Psychoanalysis and Criticism

First perhaps we should get the distinction between "psychoanalysis" and "analytical psychology" out of the way. Psychoanalysis derives from Freud and has its basis in neuroses and psychoses, that is in a study of the conflict between the ego and the id or the corresponding conflict between the ego and the outside world. The psychoanalyst engages in analytic work in order to understand an illness, a mental imbalance in which the individual is somehow in conflict with his or her own instinctive drives or with the environment. We equate psychoanalysis with a clinical method, the so-called "talking cure." In its literary application, psychoanalysis takes an interest in understanding the conflicts between ego and id or between ego and the world as they manifest themselves in literary works, in authors, or in readers. Analytical psychology, on the other hand, derives from Jung and in its literary application it represents a desire to praise the creative process itself. The artist participates in a continuing force of creative energy; he or she is a mouthpiece for a universal language of symbolism. Often analytical psychology, when turned to literature, results in what we know of as "archetypal criticism," a criticism that looks for universal symbols or archetypes in works of literature--looking for the anima or the mandala or the old crone or the maze or the child and so on as signs of a symbolic language that crosses cultures and historical periods. But my interest here is in psychoanalysis. But I note that both psychoanalysis and analytical psychology present themselves as scientific in method. Hence the emphasis on "analysis" and on "ology." Both proceed from a system outside of literature and both are, therefore, extrinsic approaches to literature. I say this because once put into practice both of these approaches can have the appearance of instrinsic approaches because both can focus closely on a particular text or set of texts.

Freud comes first in any psychoanalytic approach to literature. But it might be worth pointing out that psychoanalysis, like any other theory, can take several forms depending on whether the psychoanalytic critic bases his or her theories on Freud or on any branch of Freudian influenced psychoanalysis, say object-relations theories related to Melanie Klein or D.W. Winnicott, or ego or id-based theories. Anyhow, Freud is central. And whether or not we like it, Freud is one of the pre-eminent forces in twentieth-century thinking.

Let's begin with the phallic stage of development when the child leaves behind the period of undifferentiation and enters the world of difference (specifically sexual difference), the Oedipus complex in which sexual difference takes on a dynamic between child-mother-father, and castration anxiety or the fear of transgressing the law of sexual and social hierarchy. These are all useful things to know about mostly because the Oedipus complex has had such a monumental influence on our thinking. The Oedipus complex leads to what Freud calls the "family romance." The family romance finds application in any number of theories of literature (you might look at the anxiety theory of Bloom, for example). It posits a conflict within any "family." I put "family" in quotation marks to indicate that a family need not be a biological family. Anyhow, the biological family will do for purposes of explanation. Let's posit a family of three: mother-father-child. The dynamic here has to do with rivalry, desire, fear, and the need for order. Within the family a constant tension exists, a tension based on dominance, the desire for satisfaction of basic instincts. These instincts include the instinct for pleasure (love) and the instinct for control (power). The cite of power is the parents--father and mother--but even here a division exists since the father wields more power than the mother (yes Freud was sexist!). The father's power manifests itself in several ways, not least in his relationship to the mother. The child too has a relationship to the mother that precedes his or her relationship to the father (the mother gives birth to the child, suckles the child, looks after the child, and so on). The child perceives that the father's relationship to the mother is something he or she desires. Hence the Oedipal situation.

Perhaps for our purposes, the most important idea has to do with the reaction of the child to this Oedipal situation. Successful maturing involves a transference of the child's love for the mother on to a suitable substitute. This transference is crucial. It ties in with other Freudian notions such as condensation and displacement. These are terms which are separate but I'm lumping them here to serve as a focus for the essential Freudian move: any image or symbol tossed up in a dream or used by a writer in a work of literature is a product of such mental mechanisms as transference, condensation or displacement. What this means, in a simple form, is that no image or symbol will mean only one thing; it will have what Freud termed a manifest (obvious) meaning and a latent (hidden) meaning. The analyst/critic's task is to get through to the latent meaning. Now this latent meaning will be latent because of the mechanism of repression. Repression is the mind's safety valve covering over or hiding scary or socially unacceptable desires that push into consciousness from our unconsious. As these unacceptable drives push their way into the conscious they become displaced in order that we not recognize them, in order that they appear acceptable. Artists are good at this. They sublimate, that is, they turn into higher and even beautiful forms those drives that, if seen in unsublimated form, would be terrifying, maybe even ugly, and certainly disruptive to social order. Go back to the Oedipal thing. If we did not displace our desire for our mothers, then sons would cause all sorts of disorder within the family.

Aside: Freud can be accused, and sometimes is accused, of manipulating his patients into giving the answers he wants in order to have his theories confirmed. In other words, Freud as superego is a problem for anyone who wants to see Freud's theories as deriving from observation rather than from a priori assumptions on the part of Freud.

