read psychoanalysis in Terry Eagleton's book, then see for example its application in Tyson's book. And, write an essay about synthesizing the application of Freud's and Lacan's theories of psychoanalysis with the example given by Tyson. Explain How would the case study given by Tyson be read through Freud's theory and then contrasted and/or synthesized with Lacan's psychoanalysis.


Psychoanalysis in Terry Eagleton’s book

In the previous few chapters I have suggested a relationship between devel­opments in modern literary theory and the political and ideological turmoil of the twentieth century. But such turmoil is never only a matter of wars, economic slumps and revolutions: it is also experienced by those caught up in it in the most intimately personal ways. It is a crisis of human relation­ships, and of the human personality, as well as a social convulsion. This is not of course to argue that anxiety, fear of persecution and the fragmentation of the self are experiences peculiar to the era from Matthew Arnold to Paul de Man: they can be found throughout recorded history. What is perhaps significant is that in this period such experiences become constituted in a new way as a systematic field of knowledge. That field of knowledge is known as psychoanalysis, developed by Sigmund Freud in late nineteenth­century Vienna; and is Freud's doctrines that I now want briefly to summanze.
'The motive of human society is in the last resort an economic one.' It was Freud, not Karl Marx, who made this statement, in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. What has dominated human history to date is the need to labour; and for Freud that harsh necessity means that we must repress some ofour tendencies to pleasure and gratification. If we were not called upon to work in order to survive, we might simply lie around all day doing nothing. Every human being has to undergo this repression of what Freud named the 'pleasure principle' by the 'reality principle', but for some of us, and argu­ably for whole societies, the repression may become excessive and make us ill. Weare sometimes willing to forgo gratification to an heroic extent, but usually in the canny trust that by deferring an immediate pleasure we will recoup it in the end, perhaps in richer form. Weare prepared to put up with repression as long as we see that there is something in it for us; if too much is demanded of us, however, we are likely to fall sick. This form of sickness is known as neurosis; and since, as I have said, all human beings must be repressed to some degree, it is possible to speak of the human race, in the words of one of Freud's commentators, as the 'neurotic animal'. It is import­ant to see that such neurosis is involved with what is creative about us as a race, as well as with the causes of our unhappiness. One way in which we cope with desires we cannot fulfil is by 'sublimating' them, by which Freud means directing them towards a more socially valued end. We might find an unconscious outlet for sexual frustration in building bridges or cathedrals. For Freud, it is by virtue of such sublimation that civilization itself comes about: by switching and harnessing our instincts to these higher goals, cultural history itself is created.
If Marx Iooked at the consequences of our need to labour in terms of the social relations, social classes and forms of politics which it entailed, Freud looks at its implications for the psychical life. The paradox or contradiction on which his work rests is that we come to be what we are only by a massive repression of the elements which have gone into our making. We are not of course conscious of this, any more than for Marx men and women are generally conscious of the social processes which determine their lives. Indeed we could not be by definition conscious of this fact, since the place to which we relegate the desires we are unable to fulfil is known as the uncon­scious. One question which immediately arises, however, is why it is human beings who should be the neurotic animal, rather than snails or tortoises. It is possible that this is merely a Romantic idealization of such creatures and that they are secretly a good deal more neurotic than we think; but they seem well-adjusted enough to an outsider, even though there may be one or two cases of hysterical paralysis on record.
One feature which distinguishes human beings from the other animals is that for evolutionary reasons we are born almost entirely helpless and are wholly reliant for our survival on the care of the more mature members of the species, usually our parents. We are all born 'prematurely'. Without such immediate, unceasing care we would die very quickly. This unusually prolonged dependence on our parents is first of all a purely material matter, a question of being fed and kept from harm: it is a matter of the satisfaction of what may be called our 'instincts', by which is meant the biologically fixed needs human beings have for nourishment, warmth and so on. (Such self­preservative instincts are, as we shall see, a good deal more immutable than 'drives', which very often alter their nature.) But our dependence on ourparents for these services does not stop at the biological. The small baby will suck its mother's breast for milk, but will discover in doing so that this biologically essential activity is also pleasurable; and this, for Freud, is the first dawning of sexuality. The baby's mouth becomes not only an organ of its physical survival but an 'erotogenic zone', which the child might reacti­vate a few years later by sucking its thumb, and a few years later than that by kissing. The relation to the mother has taken on anew, libidinal dimension: sexuality has been born, as a kind of drive which was at first inseparable from biological instinct but which has now separated itself out from it and at­tained a certain autonomy. Sexuality for Freud is itself a 'perversion' a 'swerving away' of a natural self-preservative instinct towards another goal.
