, The mirror stage, E:S, 1977: 1-2). The newborn infant cannot walk or talk. Left alone without necessary mothering, it will die. This dependency determined by the immaturity of the human infant is the source of psychological anxiety which I shall consider later. The instinctual strivings, wishes and impulses that dominate the infant s mind were conceptualized by Freud as the id. Just like ego and superego, id is an agency of our mental apparatus. The theory of the functions of our mental apparatus is so fundamental and so significant in psychoanalysis that it has become inevitable in most psychoanalytic research. Therefore, I believe it is worthwhile and surely helpful to offer a review of this theory. The id is blind and irrational. It totally disregards reality, the rights of other human beings, and even the welfare of the person who owns it. It presses constantly for the discharge of strivings, wishes or impulses, which results in the release of 8

9 tension, or as we usually call it, pleasure. We are all familiar with the infant s massive bodily reactions of uncontrollable anger and rage which occur due to either the non-existence or inefficiency of the ego, which is the second agency of the mental apparatus. Unlike the id, which has been present since the very beginning of the infant s existence, the ego has to be developed. The procedure of development, though, is rather unpleasant or even painful for the infant as he/she learns mainly through frustration. Through his experiences, the child gradually learns that he is not everything and everywhere, as he once assumed, but that he is surrounded by something else. Although the mother is almost always present when the child is crying out his needs, there are instances when the gratification she brings is delayed. After a short period of overreacting to the delay, the child finds that although delay is inevitable, the gratification will come in the end. Thus he learns to tolerate a short delay for the coming gratification. Through later experiences, such as being weaned from the breast, bumping into things while moving around, and having to control the urine and faeces, the child soon learns the distinction of inside and outside, separating himself from the outer world and in the meantime, separating the mother from his own body. The child then realizes the existence of the reality which tends to frustrate or even deny his wishes but to which he is compelled to adapt. Then the ego comes into function, to put up with frustration, to adapt to demands and needs of others, to take into account the reality of a situation and to modify the needs of the organism. 9

10 The ego is born to control the pressing needs that come from the id and by doing so it assures the person s adaptation to the outer world populated by other people who also have their own rights, needs and motives. This does not mean that the ego is a sole representative of social demands or that it aims to deny the pleasure of the id. On the contrary, it attempts to bring about gratification of the organism s needs; only it will do so within the framework of accepted standards and external demands. The third agency, superego, is the last to be acquired by the child. It represents firstly the parents then later the society s values, ideals, prohibitions and standards, and thus coincides to some extent with the commonsense conception of conscience. Different from the ego, the superego is more like a tyrant who internalizes the social standards and continuously observes the person s behavior according to these standards. It cannot be bribed by offering pleasure and is not open to negotiation in deciding what is right or wrong. Any offensive behavior observed by the superego will result in a feeling of guilt. In this way, the superego acts as an agent employed by our mind to make sure our moral rules and social standards can be carried on from generation to generation. Freud divided the unconscious drives into two main categories: the first category includes those drives which engender motives that are creative and constructive, such as affection, love, and care, which he called the life instincts; the second category includes those which yield motives linked to aggression, such as 10

11 envy and hate, which he called the destructive or death instincts. The sexual drives (or motives), together with drives aimed at self-preservation, are among the life instincts generally; but owing to their great plasticity, they are liable to be mixed with aggression, as in the case of sadism, masochism, devaluation of the object of love, etc. Constructive motives are allowed to enter our awareness while destructive instincts are held back and repressed outside the conscious. It is at the moment of repression that the conscious and unconscious come into being simultaneously. Little elaboration is required on the concept of consciousness since it substantially coincides with the commonsense definition of the term. The unconscious in Freud s essay of the same title is summed up as having four important characteristics. Firstly, it is to tolerate contradictions. Opposed wishes can co-exist in the unconscious. For instance, a wish to kill a beloved person may live side by side with the wish to possess that person sexually. This effect is enormously enhanced by the way, in Freud s point of view, that the unconscious speaks in images rather than words, which then eliminates the requirement for acceptable logics. Secondly, energies in the unconscious are not fixed but mobile, liable to recombine into new configurations in an active process like that in which meanings are displaced and superimposed in dreams. In other words, the unconscious is alive, and this makes repressed material likely to return to consciousness in some form. Thirdly, the unconscious is timeless. It is not formed temporally and is not altered by the passage 11

