312 FREUD The Master Thinkers, trans. Brian Pearce, 1980); Félix Guattari, L'lnconscient machinique (1979), La Revolution moleculaire (1977, Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed, 1984); Barbara Johnson, A World ofdifference (1987); Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Le Sujet de la philosophie (1979, The Subject of Philosophy; ed. Thomas Trezise, trans. Tresize et al., 1993); Bernard-Henri Levy, La Barbatie visage humain (1977, Barbarism with a Human Face, trans. George Holoch, 1979); Lucy Lippard, Mixed Blessings (1990 ); Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, De la Chine (1972, Daily Life in Revolutionary China, 1972, in Italian in 1971); David Macey, Lacan in Contexts (1988); [ean-luc Nancy, La Remarque speculative (1973); Clement Rosset, L'Objet singulier (1979), Le Philosophe et les sortileges (1985); Michel Serres, Esthetiques sur Carpaccio (1975), Feux et signaux de brume: Zola (1975), Hermes I: La Comm unication (1968), Hermes II: L'lnterference (1972), Hermes III: La Traduction (1974), Hermes IV: La Distribution (1977), Hermes V: Le Passage du nord-ouest (1980), Hermes: Literature, Science, Phitosophy (ed. Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell, 1982), louvences sur Jules Verne (1974), Le Parasite (1980, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr, 1982); Philippe Sollers, Logiques (1968), Paradis (1981); Trinh Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other (1989); Sherry Turkle, Psychoanalytlc Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution (1978, zd ed., 1992); Monique Wittig, Le Corps lesbien (1973, The Lesbian Body, trans. David LeVay, 1975), Les Guerilleres (1969, trans. David LeVay, 1971). FREUD, SIGMUND Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was not a literary theorist, but he was the important thinker of whom W. H. AUDEN could write: "to us he is no more a person I now but a whole climate of opinion I under whom we conduct our different lives" ("In Memory of Sigmund Freud [d. Sept. 1939]," Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson, 1976, 217). The Viennese neuropathologist and subsequent founder of psychoanalysis saw himself as the systematic, scientific explorer of the human unconscious and, indeed, was embarrassed by the misunderstanding of André Breton and the surrealists, who wanted to make him into an apologist for the irrational. Of course, epistemologists, logicians, semanticists, linguists, and philosophers of language, not to mention psychologists and physicians, have all attacked Freud's pretensions to science, but his own belief in the objective and scientific validity of his work was unshakable. For this reason, though an avid reader of literature, Freud felt nervous about how his early case histories might be perceived: they read like short stories and therefore might seem to lack the stamp of serious science. The impact and significance of Freud's work have obviously extended far beyond the narrowly scientific. No consideration of his place in contemporary cultural thinking can ignore the fact that his theories-such as those of infantile sexuality-changed forever humanity's confidence in its mastery and control of the self. Although Freud was not in any way a deliberate aesthetic theorist, he did leave his mark on both literature and critical theory through his general psychoanalytic framework and also his specific turning to art to show that the range of applicability of psychoanalysis extended beyond dreams and neurosis to even the highest cultural achievements. Freud had always been interested in literature. Although in his "Contribution to a Questionnaire on Reading" he listed the works of Copernicus and Charles Darwin under the heading "most significant books," he also ranked the poems and plays of Homer, Sophocles, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and William Shakespeare under "most magnificent works" (9:245-47). These, it should be noted, were the works that had provided him with his best illustrations of psychoanalytic theories. In 1912 Freud founded Imago, a journal of applied psychoanalysis, for he wanted to extend his insights from the individual to his or her interaction with the collective-in religion, aesthetics, mythology, philology, law, and so on. Freud also invited nonmedical people (Otto Rank, Harms Sachs, Theodor Reik) to join the Vienna Association. Today the consequences for literary theory of Freud's fertile interdisciplinary efforts can be traced in Norman Kiell's two extensive bibliographies, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, and Literature (2d ed., 1982 and suppl., 1990) and Psychiatry and Psychologyin the Visual Arts and Aesthetics (1965), as well as in the bibliographies printed in the journal Literature and Psychology. Freud was admittedly generous in attributing to the artist the role of precursor of psychoanalysis in his or her insights into the unconscious, be it in prefiguring the significance of dreams, fetishism, repression and childhood eroticism, parapraxes, the object choice in love, the uncanny, the roles of Eros, daydreams, or almost anything else. Artists' sensitive perception of the hidden indicates that in their knowledge of the human mind "they are far in advance of us everyday people, for they draw upon sources which we have not yet opened up for science" (9:8). That "not yet " is both interesting and significant. Sarah Kofman has shown how Freud's reading of Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva develops from admira
FREUD 313 tion for the author's insights to astonishment that he could possibly have prefigured Freud's own findings. In other words, Freud elevated Jensen's work to the status of a case study and yet, at the same time, undercut his achievement by pointing out that Gradiva only described and did not explain: that task was left to Freud. And, in fact, Jensen could have had no idea how significant his descriptions would prove, he claimed. Whatever Freud's own ambivalence about the relation of literature and literary criticism to psychoanalysis, Freudian literary critics since have shown the concerns and processes of interpretation the two share: mean ing and hermeneutic method, symbolism and stylistic deviation, discourse and narrative. In addition, at least five areas of Freud's "implied" aesthetic are of special interest to literary theory. The first and most central is the primacy of the unconscious to theories of creativity and culture. There are obvious implications of such a view for, second, the theory of reception (aesthetic pleasure) and, third, the theory of interpretation. The fourth area is the relationship between the artist and the work, the psyche and the productions of its sublimation. And the final area is a methodological one, for Freud's comments both on art and on psychoanalysis in general suggest a number of possible literary-critical models for applied psychoanalysis. Whether we believe that in writing on art Freud wanted only to verify his interpretation of neurotic symptoms, dreams, jokes, and parapraxes or that his ambition was actually to create an entire theory of culture, in either case Freud saw in all cultural and psychic phenomena the same source: the unconscious. This meant that the same principles (e.g., repression and the economy of psychic expenditure) operated and the same mechanisms (condensation, displacement, symbolization, etc.) were brought into play. Freud did not, of course, discover the unconscious, but he might be said to have posited the general psychic structural principles and contents of the unconscious mind. He argued that despite individual variants, the unconscious has universal laws. Otto Rank and Hanns Sachs later described the Freudian unconscious in terms that make its relevance to literary theory obvious: it is that part of the mental life which, bent upon immediate gain of pleasure, will not submit to adaptation to reality. So far, then, as human mental activity had to deal exclusively with reality and its domination, nothing could be started with the unconscious. But in all those fields where a diversion from reality was allowed the mind, where phantasy might stir its Wings, its field of application was assured. (32). It is from this point of view that Freudian literary theory has based its belief in th e primacy of the unconscious in aesthetic production. Since the unconscious is essentially and radically asocial, it can instigate the creation of cultural phenomena only by sublimation, that is, only when the sexual aim of the libido is turned into a cultural one via th e mediation of the ego. For Freud, this displaced libido is actually more than just animal instinct, and its sublimation is a complex process of repression and transformation of these unconscious drives into something more acceptable to society. Sublimation, in other words, has the power to transform individual unconscious fantasy into universal art-a kind of legalized fantasy, halfway between a Wish-frustrating reality and a Wish-fulfilling world of imagination: "Art is a conventionally accepted reality in which, thanks to artistic illusion, symbols and substitutes are able to provoke real emotions" (13:188). Freud saw art as a path linking fantasy and reality (16:375 77). But this made art into a kind of alternative to neurosis rather than unrepressed, unconscious sexual drives; the artist "can transform his phantasies into artistic creations instead of into symptoms" (n:50) and by this linking path of art regain contact with reality. Art is social and public; neurosis is asocial and private. For Freud, the artist, always seen as male, was "in rudiments an introvert, not far removed from neurosis" (16:376), a man who was oppressed by excessively powerful instinctual needs for honor, power, wealth, fame, and the love of women but lacked the means of achieving satisfaction. This was where sublimation came into play: fantasy, the substitute satisfaction of all people, became the reserve, the psychic realm free from the reality principle. This central Freudian tenet, as expressed in the 1916-17 Introductory Lectures in Psycho-Analysis, was first expounded in 1908 in an important paper entitled "Creative Writers and Day-dreaming." The artist was the one who could work out th e overly personal (and therefore repellent) in his daydreams in order to let others enjoy them too. The "origin from pro scribed sources" of the daydreams was hidden, for the artist poss essed "the mysterious power of shaping some particular material until it has become a faithful image of his phantasy" (16:376). Therefore, others could derive consolation from their own unconscious depths, which had been inaccessible until this pleasure-yield lifted the repression. So, the artist managed to achieve through fantasy what he had wished for in fantasy: the fruits of success (see also 13:187) In suggesting nonrational origins for art, Freud was in a sense only reworking a version of the old tradition of the divinely inspired poet. Philosophers and art theo