As the infant grows, other erotogenic zones come into play. The oral stage, as Freud calls it, is the first phase of sexual life, and is associated with the drive to incorporate objects. In the anal stage, the anus becomes an erotogenic zone, and with the child's pleasure in defecation a new contrast between activity and passivity, unknown in the oral stage, comes to light. The anal stage sadistic, in that the child derives erotic pleasure from expulsion and destruction; but it is also connected with the desire for retention and possessive control, as the child learns a new form of mastery and a manipulation of the wishes of others through the 'granting' or with­holding of the faeces. The ensuing 'phallic' stage begins to focus the child's libido (or sexual drive) on the genitals, but is called 'phallic' rather than 'genital' because according to Freud only the male organ is recognized at this point. The little girl in Freud's view has to be content with the clitoris, the 'equivalent' of the penis, rather than with the vagina.
What is happening in this process - though the stages overlap, and should not be seen as a strict sequence is a gradual organization of the libidinal drives, but one still centred on the child's own body. The drives themselves are extremely flexible, in no sense fixed like biological instinct: their objects are contingent and replaceable, and one sexual drive can substitute itself for another. What we can imagine in the early years of the child's life, then, is not a unified subject confronting and desiring a stable object, but a complex shifting field of force in which the subject (the child itself) is caught up and dispersed, in which it has as yet no centre of identity and in which the boundaries between itself and the external world are indeterminate. Within this field of libidinal force, objects and part-objects emerge and disappear again, shift places kaleidoscopically, and prominent among such objects is the child's body as the play of drives laps across it. One can speak ofthis also as an 'auto-eroticism', within which Freud sometimes includes the whole of infantile sexuality: the child takes erotic delight in its own body, but withoutas yet being able to view its body as a complete object. Auto-eroticism must thus be distinguished from what Freud will call 'narcissism', a state in which one's body or ego as a whole is 'cathected', or taken as an object of desire.
It is clear that the child in this state is not even prospectively a citizen who could be relied upon to do a hard day's work. It is anarchic, sadistic, aggressive, self-involved and remorselessly pleasure-seeking, under the sway of what Freud calls the pleasure principle; nor does it have any respect for differences of gender. It is not yet what we might call a 'gendered subject': it surges with sexual drives, but this libidinal energy recognizes no distinction between masculine and feminine. If the child is to succeed in life at all, it obviously has to be taken in hand; and the mechanism by which this happens is what Freud famously terms the Oedipus complex. The child who emerges from the pre-Oedipal stages we have been following is not only anarchic and sadistic but incestuous to boot: the boy's close involvement with his mother's body leads him to an unconscious desire for sexual union with her, whereas the girl, who has been similarly bound up with the mother and whose first desire is therefore always homosexual, begins to turn her libido towards the father. The early 'dyadic' or two-term relationship between infant and mother, that is to say, has now opened up into a triangle consisting of child and both parents; and for the child, the parent of the same sex will come to figure as a rival in its affections for the parent of the opposite sex.
What persuades the boy-child to abandon his incestuous desire for the mother is the father's threat of castration. This threat need not necessarily be spoken; but the boy, in perceiving that the girl is herself 'castrated', begins to imagine this as a punishment which might be visited upon himself. He thus represses his incestuous desire in anxious resignation, adjusts him­self to the 'reality principle', submits to the father, detaches himself from the mother, and comforts himself with the unconscious consolation that though he cannot now hope to oust his father and possess his mother, his father symbolizes a place, a possibility, which he himself will be able to take up and realize in the furture. If he is not a patriarch now, he will be later. The boy makes peace with his father, identifies with him, and is thus introduced into the symbolic role of manhood. He has become a gendered subject, sur­mounting his Oedipus complex; but in doing so he has, so to speak, driven his forbidden desire underground, repressed it into the place we call the unconscious. This is not a place that was ready and waiting to receive such a desire: it is produced, opened up, by this act of primary repression. As a man in the making, the boy will now grow up within those images andpractices which his society happens to define as 'masculine'. He will one day become a father himself, thus sustaining this society by contributing to the business ofsexual reproduction. His earlier diffuse libido has become organ­ized through the Oedipus complex in a way which centres it upon genital sexuality. If the boy is unable successfully to overcome the Oedipus com­plex, he may be sexually incapacitated for such a role: he may privilege the image of his mother above all other women, which for Freud may lead to homosexuality; or the recognition that women are 'castrated' may have traumatized him so deeply that he is unable to enjoy satisfying sexual relationships with them.