12 of time. Fourthly, it replaces external reality with psychical reality. The unconscious essentially seeks pleasure, and since it has little regard for reality, it will readily express itself in wishes and fantasies (Freud, The Unconscious, SE, 14: ). Between the conscious and unconscious, there is another system the preconscious, which stands in a crucial relationship to the other two systems. It is the locus of censorship between the two systems and enables communication between them. As well, it possesses important functions of its own such as the activities of conscious memory, language, reality testing and the reality principle. The preconscious contains many of a person s life experiences which are typically outside of awareness, but which can potentially enter the field of consciousness on a moment s notice. These memories and past experiences are subject to immediate recall and verbalization even though they are not in the center of consciousness at the time Return of the repressed Although Freud was often unclear as to what he thought repression was, this concept is still considered to be one of his greatest contributions. In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Freud, SE, 20:77-174), Freud was clear in stating that repression was just one of the defenses used to protect the psyche against objectionable material. At other times he frequently employed the term repression as a kind of shorthand to refer to any psychological process which prevents 12

13 unconscious material from becoming conscious. In the paper Repression (Freud, SE, 14: ), he notes that repression was simply the process that attempted to turn something away from consciousness. In Freud's early work with hypnosis and the cathartic method, he observed resistances in and of analysis. Indeed, hypnosis seemed always to have had its difficulties for Freud: it was partly to improve his technique that he had in 1889 journeyed to Nancy to visit the great Bernheim and Liébeault, the famous hypnotists. A technique called pressure technique (in which he merely place his hands upon the patient s forehead and told him he could remember everything) had to be given up in 1900 for its ineffectiveness and a new technique, latter to be known as freeassociation, slowly came into being. Although the patient did at times respond to the new technique, there were also occasions on which the patient remained silent (for instance, the case of Elizabeth von R). From this, Freud concluded that there had to be in existence mental phenomena which are not available to the awareness, but still had a powerful influence on mental life. Conceptually then, the logical conclusion was to postulate an unconscious state along side of the conscious. Thus Freud's contribution, at this point, lies in his recognition of the relationship between repression and the unconscious, in his description of the functions of unconscious material, and in his detailing of the contents and form of unconscious life. 13

14 In the "Papers on Metapsychology" (Freud, SE, 13: ), Freud distinguishes between two types of repression. The first is primal repression; here the mental representation of instinctual desire is denied access to consciousness. The representation thus remains unconscious. The second type is repression proper; Freud refers to this as "after pressure", in which material that is available to (the) consciousness becomes repressed because of its association with the already repressed mental representative of the instinct. As a follower of Darwin, Freud believed in the crucial role of genetics, a view supported by the scientific community today. Therefore, he kept coming back to the idea that we inherit some of our ideas, preserving memories of what was experienced by our ancestors (Freud, SE, 13:109). A baby baboon will run in terror from a rope waggled in its face because it was born with the idea already in its head that snakes are very dangerous for baboons. Thus present material is repressed not only because it is objectionable, but also because of its attraction to material that has already been repressed. Repression is a most effective defense; however it is also potentially dangerous. The danger lies in its permanence and immutability. Mental contents, which have not succumbed to the fate of repression, are subject to modification in the light of the person s accumulating life experience. However, repressed impulses never participate in the reality testing. Both the impulse and the repressing force pertain to an early phase of the person s life and prove refractory to changed conditions. Once the material is repressed, the issue is closed. Yet the ego regards and 14