FREUD rists have often turned to some such theory of the imagination to explain overdetermined meaning, obsessive repetition, and any apparent disorder in art-gaps, contradictions, and so on. Psychoanalysis had posited the theory of the unconscious to explain those discontinuities in consciousness such as dreams and parapraxes. But the artist, in Freud's view, was also like a daydreamer because he could objectify the subjective into a public, socially acceptable form-art-instead of turning it into private neurotic symptoms. This analogy allowed Freud to suggest that fantasies called art could therefore be interpreted by means of the methods of dream analysis. Freud had made an early and very strong commitment to the value of such analysis. "The interpretation of dreams," he emphasized, "is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind" (5:608). Writers, Freud duly noted, have always granted dreams great significance. His study of the dreams in Jensen's Gradiva corroborated his own clinical findings about the structures, mechanisms, and interpretations of dreams, and Freud was not surprised: The author no doubt proceeds differently [from the psychoanalyst]. He directs his attention to the unconscious in his own mind, he listens to its possible developments and lends them artistic expression instead of suppressing them by conscious criticism. Thus he experiences from himself what we learn from othersthe laws which the activities of this unconscious must obey. (9:92) Works of art, therefore, support Freud's theories; artists are "valuable allies and their evidence is to be prized highly" (9:8). But the artist's fantasy involves more than daydreaming or hallucinatory Wish-fulfillment and its reworking into a shareable form. Here Freud turned to children's fantasies in play for an added analogy, for play involves control and mastery as much as fantasy. The hero of every story, then, the one who controls, is an embodiment of the ego, the part of the psyche whose role it is to master both reality and the unconscious. Daydreams, wrote Freud in summary, are the raw material of poetic production, for the creative writer uses his day-dreams, with certain remodellings, disguises and omissions, to construct the situations which he introduces into his short stories, his novels or his plays.the hero of the day-dreams isalways the subject himself, either directly or by an obvious identification with someone else. (15:99) Many questions can be raised at this point regarding Freud's choice of analog for art and artistic creation. Dreams, for Freud, had no aesthetic value per se. Where did this aesthetic value in art lie? It was not in its form, which was seen only as a disguise or as a bribe of forepleasure. Daydreams and dreams are private and relatively formless on the surface; art is social and formal. This does not mean, of course, that they cannot fulfill the same functions for the psyche; that is, both can act as safety valves. Nor does this difference necessarily negate the similarity in latent structures and mechanisms, as the laws of the unconscious are said to be universal ones. The main objection, and the obvious one, to the use of dreams as a model for art is that it reduces art to a psychological framework for something else. A certain part of the history of psychoanalytic literary criticism would seem to bear out the view that the dream model has led only to facile, if attractive, formulations of the creative process. The ego psychologists were the ones to question most radically the adequacy of the concept of sublimation. Even more recently, psychologists working directly with artists have questioned even the primacy of the unconscious in creatlvlty, The nonlogical primary processes of the unconscious, they argue, do not resemble the conscious elaboration that results in works of art. In other words, art resembles, if anything, the patient's narration of his or her dream, not the dream itself, as ÉMILE BENVENISTE had also argued from a linguistic point of view. The repressed elements of the unconscious may exert influence, but alone they cannot account for novelty, aesthetic form, artistic conventions, or, given their discontinuity, the humanist assertion of the essential organic unity of both art and the subject. This, of course, is where poststructuralists such as JACQUES DERRIDA have been able to play with Freud's model to challenge such assertions. Freud's mechanisms of dreamwork-condensation, displacement, symbolization-mediating between preconscious censorship and unconscious desire, obviously resemble the processes of metonymy, metaphor, and symbol in poetry, but the actual equation of the two does not necessarily logically follow. Like works of art, those dreams, slips of the tongue and pen, jokes, and neurotic symptoms are all overdetermined; that is, they are capable of being interpreted in more than one way. Freud attributed this overdetermination in dreams to an element of dreamwork that he called "secondary revision." This is still not conscious aesthetic elaboration, though, for meanings are hidden and not intended for communication. This may be true of parapraxes and neurotic symptoms, but surely jokes share with works of art the desire to communicate precisely their overdetermined ambiguities. But for Freud, jokework was like dreamwork (8:54), and both provided analogies for art.
FREUD 315 Freud argued that the overt, conscious order of art arose logically but from unconscious premises. The "much abused privilege of conscious activity" seemed to him to serve only to conceal what was truly important, and he concluded: "We are probably inclined greatly to overestimate the conscious character of intellectual and artistic production" (5:613). What interested Freud was the deep unconscious structures that art shares with myth and religion as well as with dreams. The manifest individuality of the work was less significant for him than its latent universality. Freud's theory of the unconscious as the root of artistic creativity held certain implications not only for the production of art but also for the theory of its reception. Given the belief in psychic universality, the pleasure that the viewer or reader derives from art must be directly linked to that of its creator: Kindlynature has given the artist the ability to express his most secret mental impulses, which are hidden even from himself, by means of the works that he creates; and these works have a powerful effect on others who are strangers to the artist, and who are themselves unaware of the source of their emotion. (II :I07) As early as The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud had seen the universality of safely released repression as the key to the continuing impact of works such as Oedipus Rex and Hamlet. The artist's disguised and objectified presentation of his unconscious fantasy in the form of art caused a yield of pleasure so great that repression was lifted and the audience could "derive consolation and alleviation" (16:376). In other words, there is a release and gratification (by fantasy) of unconscious desires common to both writer and audience. Therefore, to study creativity is automatically to study reception. Nothing is arbitrary in art-or in any of the other manifestations of unconscious psychic processes. Or so Freud claimed. His determinism is clear in his assigning of meaning to all verbal ambiguities and seeming incongruities, be they in jokes, dreams, parapraxes, or works of art. There are obviously implications of this determinism for the interpretation of art, as well as for the response to it. If we accept a manifest-latent structure for all the productions of the unconscious, the task of the analyst-literary or psychological-becomes one of divining secret and concealed meanings. For Freud, this task entailed paying attention to the small, seemingly unimportant detail, which is then assumed to have significance (13:222, 22g). His interpretation of the Moses of Michelangelo, for instance, centers on the attitude of the statue's right hand and the position of the Tables of the Law. Unlike most traditional interpretations, which see Moses' pose as that at the inception of action, Freud's presents the statue as a representation of the remains of a completed action. Freud attributes this obvious deviation from the usual view of Moses, that is, that he does not break the tablets, to Michelangelo's inner motives in his relations with Julius II, whose tomb this statue was to adorn. But as several generations of commentators have asked since then, by what criteria are we to judge the validity of Freud's interpretation? The same question has been posed regarding Freud's dream interpretations. Freud was a wily defender of his own views: contradictions were shown to be apparent, not real, and negatives were claimed, in actual fact, to conceal positives. In dream analysis, Freud used a mixture of free association and symbol decoding (5:360). It was not that dream symbols had a fixed, known meaning but rather that dreams used existent symbols to escape censorship and allow "representabillty" of the repressed. And some symbols did seem to have universal meanings, he argued. In addition, most dream symbols seemed to represent people, parts of the body, or activities invested with erotic interest. But given Freud's theories of repressed infantile desire, they could hardly do otherwise. The circularity of Freud's hermeneutic theory has, needless to say, not gone unnoticed. Since Freud believed in the universality of these symbols, he felt justified in applying the laws of the unconscious, which he learned from the dreams of living patients, to the creative works of dead artists. In his study Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910), he went beyond an interpretation of a particular work to investigate and pronounce upon the psyche of the artist himself. In his writings on Goethe and Fyodor Dostoevsky, Freud worked more in the opposite direction, interpreting works in the light of psychological details gleaned from the lives of the writers. In either case, the artist was cast in the role of the analysand, and the critic in that of the analyst. Yet, earlier, the artist was also credited with the insights of the analyst himself. This question involves the last major part of Freud's aesthetic. Aside from the dreamwork concept, at least three possible investigative models implied in Freud's writings theoretically could prove useful to literary theory and criticism: the model of the analytic situation, the image of archeology that Freud loved so dearly, and the technique of superimposition of examples to yield common factors. In the first case, if the character was seen as manifesting the symptoms of a real neurotic person, the artist was credited with prefiguring Freud's own clinical find
