Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice
Here are some resources to supplement our texts/readings, including some ongoing notes that I am providing as we go (so check back to this page over the semester). Consider, in particular, how the concept of the “subject” or “subjectivity” challenges the notion of an autonomous, personal self (individualism, purely private desires). For example, Kaja Silverman suggests that the term “subject” or our “subjectivity” can be regarded as the “product of signifying activities which are both culturally specific and generally unconscious . . . . it suggests that even desire is culturally instigated, and hence collective” (qtd. in CTP 142). Or consider why and how the “literary critic occupies thus at once the place of the psychoanalyst . . . and the place of the patient” (Felman qtd. in CTP 144). If you want to take up Lacan’s contention that all subjectivity (knowing/desire) is predicated on loss, absence, and failure, refer to Madan Sarup’s excellent introduction to Lacan (in his book/one of our texts). A Lacanian reading recognizes that what one discovers within the discourse of anOther--the unconscious--is a trace of what is actively reading within oneself; in effect, the text reads the reader (subject) who unconsciously repeats its structures and thereby dismantles distinctions between subject (critic) and object (textual other), master/slave, reading and writing. When such apparently mutual recognition occurs--when I feel that I understand the text and that it seems to understand, even to interpret me, then reading and interpretation are also forms of desire, where my interpretive narrative or its story become “love” stories exchanged in the interest of knowledge of each other. Freud and Lacan argue that this process of “transference” and counter-transference is at work within, or structures, all kinds of communication, particularly acts of “interpretation.” Can you show within a work or in your relation to a work how a reading/interpreting Subject projects his or her desire(s) onto another (text), and show how that which the Subject perceives as Other may be his or her culturally-inflected, unconscious desires already active within himself/herself?
Flores on Classical Freudianism
Flores's Summary of Meltzer on "Unconscious" (Freud/Lacan)
Flores's Summary/Account of Post-Structuralist Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice