Freud's_Theory_of_Dreams_and_the_Unconscious

The general idea of psychoanalytic criticism, especially the study of the unconscious, has been used throughout history although it was not defined by a name until the studies of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). As a result of Freud’s works such as ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ and ‘The Ego and the Id’ some notable literary theorists have produced psychoanalytical readings of many classical pieces of literature. This essay will look mainly at how Freud’s ‘The Interpretation of dreams’ and his studies of the unconscious are significantly valuable to the study of literature. It will look at psychoanalysts such as Marie Bonaparte and Ernest Jones and show examples of psychoanalytic criticism of literary works. In order to understand the full value of Freud’s theories in relation to literature you first need to have knowledge of what Freud termed the unconscious and how it influences dreams. A major part of the unconscious is the id part of a human’s personality structure. The id is the part of the structure that deals with needs and desires. Louis Tyson defines the id in his book Literary Theory Today by saying: “The id is devoted solely to the gratification of prohibited desires of all kinds – desires for power, for sex, for amusement, for food – without an eye to consequences...desires regulated or forbidden by social conventions” (Tyson 2006. P. 25) With these desires often being forbidden they become repressed in the unconscious mind. This is what influences dreams. Dreams are a product of the unconscious mind and often reveal a person’s deepest, darkest desires and memories that the mind would have been repressed, these are seen as taboo so would not be revealed while the person is awake. During his study of dreams, Freud analysed the dreams of his patients and found that although the unconscious mind produced the dreams it also edited them whilst the subject was asleep and edited what a person remembered of a dream. Whist asleep the unconscious mind alters the latent content of a dream through distortion and condensation. Things such as the identities of people, feelings towards oneself or others and events that have happened, the dreams become distorted in order to protect the dreamer from frightening visions of their repressed self. This is known as primary revision. In Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams he refers to the unconscious repressed desires as the first system and to the distortion and condensation (the primary revision) as the second instance, he says: “Nothing can reach the consciousness from the first system which has not previously passed the second instance; and the second instance lets nothing pass without exercising its rights, and forcing such modifications as are pleasing to itself upon the candidates for the admission to consciousness.” (Freud 1997. P. 53) This is the minds need to ‘dress up’ the repressed desires to keep them palatable for the conscious mind to deal with. The secondary revision of a dream happens when the dreamer wakes and remembers a dream. What is remembered is the manifest content of the dream, the actual images seen by the dreamer which have become a distortion of the latent content. In the secondary revision, although in a conscious state, the dreamer is: “very liable to unconsciously change the dream in order to further protect ourselves from knowing what is too painful to know.” (Tyson 2006. P. 19) This means the dreamer only remembers good parts, omits or forgets parts or changes some details of a dream. Both the primary and secondary revisions produce the final manifest content and in order to discover the latent content one must interpret the symbols to understand the true meaning of the dream. This is where the dream theory relates to literature. A piece of literary work is subject to similar primary and secondary revisions meaning you must interpret the manifest content, the words on the page, to get to the latent content, the meaning behind the words. The unconscious influence in a literary work may be that of the author or of a character in the text, for example what is written in the text may be the influence of the author themselves and their repressed memories or it could be of the ‘made up’ past of a character that causes them to behave in a certain way. For instance, Edgar Allen Poe’s works have been said to be influenced by repressed memories, feelings toward his mother and other personal experiences. This would mean that in order to understand the manifest content of his literature one would have to use a biographical knowledge of him to decode it and understand the latent content. A good example of the unconscious of a character would be Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The fictional character of Hamlet is influenced by his own unconscious as opposed to that of the author Shakespeare. Therefore we would have to study Hamlet’s repressed feelings for his mother in order to interpret the manifest content. This will be looked at in more detail later in the essay