Next some words on Lacan and his crucial argument that humans enter into language as if they were entering into a stream. This is true for Lacan because for him we do not so much write as we are written. That is, no human can control language because language exists prior to and beyond each individual. All we can do is enter into the stream at any given place and stir things up a bit. For the literary critic who accepts Lacan's idea, this means that no writer knows exactly what she or he meant when he or she wrote something (because language always has a way of expressing more than we know) and therefore the writer becomes just another commentator, not necessarily better or worse, than any other on that writer's work. It also means that any given structure of words or work of literature swims in the language stream and to trace its meaning is to navigate the stream, not just the single swimming text. The thrust of such an approach will lead to deconstruction and I think I can leave this for now.

So let's look again at Jack Prelutsky's "We Heard Wally Wail."

Here's a short four line poem about someone named Wally who apparently transgressed the standards of good taste by creating a word in his alphabet soup. The poem gives us at least three people we might wish to consider in any psychological analysis: Wally, his mother, and the speaker of the poem who presents himself or herself as spokesperson for the neighbourhood. One way of proceeding might be to take the analyst's position towards Wally. Why did Wally choose the alphabet soup as the site of his transgression? And why did he choose to transgress at a time (dinner or lunch) and place (his own kitchen or dining room table) guaranteed to get him caught in the act? In other words, why did Wally wish to get caught? Did he know that his mother, not his father, would catch him? And if so, then why did he wish to have his mother catch him? First the soup. This is prime material for a Freudian reading. Soup is liquid and often hot or at least warm. It sits comfortably in a bowl, a nicely rounded shape. Remember, a psychoanalytic reading rests on the assumption that the manifest meaning--here a bowl of soup--contains a latent meaning--soup has something to do with warm fluids that relate to the mother. Dare I spell it out? Does Wally desire a return to the womb? Or does he desire some other equally transgressive satisfaction? At the very least we have here an image of something oral and in Freudian terminology the oral stage precedes the phallic one. Does Wally desire to regress to his infancy? Don't we call his type of behaviour immature, perhaps even "infantile." If you're with me so far, then the next step is easy. What are the letters in alphabet soup made of? Noodles, of course. Soft, long, rounded, worm-like pieces of pasta. Need I say more? The two images here--one decidedly female, the other male--are brought together. It is not too difficult to see why Wally's mother reacted the way she did; it hardly matters what the word was that Wally spelled because the significance of what he did rests in these images of male and female. Another way of putting this, and I think Wayne said as much, is that this poem deals with Wally's desire for his mother. His repressed desire for his mother surfaces in the soup and his mother acts the part of the controlling superego compelling Wally's desire to return to where it belongs, buried in the unconscious.

What about the poem's insistent use of alliteration. Can this be relevant to a psychoanalytic reading of the poem? The answer is, I think, yes. We might well relate the alliteration to Freud's notion of "repetition compulsion." Repetition compulsion is the uncontrolled return of the repressed. Because that which we repress desires release from the unconscious, it continually tries to find this release and it often does so in the same or similar ways--hence repetition compulsion. We are compelled to repeat the same mistakes or to return to the same images. This can result in a fetish. Have you seen the Eric Rohmer film CLAIRE'S KNEE (1971)? Here a young man becomes absolutely obsessed with the knee of a girl he does not even like. The knee is obviously a displacement of some other part of her body. He turns it into a fetish, that is a substitute for what he really desires. I'm suggesting, of course, that the insistent alliteration in "We Heard Wally Wail" reflects Wally's compulsion to repeat his transgressive acts. Read this way, Wally as a compulsive personality, the poem might alert us to a specific significance in the particular alliteration of the sound "w." "Wally wail" emphasises the "Wally" sound (or at least the "Wa" Wa" sound) and how far do we have to go to get "Willy" (or "Wi" Wi" "Willy")? In other words, a resolutely Freudian reading might well see Wally as penis. This type of reading, far-fetched as it may seem, has been applied to such texts as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It is a distinctly Freudian reading. Were we to turn Lacan loose on "We Heard Wally Wail," we would come up with a different reading.