15 deals with repressions as if they pertained to present-day reality. Therefore the mature ego continues to react to the original impulse as a infantile ego, which was once weak, vulnerable, and greatly dependent upon the love and good-will of the significant adults. In this way, the repressed material is very likely to create anxiety because it must be kept constantly under pressure. However, as I have mentioned, repressed material is not static while in an unconscious state. It constantly seeks for an expression in the conscious level and in some special forms, such as dreams, fantasies and the symptoms of the neuroses, it does succeed. Yet once these disguised forms of unconscious impulses are recognized by the ego, they are immediately rerepressed. That is why the hesitation and silence of a patient is what an analyst should really be listening to in a talking cure, and why the gaps and subtexts are worthy of extra attention by the literary critic. The repeated hesitation, silence, gaps and subtexts of a patient or a creative writer reveal a return of the repressed. Therefore the Gothic, and the horror genre in particular, is more suitable for application of psychoanalytic theories as it explodes our fears and drives more directly than any other genre due to its prototypical narrative of silence, uncertainties and gaps. Rebelling against reason and authority, the Gothic creates characters who assert their identity in the face of reason and manners. The conflict between social repression and inner drives of characters bubble to the surface in the Gothic text. The typical ruins of the Gothic castle symbolized the destruction of order and society. King inherited this typical symbolization, and so we see the explosion of the Overlook Hotel (The Shining), the fall of the Beaumont house in Castle Rock (The Dark Half) and the 15

16 collapse of Sarah Laughs (Beg of Bones). Following the Gothic ancestor Poe King acknowledges that the best horror text posses a pleasing allegorical feel (King, Danse Macabre, 31). As the specifically allegorical nature of such texts is never given a definitive exegesis, King chooses to use allegory as a symbolic way of saying things that we would be afraid to say out straight, a way for the audience to exercise emotions which society demands we keep closely in hand (King, Danse Macabre, 31). Therefore, under the surface of King s gothic text, is in fact a commentary about the contemporary political, social, economic, and personal anxieties The Theory of Anxiety Originally, Freud viewed anxiety as the result of repressed libido. In this view, anxiety was taken to be an alternative mode of release for instinctual energies whose expression at the conscious level is denied by the secondary agency of the psychic apparatus. Because energies subject to repression are refused discharge along preferred pathways, they undergo a transformation and are experienced in characteristic reactions: shortness of breath, weakness, sweating, shaking, dizziness, etc. In this early account of anxiety as transformed libido, anxiety was thought to be a consequence of repression and, more specifically, of neurotic repression, the prime agency of which Freud came to conceptualize as the superego. 16

17 However, this approach failed to account for the very striking occurrence of anxiety in infancy, even before the formation of the superego. Proven to be unsatisfactory, this theory was replaced by a new one in According to the new theory, the prototype anxiety is caused by the premature birth of the infant. Freud maintained that the long period of time during which the young of the human species is in a condition of helplessness and dependence establishes the earliest situation of danger (Freud, SE, 20: ). Thus a definition of anxiety emerges from Freud s text: anxiety is a signal of danger to the ego. Joan Copjec (Copjec, Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety, 52-63) posits that this signal is extraordinary because it works without the use of any signifiers. Since a signifier can always be negated, the message it sends can always be doubted. Anxiety, however, is an effect a special sort of effect that is caused by something repressed in the unconscious, that is, nothing in the conscious and as such it cannot be signified or doubted. In contrast to fear, which is considered as a signal of external danger, anxiety is more persistent. While fear vanishes when the danger disappears, the same is often not true of anxiety. The difference between the two is to be related to the presence or absence of a specific object. Anxiety has a quality of indefiniteness and lack of object. In precise speech, we use the word fear rather than anxiety if it has found an object (Freud, SE, 20:105) Lacan is in agreement with Freud in that it is the integrity of the ego that is threatened in anxiety. For Lacan, it is through the image of another person that the 17