when looking at Ernest Jones, for now we will look further at Edgar Allen Poe and at Marie Bonaparte’s study of his work in relation to psychoanalysis of the author. Marie Bonaparte wrote a study on Edgar Allen Poe entitled Edgar Poe, Etude Psychanalytique in 1933 which was translated into English and published 1949 as The Life and Works of Edgar Allen Poe: A Psyco-Analytic Interpretation. The book that was published included a preface from Freud who showed his approval of her studies. Bonaparte provides the reader with a full biography of Poe’s life before giving a detailed analysis of his texts. Bonaparte looks at how the latent content of Poe’s repressed memories and desires are projected into his stories and poems to become the manifest content. Elizabeth Wright, in her book Psychoanalytic Criticism a Reappraisal says of Bonaparte’s study of Poe that: “In her analysis of these tales she wishes to show how the repressed feeling is transferred via a displacement (dream-theory) onto fictional figures and objects.” (Wright 2006. P. 36) One of the analyses that Bonaparte provides is one on Poe’s famous story The Purloined Letter. In her analysis Bonaparte looks at the symbolism of the lost letter and where it is eventually found. The letter was discovered hanging from a mantel piece which Bonaparte interpreted as a representation of the “much-coveted penis that hangs between the man’s legs.” (Thurschwell. After Freud). She also interprets many other images in the book as indication other symbolism of the male and female genitals. This falls in line with many of Freud’s theories, particularly with his theories of the unconscious and the repressed feelings towards parents. Bonaparte solely concentrates on the content of Poe’s writing when giving her analysis and always relates it back to events in his life. She tells us that Poe’s stories are “imagos” of the father, mother and sister figures that have unconsciously appeared in his work. Bonaparte also calls Poe a necrophiliac and focus’, in one part of her book, solely on his fixation with his deceased mother. This is in the section of her book entitled ‘Tales of the Mother’ where we see that: “In each tale, according to Bonaparte, Poe is reliving Elizabeth Poe’s last agony and death” (Wright 2006. P. 36) The following section of her book is called ‘Tales of the Father’: “in which male figures become the return of the repressed, the father who comes back to avenge Poe’s imaginary parricide and incest” (Wright 2006. P. 36) If, as Bonaparte believes, Poe’s works are all about his repressed memories and desires then this puts them into the same category as dreams. Bonaparte, through her study on Poe, shows the value that Freud’s theories have in the literary field. She directly links literature to the same theory as a dream and shows how the unconscious mind can affect an authors writing. She also shows how by using Freud’s theories a reader can uncover the latent content of a book from the manifest content on the page. Moving on from psychoanalysis of the author we will now look at psychoanalysis of the character taking into consideration Hamlet by William Shakespeare and the studies of Ernest Jones and Sigmund Freud. A psychoanalytic reading of a character is done in much the same way as when looking at the author. The difference is that you are looking at fictional events and memories that have been repressed. It has been said that: “Fictional characters are representations of life and, as such, can only be understood if we assume they are real. And this assumption allows us to find unconscious motivation[s] by the same procedure that the traditional critic uses to assign conscious ones.” (Kaplan and Kloss 1973, p. 4) Therefore we have to assume a character is real and has real memories in order to do an accurate psychoanalytic reading. In 1910, Ernest Jones wrote a journal on Hamlet entitled The Oedipus Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery: A Study in Motive which was later, in 1949, developed into a book titled Hamlet and Oedipus. In the journal Jones discusses Hamlet in relation to Freud’s dream study and what Freud termed ‘The Oedipus Complex’. Jones points out the repressed feelings that the character of Hamlet has for his mother and as a result of this his inability to revenge his father’s death. Up until the murder of his father, Hamlets repressed feelings for his mother had not surfaced but Jones states: “the event has awakened to increased activity mental processes that have been ‘repressed’ from the subject’s consciousness.” (Jones 1910) The murder of Hamlets father and her quick marriage to Claudius has awakened his repressed feelings and caused him to act or want to act upon them. These feelings are what prompt Jones to describe as: “his devotion to his mother had made him so jealous for her affection that he had found it hard enough to share even with his father, and could not endure to share it with still another man.” (Jones 1910) Hamlet’s unconscious could have hoped to gain the full affection of his mother once the father was dead but consequently lost this when she married