Just how different? Well Lacan is more interested in language than in the libido. The unconscious for Lacan is structured like a language and so although libidinous drives might be important, they cannot be articulated without language. Everything depends on the letter. In "We Heard Wally Wail," everything turns on the letter. Whatever it was that Wally spelled, his letters caused the action of the poem. I think a Lacanian reading of this little poem would direct us to those letters in the alphabet soup. Clearly, those letters constitute a signifier, but in the poem this signifier is absent. Of course, it is also present in that the signifier clearly caused action to take place--Wally's mother reacted strongly to this signifier. But the signifier remains hidden, absent. What it signifies is unclear, absent. It is not important what the signified is because there is no signified. Without knowing what the signifier is, we can never know what the signified is. Without knowing what the signified is, we are left with an endless chain of possible signifieds-which are, by the way, really other signifiers. In other words, those letters in Wally's soup constitute what deconstructionists would describe as the "mise en abyme," the point of the abyss, the drop into emptiness. We might interpret Wally's letters as his separation from the mother (in fact, the poem lets us see this in a quite literal fashion), his entry into what Lacan refers to as the "symbolic." The entry into language for Lacan is the activation of the unconscious. Without language the unconscious does not exist. In other words, Wally's letters inscribe his unconscious and in doing this they mark his entry into the world, his entry into the world that functions only and because of the letter. This is the "law of the father." It is, in short, a phallocentric (and therefore logocentric) world. Hence the noodles as letters is a nice Lacanian touch. We might go farther and posit Wally's letters as his way of trying to reach--i.e. get back to--his mother, but the result of those letters is to drive him farther from her. His "wail" is his lament at recognizing what he has lost. He wails because he lacks what his letters in the soup had tried to retrieve. His wail and his letters are indications of lack, of a desire frustrated. And the whole neighbourhood hears Wally's wail because the whole neighbourhood is witness to the ever repeating operations of lack. Repetition compulsion is at work here too because we are ever doomed to repeat the attempt to satisfy desire, but all our attempts are frsutrate from the beginning because all attempts must function in the realm of the symbolic, and by definition (Lacan's anyway) the symbolic is a substitution for that which we really desire. We are doomed to a succession of substitutions none of which can fulfill the role of that which they substitute for (essentially, the mother and what she signifies). Wally's wail is the sound of the Lacanian subject forever displaced from the site of pleasure. Lacan's world view is not optimistic.

These types of reading might be brought to other works, say William Blake's "The Sick Rose" or of course William Faulkner's AS I LAY DYING. I won't go on to such readings now, however, because this has already gone on too long. I hope, however, you can see how psychoanalytic readings might work, and I trust you see how they become for me just another way of playing with texts. This notion of play becomes central to the next theory we come to: deconstruction. We might situate Lacan precariously between structuralism (he is after all interested in the structure of the unconscious and the structure of langauge) and post-structuralism (which amounts to a view of things which accepts without hesitation the slipperiness of the signifier). In short, structuralism in whatever form it might take rests on an idealistic base; that is, it remains confident that its search for clarity and even "truth" can find successful conclusion. Post-structuralism in whatever form it might take rests on a sceptical base; that is, it accepts the view that all knowledge is relative and that the search for clarity and truth will never find a conclusion. The shift from the first of these views to the second accounts, partly, for the shift in pedagogy over the past couple of decades. The shift from instructor-centered to student-centered learning could not have happened without a shift from what I'm calling here a structuralist view of things to a post-structuralist view of things. We are now in an age of "postness": post structuralism, post modernism, post industrialism, post literacy, post colonialism, post office, post haste, and post democracy. It's time to post on out of here.

Here are a few more jottings: the unconscious is related to the instincts, especially aggressive and sex-driven instincts. For the purposes of literary criticism, the very acceptance of the concept of the unconscious opens the door to probing beneath surfaces. And yes, to probe unconscious material, the critic will look to find instinctive drives related to pleasure (loosely defined perhaps as the sex instinct or eros), pain (fear of such things as castration and isolation), death (the death wish or thanatos). Stories liberate these unconscious drives simply because in story our defenses are relaxed, or if we accept Lacan, language partakes of the unconscious and we cannot use it without revealing something of those unconscious depths. And yes, a psychoanalytic approach to text will likely take an interest in how gender manifests itself in our psychic lives. We could reprise the Oedipal and Electra phases once again, but I'll resist.

Related to gender identity is psycho-sexual development: the various 'stages" of growth such as oral, anal, phallic, etc. These "stages" are not necessarily left behind as one grows older, and therefore we might see an anal fixation in a particular individual. Fixation in any of these early stage reveals immaturity. The most famous literary manifestation of such a fixation is probably Hamlet who is supposed to be fixated at the Oedipal stage, unable to cope with his love for his mother. A character in fiction who eats all the time might be fixated in the oral stage. And so on.

On to the Oedipal stage which illustrates the male-centered aspect of Freud's theories. "psychological determinism." All action has a cause; all symptoms arise from some psychic imbalance. We might also see psychoanalysis as a "blueprint" and as such it is deterministic. We set out to determine the fit of a text to the Freudian or Lacanian or Kleinian model. The grid includes the triad that Freud invented late in his career: id, ego, superego. These relate to the two principles: pleasure and reality. Our id pursues the pleasure principle, but the superego always counters this with the reality principle. If we pursue pleasure willy-nilly, so to speak, then reality will rear its ugly head and punish us. This is the reason we have repression, the psychic mechanism that keeps us functioning as social creatures.

