CLASSICAL FREUDIANISM (liberal borrowings from Terry Eagleton’s account, as I dimly recall when writing these notes years ago!—Stephan Flores)

"The motive of human society is in the last resort an economic one" (Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis). According to Freud, our need to labor (reality principle) compells us to repress our desires for gratification (pleasure principle). We put up with repression hoping for a reward, but if that is deferred too long we may become sick, neurotic. One way of coping with our neuroses (anxieties,obsessions), our unfulfilled desires (esp. sexual), is by sublimating them, directing them towards a more socially valued end. For Freud, such sublimation creates civilization itself, especially its higher, cultural elements such as art and literature.

We begin life highly dependent on our parents for the satisfaction of our biological and instinctual needs, and babies, for example, seem to find such satisfaction (e.g., suckling) pleasurable. This libidinal dimension of our experience, our sexuality and its pleasures, are relatively autonomous from a purely biological drive for self preservation. For Freud, children proceed through stages where they wish to incorporate objects/others to themselves (oral stage), or master their bodies and control the wishes of others (anal stage), and begin to recognize sexual identities? (phallic stage). But the child still has no central, stable identity: he or she is not a unified subject desiring a stable object because the boundaries between self and others/world are blurred or indeterminate. At this stage, a child takes auto-erotic delight in its own body without being able to fully recognize its body or self as a complete object or subject (different from narcissism). At this point, says Freud, the child is not a "citizen" ready to do a hard day's work: it tends to be anarchic, aggressive, self-involved, pleasure-seeking, even sadistic. It does not yet recognize gender differences. But as the child emerges from the pre-Oedipal stage, the boy unconsciously desires sexual union with the mother, and the girl turns towards the father--subsequently, for the child, the parent of the same sex comes to figure as a rival in its affections for the parent ofthe opposite sex.

The Father's symbolic threat of castration, however, persuades the boy to abandon the desire for the mother. The boy perceives girls as castrated and fears a similar punishment. The boy thus represses his incestuous desires, deferring his pleasure by seeing himself eventually taking the symbolic place of the father as patriarch and by identifying with the father and aligning himself with images and practices defined as"masculine."
Freud's account of female sexuality is much more apparently biased. The girl perceives she is inferior because castrated, turning in disillusionment from her similarly castrated mother to the project of seducing the father, but since this project is doomed, she must reluctantly turn back to identify with the mother's gender roles, and unconsciously substitute for the penis she envies but can never possess for a baby which she desires toreceive from the father. [But if castration is what makes her incestuous desire possible, there seems to be no obvious reason why she should abandon this desire and shift her desire from the father to the mother since she would be immune from the threat of castration.]

Hence, the Oedipus complex or phase is central to Freud's understanding of how men and women are constituted as subjects in a shift from pre-Oedipal Nature or instincts to Culture and its identities and desires. The Oedipus complex marks the beginning of morality, conscience, law, and other forms of social and religious authority, because the father's real or imagined prohibition of incest symbolizes all subsequent and higher authority. In making its own or introjecting this patriarchal law, the child begins to form its superego, the punitive/putative voice of conscience within it.

The child has now developed an ego or individual identity—a particular position within sexual, familial, and social networks--but it does so only by splitting off its guilty desires, repressing them into the unconscious. As a result, the human subject who emerges from the Oedipal process is a split subject, torn between conscious and unconscious activity, and subject to the eruption of the unconscious returning to plague its conscious wishes/meanings. For Freud, unconscious activity is radically other, seemingly indifferent to reality, knowing no logic or negation or causality or contradiction--given over wholly to the instinctual play of the drives and the search for pleasure.

Dreams, however, allow us to glimpse the unconscious fulfilling its wishes in symbolic forms (symbolically disguised in order to protect us from material that might be too shocking or disturbing if perceived directly). The watchful ego is still at work, censoring and scrambing dream images by condensing some images into single statements and displacing other meanings onto objects somehow associated with those meanings (metaphor and metonymy--see Lacan's notion that the "unconscious is structured like a language). Parapraxes or slips of the tongue are also forms of mis-speaking or misreadings that provide evidence of unconscious desires at work, and Freud felt that jokes frequently turn upon libidinal or aggressive anxieties. If unconscious desires are denied and cannot find an adequate outlet, neurotic conflicts are produced that may lead to more severe forms of psychosis where the links between the ego and the external world are ruptured, producing an alternative, delusional reality for the subject.

The Freudian cure depends upon transference. The patient or analysand may begin unconsciously to transfer onto the figure of the analyst the psychical conflicts which he or she suffers. Such repetition and projection is one of the patient's unconscious ways of avoiding having to come to terms with the conflict, and yet it is also the only way the analyst may have access to the patient problems. Analysts must also resist the process of counter-transference, of projecting their own problems onto patients.