Freud, Saussure and Lacan: Interpreting Dreams of a Mad King, Significations of a Modern Ulysses and Unrealities in a Story of Passion.
Freud, Saussure and Lacan: Interpreting dreams of a mad king, significations of a modern Ulysses and unrealities in a story of passion
The equation ‘Freud + Saussure = Lacan’ is a student-friendly basis for streamlining the complex theories of these three major modern thinkers towards a common and purposeful analytical illustration of psychoanalytic and linguistic fundamentals. In today’s world of interdisciplinary studies, it is also included in literary studies to help students of literature explore relevant aspects of texts that they read. But how does each component of the quoted relationship relate to literary theory? How may the knowledge of each be employed to enhance the literature student’s grasp over his/her reading? This essay seeks to explore the connections between psychoanalysis, linguistics and literature in relation to the Freud-Saussure-Lacan triad. In doing so, the relevant theories of each will be considered by turn and explicated by applying them to the analysis of selected portions from certain well-known texts.
I
Sigmund Freud
“At the very least, Freud would recognize that he is a writer of novels, since he compares his analytic constructs to the delusions of his patients and declares ‘deep-rooted prejudices’ to be the guiding and dominating force behind the most abstract speculations of philosophy and science. Science, offering only ‘provisional validity’, is, in his view, simply a mythology…the pleasure which would be added to, or would replace, aesthetic pleasure would be the pleasure of knowledge. To a common pleasure in the fantastical, Freud adds the intellectual pleasure which stems from the resolution of the enigma which, for him, is the work of art; the pleasure which comes from grasping, detail by detail, the connections between a seemingly arbitrary ‘creation’ and the daily reality or past history of the artist.”
Freud’s theories in general and his techniques for interpreting dreams in particular have a lot of
The equation ‘Freud + Saussure = Lacan’ is a student-friendly basis for streamlining the complex theories of these three major modern thinkers towards a common and purposeful analytical illustration of psychoanalytic and linguistic fundamentals. In today’s world of interdisciplinary studies, it is also included in literary studies to help students of literature explore relevant aspects of texts that they read. But how does each component of the quoted relationship relate to literary theory? How may the knowledge of each be employed to enhance the literature student’s grasp over his/her reading? This essay seeks to explore the connections between psychoanalysis, linguistics and literature in relation to the Freud-Saussure-Lacan triad. In doing so, the relevant theories of each will be considered by turn and explicated by applying them to the analysis of selected portions from certain well-known texts.
I
Sigmund Freud
“At the very least, Freud would recognize that he is a writer of novels, since he compares his analytic constructs to the delusions of his patients and declares ‘deep-rooted prejudices’ to be the guiding and dominating force behind the most abstract speculations of philosophy and science. Science, offering only ‘provisional validity’, is, in his view, simply a mythology…the pleasure which would be added to, or would replace, aesthetic pleasure would be the pleasure of knowledge. To a common pleasure in the fantastical, Freud adds the intellectual pleasure which stems from the resolution of the enigma which, for him, is the work of art; the pleasure which comes from grasping, detail by detail, the connections between a seemingly arbitrary ‘creation’ and the daily reality or past history of the artist.”
Freud’s theories in general and his techniques for interpreting dreams in particular have a lot of
Bibliography: 1. Badcock, Christopher, Essential Freud, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992) 2. Culler, Jonathan, Saussure, (Sussex: The Harester Press Limited, 1976) 3. Derrida, Jacques, Acts of Literature, ed. by Attridge, Derek (London: Routledge, 1992) 4. Derrida, Jacques, Dissemination, trans 5. Freud, Sigmund, The Penguin Freud Library, Volume 4: The Interpretation of Dreams, (London: Penguin Books Limited, 1991) 6. Freud and the Humanities, ed 7. Joyce, James, Ulysses (London: Penguin Books Limited, 1992) 8. Kofman, Sarah, Freud and Fiction, trans 9. Lacan, Jacques, Ecrits: A Selection, translated from the French by Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977) 10. Lacan, Jacques, The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, trans 12. John Milton: The Complete Poems, ed. by Leonard, John (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1998) 13. MacCannell, Juliet Flower, Figuring Lacan: Criticism and the Cultural Unconscious (London: Croom Helm Ltd, 1986) 16. Smith, Joseph H., Arguing with Lacan: Ego, Psychology and Language (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1991) 17. Stafford-Clark, David, What Freud Really Said (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd, 1967) 18. Winterson, Jeanette, The Passion (London: Vintage, 1987).