18 newborn infant gains the first inkling of its bodily integrity and the first measure of control over its own movement. By displaying itself as an example, the imago of the fellow human beings brings the concept of coordination and organization into the infant s anarchical world. In the imago of the other, the infant relates itself to an ideal unity which introduces a sort of fixed point into the flux of the infantile psyche. This is conceptualized by Lacan as the Imaginary Order which is a domain of the ego where the subject misrecognizes itself as a full identity, imagines it speaks with clear and coherent meaning, but where it is in fact subject to all kinds of fantasy including the power to overlook the symbolic order. Insofar as the imaginary formation of the ego serves to deliver the infant from its original chaos and helplessness, the structure of the ego itself becomes the primary protection against anxiety. Yet anxiety remains an ever-present possibility to the extent that the ego is vulnerable to disintegration. The very possibility of anxiety testifies to the fact that the formation of the ego does not fully quell the infant s internal chaos. The ego as Lacan conceives it functions to inform the libidinal drive at the cost of refusing some portion of the heterogeneity of organic impulses the quantity of alienated desire attributable to the real. Lacan s account makes it clear how and why anxiety is possible prior to the formation of the superego by locating the origin of anxiety in a form of repression that is more primitive. The propensity to anxiety does not depend on the existence of an agency superior to the ego, but represents the price paid for the institution of the ego itself. From a Lacanian point of view, the most constant and elemental form of danger faced 18

19 by the ego stems not from its relations with the superego nor with the external world, but from the reassertion of the real refused by its imaginary unity The Oedipal Complex and Castration As I have mentioned in the opening part of this chapter, Freud was inspired by Sophocles play Oedipus Rex to form his theory of the Oedipal Complex. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar notes in their book The Madwoman in the Attic that Western Literary history is overwhelmingly male (Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, Original italic). It is thus impossible for this Freudian theory (or other psychoanalytic theories) to completely avoid patriarchal imprints concerning its (their) close connection with the Western Literary history. While the little boy s Oedipal and castration complexes are rather satisfyingly analyzed and explained, the little girl s case is hard for Freud to account for in his theory of the difference of the sexes, as we can see from his repeated admissions that the subject of woman s sexuality is still very obscure (Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 48). For Freud, In the beginning the little girl was (only) a little boy (Freud, SE, 17:245); while as Irigaray sees it, THERE NEVER IS (WILL BE) A LITTLE GIRL (Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 48). This obvious masculine point of view in Freudian theory is later inherited by Lacan and mirrored in King s novels, which I will discuss in the following chapters. 19

20 Oedipus is brought up as the son of the ruler of Corinth until one day a prophet tells him he is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. He immediately leaves home. On the road he gets into a row with a man about the right of way at a junction, and in the ensuing fight, kills him. Arriving in Thebes he saves the city by solving the riddle of the Sphinx and is rewarded by marriage to the queen, who has been recently widowed. It turns out that he was in fact a foundling, who was brought to Corinth as a baby and that the man killed at the junction was his father, and the woman he has just married his mother. Oedipus blinds himself and goes into exile. The Oedipal complex is defined as the erotic love, either conscious or unconscious, of male or female for the parent of the opposite sex, accompanied by extreme jealousy of the other parent. In the Oedipal complex, the incestuous drive towards the mother is immediately matched by opposing forms of drive, expressed as the threat of castration from the father. Freud and Lacan agree that the Oedipal crisis, for which castration is the pivotal issue, is caused by an intensification of the child s sexual strivings toward its parent, along with a shift in the aims of those strivings from an oral or anal to a genital orientation. Such a blossoming of instinctual impulses tends to produce anxiety as the force of psychically unmastered impulses act on the infantile ego. This is the cause of anxiety in the case of Little Hans, a typical case of castration anxiety. According to Freud, the boy felt anxiety in the face of a 20

21 demand by his libido in this case, anxiety at being in love with his mother; so the case was in fact one of neurotic anxiety (Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, SE, 22:86). What he is afraid of is evidently his own libido (Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, SE, 22:84). Freud emphasized the paternal threat over the libidinal danger in explaining the castration anxiety but this approach fails to account for the presence of castration fear even in instances where a real threat, pronounced by the father or by some other caretaker, is absent. Here again, Freud proved himself a follower of Darwin by assuming the fear of castration stemmed from a phylogenetic inheritance from a primeval time in which castration was actually carried out. Assuming the existence of such a phylogenetic inheritance, fears of castration might arise even without any actual threat being made. At this point, Lacan rejects Freud s interpretation and maintains his own by returning to the internal causes of castration anxiety. The main lines of Lacan s approach to castration parallel his treatment of anxiety in general. As a form of anxiety, castration signals a threat to the integrity of the imaginary ego. What sets the challenge to the ego is a surging of libidinal energies that are foreign to it. The origin of Oedipal anxiety is the force of emergent sexuality, for which the infantile ego lacks adequate means of symbolization and discharge. Yet how does the Oedipal crisis emerge in concern for a particular organ? Lacan gives an answer by focusing on the function of the penis as a sacrifice. Like 21