316 FREUD ings. The author was a proto-analyst; th e character, his patient. This shows Freud's ambivalence about th e value of art: art could be a theoretical model to validate psychoanalysis to the public at large and yet also be reduced to little mor e th an an illustration (rathe r than a confirmation) of Freud's version of psychi c truth. Lady Macbeth could become only another example of one of "those wrecked by success," a character type Freud met con stantly in his clinical practice (14:318-24). Ibsen's Rosmersholm could be reduced to "the greatest work of art of the class that treats of this common phantasy in girls " (331). Freud, however, also suggested another investigative model for analysis. The psychoanalyst's task was said to be like the archeologist's, rather than the arti st's, though his or he r ob ject of study was more complex. In both cases, fragm ents had to be discovered and pieced together. A seem ingly insignificant detail-e.g., the pos i tion of Michelangelo's Moses' right hand-might prove to be the key to reconstituting th e whole form of the work of art and its probable context. In dream analysis, this reconstruction of latent meaning was the product of a series of successive decodings and unravelin gs- a model used by many psychoanalytic the ori sts sin ce. The problem is that despite Freud's theory of un iversality, an y such reconstitution can only be hypotheti cal, and the evidence for thi s might lie, for example, in the many very different psychoanalytic readings offered since Freud for a text such as Hamlet or Oedipus Rex. The third and final theoretical model of investigation that Freud suggested was not a model so much as a method. The method is one we would now call interrextual in the sense that it involved superimposing various manifest versions of a literary (or mythic) structure in order to let the latent common denominators show through. This was Freud 's method in "The Theme of the Thr ee Caskets," and it was used by French critic Charles Mauron as the basis for his theory of psychocritique (see BLOOMSBURY GROUP). Although it is no doubt tru e that no com plete and coher ent aesthetic system could be deri ved from Freud's writings, the se five aspects of his th eo ry and practice suggest that jack Spector's conclusion to his study of Freud's aesthetic is rather reductive: "Psychoanalysis as a technique has contributed little to the field of aesthetics, but as a technique it has had a most Significant-and often stimulating-impact on some of th e art and literatur e of this century" (J64). Even the most un sympathetic observer would have to admit, I suspect, that at the very least Freud gave to literary theory a new vocabulary with which to discuss the functioning of the psyche and perhaps th e imagination and that thi s addition op ened up pot ential new significance for literary symbolism but also for our concept of literature at large (see Skura ). Recently th e ren ewed interest in Freud has come from reread ings of his psychoanalytic and aesthetic theories in terms of structural linguistics (JACQUES LACAN ) or feminism. For man y fem inis t theorists, th e Freudi an un conscious is seen as a repos itor y of th e structural relations of patriarchy. Yet, even given th e fact that Freud was a male, socialized into nineteenth-century ideas about women, his work is also being examined by other feminists, such as juliet Mitchell and Teresa de Lauretis, to see what can be salvaged. That there are today almost as many kind s of Freudian literary theory as there are Freudian literary theorists is certainly a potentially disabling pluralism that points to fundamental ambiguities and a radical subjectlvlty in Freud 's work. But it also bears witness to the fecundity of that work and its interest for aesthetic theory. Linda Hutcheon Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychoiogical Worksof Sigmund Freud (ed.james Strachey, trans. Strachey et ai., 24 vols., 1953-74). Émile Benveniste, "Remarks on the Function of language in Freudian Theory," Problems in General Linguistics (1966, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek, J971); Teresa de Laurens, AliceDoesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (J984); jacqu es Derrid a, L'Ecriture et la différence (1967, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, 1978); Sarah Kofman, L'Enfance de l'arl: Une Interpretation de l'esthetique freudienne (1970, The Childhood of Art: An Interpretation of Freud's Aesthetics, trans. Winifred Woodhull, 1988); jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (1967, The Language of Psyco-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, 1973); Charles Mauron, Des metaphores obsedantes au myth e personnel: Introduction á la psychocritique (1962); Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974); Otto Rank and Harms Sachs, "The Signi fican ce of Psycho anal ysis for the Humanities," Psychoanalysis as an Artand a Science:A Symposium (ed. Rank et al., J968); Paul Ricoeur, De l'interpretation: Essai sur Freud (1965, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage, 1970);Alan Roland, ed., Psychoanalysis, Creativity, and Literature: A French-American Inquiry (1978); Meredith Ann e Skura, The Literary Uses of the Psychoanalytic Process (1981); Ja ck I.Spector, The Aesthetics of Freud: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Art (1973); Elizabeth E.Wright, Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice (1984).