02 Tuesday Feb 1

Nadia Choudhry Wiki Notes 02/01/11 The first thing we did in class was take a quiz on deconstruction. Then we listened to a lecture that was supplemented by a PowerPoint presentation on psycho analysis criticism. Pyscho analysis criticism is the literary theory in which the unconscious motives of characters in literature are studied. Sigmund Freud was the pioneer of this theory and it developed over a long period of time in which he considered dream studies from his patients and his analysis of their dreams, including unconscious behaviors. He stressed the importance of the conscious and the unconscious mind. The conscious mind represents rationality and external reality whereas the unconscious mind represents irrationality and hidden desires and fears. Freud believed the psyche was divided into three parts. The Id is the storehouse of secret desires which signifies unconscious drives and according to Freud is constantly trying to come out. The superego is the contrast of this, it acts like a conscience and suppresses irrational secret desires. The ego works as a mediator between the id and superego and is the logical part of the psyche. Freud believed that when we repress unconscious desires, we use defense mechanisms to push those desires back to avoid recognition of them. Fixation is an attachment to early forms of emotional life i.e. sucking your thumb. Projection is attributing negative aspects of ourselves onto others, i.e. jealousy. Sublimation is when one disguises repressed material into something else more noble i.e. religion or art. Repression is forgetting or ignoring unresolved conflicts, desires, and traumatic past events. Freudian slip is the outlet for repressed material, i.e. forgetting a word when saying a quote, calling something by another word by accident. Freud also believed that dreams act as a safety valve through which our unconscious surfaces. He analyzed dreams by using displacement and condensation. Displacement is when one person or event is represented by another to which is associated, i.e. Mr. Appleby as apple. Condensation is when people, objects or events are consolidated and represented by a singular image, i.e. a Roman solider is father, disciplinarian and as Latin lover. Freud’s idea of infantile development included an oral stage is which he believed libido is activated by breast feeding in infants. The anal stage is the next stage and is directed towards the anus during toilet-training; this is also the stage in which infants realize their separation from mothers. The last stage is the phallic stage in which libido becomes directed towards sexual organs. Freud coined the term Oedipus complex, from his analysis of Sophocle’s Oedipus literary work. In this work, Rex kills his father and without knowing, marries his mother. His analysis of this was male infants possess an erotic attachment to their mothers and recognize their father as rivals and he recognized Rex’s actions as a repression of this infantile attraction to his mother. Jacques Lacan another important figure in psycho analytic theory, focused on the unconscious as language. In literary analysis, he used metonymy (one thing represents another) and metaphors (two images combined into a single item. After the lecture, we did an in class writing assignment of Freud’s essay online. Then we had a class discussion in which we did psycho analysis on an excerpt from Hamlet. We concluded class by watching the first few minutes of a video online titled, Pervert’s guide to cinema. The video was a satire on psycho analysis and its sexually focused theories.