22 certain species of lizards whose tails drop off in the jaws of a would-be predator, castration, in its literal meaning as a loss of penis, functions to save the whole by giving up one of its parts. The castration then is not only anxiety but a transition from anxiety to fear. The penis is chosen to be the sacrifice because of its significance in the imaginary as well as in the symbolic order. The narcissism of the pre-oedipal period is centered on the child s desire to be the privileged object of the mother s desire that is, to offer himself as what is lacking to the mother. In the Oedipal complex, the child loses its privileged position with the realization that the mother s desire aims at an object over and beyond him the father. Under the pressure of this realization, the primary imaginary identification with the phallus first intensifies, setting in motion a jealous rivalry with the father, until it must finally be abandoned. The shift from being to having or not having the phallus implies a transition from an imaginary to a symbolic orientation. That is, it implies a shift from a dual relation of all or nothing at all to a more complex, more mediated mode of functioning, which is concerned with the presence or absence of an element in a structured configuration. In this way, identification in the aftermath of the Oedipal crisis is no longer bound to assume the properties of the object as a whole, but is free to borrow particular parts or aspects of the other. As such, castration anxiety is not merely a possibility to be feared or anticipated, but a task to be symbolically accomplished. Castration involves both an anxiety of fragmentation, as it implies the giving up of the imaginary unity of the ego, and a corresponding anxiety of separation, insofar as it requires tolerating the absence of the object that is constitutive of linguistic signification. From a Lacanian 22

23 point of view, castration is the central moment of the child s acquisition of language not in the sense of becoming able to voice words or to use them in some way but rather in the sense of becoming able to dwell in language, to rely on language for the guidance of thought and action. 1.3 The Gothic Genre Psychoanalysis and the Gothic Freud and others in psychoanalysis s first generation drew upon literature both for examples of psychoanalytic insight and as prior statements of what they themselves were struggling to understand. All literature is subject to such analysis, but in myth and fairy tale, they often saw the nuclei of our most abiding concerns. In Creative Writers and Day-dreaming (Freud, SE, 9: ) Freud identified writers of what we would now call popular culture texts as providing particularly fruitful objects for psychoanalytic investigation, because it is the less pretentious authors of novels, romances, and short stories, who nevertheless have the widest and most eager circle of readers of both sexes (Freud, SE, 9:147). For Michelle Massé, the importance of the Gothic, a genre of so-called low culture, to psychoanalytic critical inquiry lies in two aspects --- its ongoing popularity and easily recognizable motifs, and the affinities between its central concerns and those of psychoanalysis. 7 7 Massé, Michelle A. Psychoanalysis and the Gothic, A Companion to The Gothic, ed. David Punter. Blackwell Publishers,

24 Concerning the similarities between the Gothic and psychoanalysis, the Gothic is not a crude anticipation of Freudianism, nor its unacknowledged father. Rather, the two are cousins. The Gothic arises out of the immediate need of the reading public to articulate and define the turbulence of their psychic existence. We may see Freud as the intellectual counterpart of this process 8. Psychoanalytical vocabulary has often seemed helpful in describing the nature of the gothic, obsessed as it is with family rivalry and with a satanically ambiguous villain whose self-sufficiency is both his glory and his damnation. With its theory of an underlying reality, psychoanalysis helped give the gothic a new "profundity", by seeing it as the revelation of the private life of either the individual or his culture that had been buried by habit, the conscious will, and forces of individual and social repression. A psychoanalytic procedure always involves an analyst and an analysand, who is often a patient suffering from some psychological problems, especially neurotic symptoms. (In self-analysis, the analyst and the analysand are the same person.) If the analyst discovers the cause of the symptoms and makes the analysand realize it, then the latter recovers from his illness. In a psychoanalytic procedure, the analysand says whatever comes to mind without censoring or criticizing it ("free associates"). In this manner, the analysand often relates his dreams and his thoughts about them. From these free associations, the analyst sifts out the ones related to the 8 Day, William Patrick. In the Circle of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