again. The anger that Hamlet feels is directed toward Claudius for two main reasons. The first being that Claudius killed his father which is an act which Hamlet himself had repressed in his unconscious. This would result in a jealousy toward Claudius although it would not necessarily have been recognised by Hamlet’s consciousness. The second is that Claudius then marries Hamlet’s mother, again resulting in jealousy. Hamlet’s unconscious craves the affection of his mother therefore causing Hamlet to want to get kill Claudius. This is a perfect example of psychoanalysis of the character. What Shakespeare wrote in the play was a distortion of what would have been happening in Hamlets unconscious. The manifest content of the play itself is interpreted by taking into consideration the unconscious of Hamlet and using this to discover the latent content of the play. The play would have been very different had the repressed feelings of the character not been distorted. Although Shakespeare wrote the play several hundred years before Freud published his studies it is still possible to use them when studying the play therefore proving that Freud’s theories are valuable to literature both before and after his lifetime. In order to further understand the value of Freud’s work and his study of dreams and the unconscious a psychoanalytic reading of the poem I started early – Took my dog by Emily Dickinson will be done using psychoanalysis of the author. In order to do a psychoanalytic reading of the poem I started early – Took the dog you first need to know some background information on the author Emily Dickinson. She was born to a wealthy family in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her father was a successful lawyer and US Congressman and her mother was a housewife. Although her mother was always around Emily felt her distance in her life and commented on this later in her life to her good friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson: “I always ran home to Awe when a child, if anything befell me. He was an awful mother but I liked him better than none.” (Sewall 1994, p74) On her father’s many business trips she would go to her brother Austin (Awe) as opposed to her mother as she felt she did not have one. Emily grew up educated and enjoyed literature and wrote letters and poetry throughout her life. She never married or had any serious romantic relationships with men (or women). She did however have a few close relationships with ‘older’ men that she drew influence from in her poetry. In her later life she became a recluse, the furthest she went from her house was her garden and rarely took visitors. These are the main parts of her life that are relevant to the psychoanalysis of the intended poem. In the first and second stanzas of the poem we see the metaphors of the house, “The mermaids in the basement” and “Frigates – in the upper floor”. The basement of a house can be interpreted as the deep recesses of the unconscious where repressed feelings and desires live. By placing mermaids, a known symbol of seduction’ emerging from the metaphorical basement we can deduce that this repressed desire is emerging from the unconscious. In stanza three we see that the emerged seduction is working: “... till the Tide Went past my simple Shoe – And past my Apron – and my Belt And past my Bodice – too –” (Dickinson 1994) It is possible that Dickinson had one of her ‘older’ men in mind when she wrote this poem. For her to seduce one of these men, one being the principal at Amherst Academy where she attended, one a lawyer who worked with her father and the other a critic with whom she became good friends with, would have been frowned upon by society. Any desire she had for any of these men would have been repressed but come out in her writing just as they would come out in a dream. They have been distorted into the symbol of the sea. The next two stanzas indicated the speaker running away from the tide. Although it is described as being “silver” and “pearl”, both colours of elegance and beauty therefore not necessary something to be scared of possibly something forbidden which furthers the earlier point of her repressed desires toward one of the men. In the final stanza the reader finds solace and comfort in the “solid town” just as Dickinson herself found solace in her home. This is just a quick, basic psychoanalysis of this poem but proves that by using Freud’s dream interpretation techniques and his theories on the unconscious you can find the latent content of a piece of literary work. To conclude, Freud’s theories of dreams and the unconscious have proven to be a valuable resource in the study of literature. Theorists such as Bonaparte and Jones have provided extensive studies to prove such a point to be true. You can uncover the desires of the unconscious and the latent content by interpreting the symbols in the manifest content. Either the authors or the characters repressed desires are distorted in the written work and Freud provides the right tools in order to decode them. This proves that Freud’s theories are very valuable to literature.