Freud Questions:
Essay 1:
In a footnote added in 1924 to the bit about sadomasochism, Freud notes that he decided to assign sadomasochism to "a peculiar position" among the "'perversions'". Could this peculiar position, at least for the sadistic aspect (which I know, he says is inseparable in many from the masochistic, but bear with me) come from the unique need of sadism for an object that can feel pain? In other words, is sadism the only "perversion" that can't be moved over into a fetish in any way, since it so entirely depends on the idea of a conscious victim? Are we skilled enough commodity fetishists that we've given objects a strong enough theory of mind to really enjoy hurting them, sexually?
(See: office space?)
Essay 2:
This is a fact-based question: In the section, "characteristics of erotogenic zones", Freud says, "A child who is indulging in sensual sucking searches about his body and chooses some part of it to suck - a part which is afterwards preferred by him from force of habit; if he happens to hit upon one of the predestined regions (such as the nipples or genitals) no doubt it retains the preference."
Do babies suck their own nipples/genitals, and if so, does that persist? It seems like those are zones usually reserves for the mucous membranes of others to suck, whereas we get our own fingers and toes. Mechanically, it just seems difficult, and Freud saying that seems to take any significance away from the hands/feet as sole (ugh, bad pun) self-suck recipients.
Essay 3:
Is an analogue of sexual tension the driving force behind capitalism? I think it works especially in the idea of startups hoping to get big, court investors, then sell out when their brand is strongest. Is an ostensible democracy, like ours, then like the feminine quality freud describes, being forced to change its masculine monarchic character through repression at the puberty of revolution while the markets get to keep on forging ahead. Sorry, a little stretched, just stick to the first part, maybe.
Handout, #2:
I really don't understand the a-ha moment that Freud seems to be chuckling at with the "Glanz auf der Naze" thing. The idea of the change in language re-interpreting the fetish seems to cast it as a kind of mantra the kid would mutter to himself for a while before thinking it was something sexy, and during that muttering phase, he moved to Germany, and things got all wacky.
By the same token, if I was a baby, growing up in France, and fetishized grapefruits - pamplemousse - then went to northern Maine during the start of a strange environmentalist initiative, would I suddenly lust after pampered moose? Is language, and therefore its puns, what governs our sexuality?
-Sam
1 comment:
I'd like to respond to your question on handout #2. I, too, thought that the conflation of Glanz and Glance was strange. Freud's associational method draws on puns, homophones, and other linguistic relations to map the unconscious, but is language really the primary content of the unconscious?
I'm reminded of Lacan's notion that the unconscious is structured like a language; Lacan's re-reading of Freud through linguistics assigns a huge importance to language and its acquisition. But in Lacan, some sort of sexuality (the drives, infantile sexuality) comes before the acquisition of language.
Yet Deleuze and Guattari often deride Freud for assigning too much significance (or signifiance) to his patients' narratives of their dreams because he seeks meaning in a system that they claim is purely productive, not representational.
However we might criticize Freud, I think that his belief in the power of language is a result of his own problematic, of the tools available to him. As a pioneer of the talking cure, Freud had little but his patients' words to go on. And what is psychoanalytic theory but words, anyway? I think that this analysis of a patients' language by the doctor's language is somewhat responsible for the strange infinite regress of psychoanalysis--the interpreter can easily become the interpretee of another interpreter ad infinitum(as many re-readings of Freud's cases, such as his dream about Irma, demonstrate).
Yet aren't our claims about unconscious, or further yet, about reality, about science, constituted in language? Even "direct" observation must be articulated in language, and many projects in the social studies of science (and Freud does consider his project first and foremost a scientific endeavor) focus on how the language of scientific narratives structures knowledge.
But still, is language the only element in play? What can we know of the non-linguistic?
It seems that within the constraints of formalized knowledge, language takes the primary role. But what about conditioned reflexes, embodied knowledges, patterns of perception?
Perhaps I've asked more questions than I have answered, but I think that your inquiry into language draws out several issues worthy of our attention in class.
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