25 analysand's symptoms. The analyst then organizes them in a way that best illustrates the cause of the analysand's symptoms. The success of a treatment usually depends on whether or not the analyst can help the analysand recall a buried memory or other material that can account for his illness. Also, the analyst usually has to deal with the analysand's dreams, which often have a lot to do with the analysand's unconscious, where buried memories lie. These dreams, however, are often disguised forms of unconscious material, and the analyst has to interpret them to get at the latent content of the dreams. Just as psychoanalysis deals with the patient s nightmares in order to achieve recognition of the repressed which keeps returning to haunt the patient, the Gothic is the barometer of an era s repressed psychology, exposing the nightmares of society in the daylight. The Gothic is a particular genre that rises from the religious and social turmoil out of which the modernity of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries took its shape. Reflecting the revolutions and industrialization of that era, the subtext of the Gothic allows us to confront symbolically the weakening or collapse of social values and the consequences of economic instability. Other genres may have served as an expression of social anxieties before but not until the rise of the gothic in the latter part of the eighteenth century did we have such a direct channel to reveal the darkest impulses of the society. The close relationship between this genre and the repressed may also explain why it was regarded (repressed) as a low literature from the very beginning. Gothic texts, thus, can be reduced to a bundle 25

26 of symptoms. Latent or unconscious materials have the weight of truth: what is sequestered in the dungeon seems to have more significance than what is on display in the drawing room. In this sense, the present has less importance than the individual, familial and social past. This may explain why the Gothic is usually defined not according to observable features of theme and setting but according to the realms of psychological depth from which it is supposed to originate (dream, fantasy) or the psychological responses it is believed to provoke (fear, terror, horror). In his famous compilation of Gothic novels, The Gothic Quest, Montague Summers examined the Gothic novel within its historical background. He argued that both the Gothic and Romantic literary modes "suggest an aspiration for something beyond the deadening familiarity of this world, a longing for the past" 9. Summers asserts that the Gothic is escapist literature: To escape thus from mundane reality is a primitive desire, and, in itself, it is excellent and good. The world, if we had not our dreams, would, God knows, be a very dull place. Of course, as precisions will never fail to tell you, there is a danger in dreams. But, if we had not dreams, life, I take it, would be far more dangerous; in fact, it would not be worth living at all. We call our dreams Romance, and it was just this that the Gothic novelists gave to their readers. This is exactly the reason why I think the Gothic novelists have done us infinite service, and proved themselves true friends to those of us who 9 Summers, Montague. The Gothic Quest,

27 care to withdraw and at rare intervals, from the relentless oppression and carding cares of a bitter actuality 10. Obviously, there is no need to argue about Summers statement on the importance of dreams since even with very basic knowledge of psychoanalysis we can see that he is right. But what about regarding the Gothic as escapist literature? Is he right about that too? The answer is yes and no. The complexity lies in the conflicting features of the Gothic. On the one hand, it allows us to experience horror scenes which we do not dare to face in reality, and to explore the forbidden realm of death, then soothes us with a reconfirmation of our good feelings about the status quo. That is, all the dangers and horrors remain as pictures in a book (King, The Shining, 100) and once the story ends, we can always return to our normal and secure life. It provides us a chance to prove our bravery without risking our lives. On the other hand, it is different from real escapist literature which lets people escape from the imminent reality of such horrors by denying their existence and by clinging to a perpetual suspension of disbelief. Gothic lets us return to childhood, to the demonic womb and allows us to re-experience the helplessness and anxieties from our completely dependent early days. Therefore, similar to psychoanalytic procedure, the Gothic text takes us on a journey, which leads to the recognition of the repressed. 10 Summers, Montague. The Gothic Quest,