The very important idea of the "subject" came next. What is a subject? This implies the opposite question: what is the object? Are subject and object immitigably separate? Is the subject identifiable as coherent, homogeneous, and knowable? Or is the subject other than itself? Are we all "strangers to ourselves" (this is the title of a book by Kristeva). How does subjectivity enter into the act of interpretation? Can we ever interpret subjectively if subjectivity is itself a site of conflict? If all subjects are outside subjectivity, then how can interpretation be otherwise? what I'm suggesting is that all interpretation is a function of the interpreter as subject, but that the word "subject" involves the "other." We cannot be subjects without the other to give our subjectivity form, and this "other" intersects with our subjectivity. All interpretation is subjective only in the sense of "inter-subjective."

Finally, a brief reading of Wordsworth's "She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways" from a pyschoanalytic perspective. The reading here is decidedly Lacanian in that Lucy becomes for Wordsworth (or for the poet, if you prefer) that which he lacks. From a strictly Lacanian perspective, Lucy is what Wordsworth desires, and what he desires he cannot, by Lacanian definition, have. We could identify Lucy with the mother, and this is certainly a plausible Lacanian reading, although the poem might raise some doubts here. Lucy is a maid. She is fair as a star and she is a violet. I suppose a son might wax figurative in such a way about a mother. But if Lucy is the poet's mother, then she might be so in a strictly Freudian sense: his desire for her is charged with a sexual frisson. It is interesting that Lucy is figured in the poem. She becomes a metaphor--a violet, a star. These signifiers replace Lucy (who is, after all, absent and also silent). We might say that for the poet, Lucy is an absence which requires a substitute, a simulated version to fill in for the absent one. But that first stanza, in which we learn that Lucy lived beside the springs of Dove, sets up a metonymic possibility. To live beside, to be continguous, to have Lucy, by virtue of proximity, partake of the implications of Dove might well lead us to another discourse: the discourse of the literal (or what Mitchell calls variously the semiotic or carnival). Lucy is a Dove; that is, she is all spirit (whether we see that spirit as the "spirit" of nature or spirit in the noumenal sense) and consequently she has no material existence and she cannot be touched by the poet in any mundane way, although she can touch him spiritually. She lives in relative anonymity, and she has very few to love her. We might surmise that the poet is one of those who loves Lucy, and her love brings the two of them together; they love as if joined. If the stanzas show progression, then we might argue that the first is metonymic (which I relate, following the lead of Margaret Homans--see her Bearing the Word--to the language of the mother, a literal language in which signifier and signified touch), the second is metaphoric (which I relate to the language of the father, the language of substitution and deferral). This leaves the third stanza which gives us a language without either metonymy or metaphor. Whatever else one says about metonymy and metaphor, they are communicative discourses; that is, they speak across a barrier--from someone to someone. As I've defined it, metonymy is a mother's language, the way of communicating between mother and child. Metaphor, on the other hand, is the father's language, the way of communicating between father and child. Somewhere Lacan speaks of these as the language of Yes and the language of No. The third stanza might be the language of 'oh." "Oh" indicates a turn, and the turn I am suggesting is a turn inward to so(h)lipsim. "Oh" is an emptiness, an expression of no signified, a free floating signifier that can never find a signified. The poet is cut free from communication, from community. He turns inward to self--"the difference to me." "Oh" is a good example of the Lacanian subject, empty of meaning.

I hope you see I'm just playing about with these ideas in relation to the poem. I suppose a more traditional psychoanalytic reading would stay closer to the notion of grief. The poet clearly finds himself in a position of loss. How we interpret this loss will depend on our particular psychoanalytic focus. If Lucy is either the poet's mother or sister, then we might see the poem (as some have done) as an expression of the poet's repressive defense mechanism. Rather than act upon unwonted (even taboo) desire, the mind does away with the desired object. That is, the mind successfully reenacts the gesture of repression driving Lucy deep within the mind, so deep that she is "dead," lost to the conscious.

I might also point out three things: 1) Freudian readings tend to focus on desire, repression, and fixation; 2) Lacanian readings can take many directions, the one I've chosen here moves in a deconstructive direction; and 3) to a great extent the text we are interpreting directs the approach we will take, and this poem by Wordsworth seems to me to offer some resistance to a psychoanalytic reading. Most psychoanalytic readings of the poem--I refer to the Bateson thesis which identifies Lucy with Dorothy Wordsworth, the poet's sister--incorporate biographical material. In other words, they psychoanalyse Wordsworth himself and in so doing they move into the extrinsic mode.