28 This recognition, however, is no simple task because what lies veiled beneath the narrative of the analysand, as well as that of the gothic writer, is the unnamable, which, as the word suggests, is impossible to be represented by words. Yet unfortunately, language united words, chains of signifiers is the only means we are given to express ourselves, to depict our anxieties. In a psychoanalytic procedure, the "clues" to the analysand's symptoms primarily lie in free associations and dreams, which, however, involve things both relevant and irrelevant to the symptoms. Moreover, the analysand may tell lies intentionally; or, because of a "resistance" common in a psychoanalytic procedure, he may not report exactly what comes to his mind, but rather rationalize it and thus blur it. Dreams, as important sources of clues, usually disguise the analysand's true experiences and feelings through displacement, condensation, and symbolism 11. A person may dream of falling from a building, yet his real fear may concern a possible moral downfall. As clues, therefore, dreams conceal as much as they reveal. Similarly, the gothic writer revises and edits his works under both his personal defense mechanisms and social repressions as he uses the gothic to reveal, magnify, and analyze the anxieties of human beings and their societies. From the above introduction to the psychoanalytic anxiety theory, we know that anxiety has a quality of indefiniteness and lack of object. According to Lacan, it is the signifiers rather than the signified that is repressed. With the signifiers barred and denied, the Gothic, like 11 Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. SE,

29 an analysand in free association, can never make an expression down to the point, because the point down there is in the forbidden realm. This may help to explain why the Gothic usually chooses to threaten rather than scare. As Noel Carroll argues, When monsters cease to be threatening, they cease to be horrifying 12. The bloody scene of a murder, the open skull, the drooling monster with sharp teeth can all be scary, yet they can also be laughed at as in the Hollywood comedy Scary Movie, a comedy which ironically imitates horror scenes (Wayans Bros. Entertainment, 2000). No laughter, not even a smile can be expected when the Gothic unveils its setting in a typical way, --- the deserted castle, dim light, the door swinging half open. While the movie results in comedy by recalling familiar horror characters in their famous scenes to the audience, the Gothic successfully evokes a psychological tension just because of its lack of object. In doing so, the Gothic narrative leaves the unnamable to the readers as a fill-in-the-blanks quest. In this respect, the readers are put into the position of the Other of the Gothic, to whom the Gothic text is addressed and by whom it is recognized. Freud s concept of the "uncanny", through which something becomes estranged from us while at the same time it is familiar to us, can be invoked to explain the relationship between the Gothic and its readers. At the beginning, the distinction between fantasy and reality seems undefined in the Gothic text. However, with the vivid depiction of the circumstances and the reader s unconscious identification with the hero or/and the 12 Carroll, Noel. The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge,

30 villain in the text, the boundary is gradually blurred. The reader unconsciously fits himself into the text, or to be exact, he takes the text into himself and thus awakens the child inside who never dies but only sleeps deeply. 13 In Evolution psychistique1 (Lacan, E:S, 112), Lacan described two levels of speeches; the first takes its orders from the ego and is addressed to the other (with a little o ), the imaginary counterpart, from whom the subject is alienated. He conceptualized this as the empty speech. The second is addressed to the Other (with a capital O), and is beyond the language ordered by the ego. This one is named full speech. The Gothic is a full speech that ends in no full-stop, waiting to be taken into the reader then combining and compromising with the reader s Other to achieve its own completeness. In the same article, Lacan also reminded analysts to distinguish between the two registers in the patient s speech. In the psychoanalytic procedure, the psychoanalyst pieces together all the analysand's free associations and dreams, and then together analyst and analysand learn why the latter has developed neurotic symptoms. Before this, the analyst has invariably discovered in the analysand's free associations some significant buried material, often a forgotten trauma, which lies at the root of the symptoms. That is, the analyst has discovered the full speech 13 Seemingly, there might be a problem for female readers to identify with the characters since, except for in the Female Gothic (please refer to Literary Women by Ellen Moers) which presents heroines instead of traditional heroes, female characters have remained less important in the Gothic, mainly occupying a role of the bystander. However, as Michelle Massé pointed out, both the Gothic and psychoanalysis stage what Freud calls the beating fantasy, in which a spectator watches someone being hurt by a dominant other. Each narrative often simultaneously avows that the spectacle was just makebelieve and that the spectator should leave her bystander s role to become a participant (Massé, In the Name of Love, 3). In other words, there is no real bystander in the Gothic narratives. 30