The story of the little girl's passage through the Oedipus complex is a good deal less straightforward. It should be said right away that Freud was nowhere more typical of his own male-dominated society than in his baffle­ment in the face of female sexuality the 'dark continent', as he once called it. We shall have occasion to comment later on the demeaning, prejudiced attitudes towards women which disfigure his work, and his account of the girl's process of oedipalization is by no means easily separable from this sexism. The little girl, perceiving that she is inferior because 'castrated', turns in disillusionment from her similarly 'castrated' mother to the project of seducing her father; but since this project is doomed, she must finally turn back reluctantly to the mother, effect an identification with her, assume her feminine gender role, and unconsciously substitute for the penis which she envies but can never possess a baby, which she desires to receive from the father. There is no obvious reason why the girl should abandon this desire, since being 'castrated' already she cannot be threatened with castration; and it is therefore difficult to see by what mechanism her Oedipus complex is dissolved. 'Castration', far from prohibiting her incestuous desire as with the boy, is what makes it possible in the first place. Moreover the girl, to enter into the Oedipus complex, must change her 'love-object' from mother to father, whereas the boy has merely to carryon loving the mother; and since a change of love-objects is a more complex, difficult affair, this too raises a problem about female oedipalization.
Before leaving the question of the Oedipus complex, its utter centrality to Freud's work should be emphasized. It is not just another complex: it is the structure of relations by which we come to be the men and women that we are. It is the point at which we are produced and constituted as subjects; and one problem for us is that it is always in some sense a partial, defective mechanism. It signals the transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle; from the enclosure of the family to society at large, since we turn from incest to extra-familial relations; and from Nature to Culture, since we can see the infant's relation to the mother as somehow 'natural', and the .post-Oedipal child as one who is in the process ofassuming a position within
the cultural order as a whole. (To see the mother-child relationship as 'natural', however, is in one sense highly dubious: it does not matter in the least to the infant who the provider actually is.) Moreover, the Oedipus complex is for Freud the beginnings of morality, conscience, law and all forms of social and religious authority. The father's real or imagined prohi­bition of incest is symbolic of all the higher authority to be later encoun­tered; and in 'introjecting' (making its own) this patriarchal law, the child begins to form what Freud calls its 'superego', the awesome, punitive voice of conscience within it.
All, then, would now seem in place for gender roles to be reinforced, satisfactions to be postponed, authority to be accepted and the family and society to be reproduced. But we have forgotten about the unruly, insubor­dinate unconscious. The child has now developed an ego or individual identity, a particular place in the sexual, familial and social networks; but it can do this only by, so to speak, splitting off its guilty desires, repressing them into the unconscious. The human subject who emerges from the Oedipal process is a split subject, torn precariously between conscious and unconscious; and the unconscious can always return to plague it. In popular English speech, the word 'subconscious' rather than 'unconscious' is often used; but this is to underestimate the radical otherness of the unconscious, imagining it as a place just within reach below the surface. It underestimates the extreme strangeness of the unconscious, which is a place and a non­place, which is completely indifferent to reality, which knows no logic or negation or causality or contradiction, wholly given over as it is to the instinctual play of the drives and the search for pleasure.
The 'royal road' to the unconscious is dreams. Dreams allow us one ofour few privileged glimpses of it at work. Dreams for Freud are essentially symbolic fulfilments of unconscious wishes; and they are cast in symbolic form because if this material expressed directly then it might be shocking and disturbing enough to wake us up. In order that we should get some sleep, the unconscious charitably conceals, softens and distorts its meanings, so that our dreams become symbolic texts which need to be deciphered. The watchful ego is still at work even within our dreaming, censoring an image here or scrambling a message there; and the unconscious itself adds to this obscurity by its peculiar modes of functioning. With the economy ofthe indolent, it will condense together a whole set of images into a single 'statement'; or it will 'displace' the meaning of one object on to another somehow associated with it, so that in my dream I am venting on a crab an aggression I feel towards somebody with that surname. This con­stant condensation and displacement of meaning corresponds to what Ro­man Jakobson identified as the two primary operations of human language: metaphor (condensing meanings together), and metonymy (displacing one on to another). It was this which moved the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to comment that 'the unconscious is structured like a language'. Dream-texts are also cryptic because the unconscious is rather poor in techniques for representing what it has to say, being largely confined to visual images, and so must often craftily translate a verbal significance into a visual one: it might seize upon the image of a tennis racketto make a point about some shady dealing. At any rate, dreams are enough to demonstrate that the unconscious has the admirable resourcefulness of a lazy, ill-supplied chef, who slings together the most diverse ingredients into a cobbled­together stew, substituting one spice for another which he is out of, making do with whatever has arrived in the market that morning as a dream will draw opportunistically on the 'day's residues', mixing in events which took place during the day or sensations felt during sleep with images drawn deep from our childhood.
Dreams provide our main, but not our only, access to the unconscious. There are also what Freud calls 'parapraxes', unaccountable slips of the tongue, failures of memory, bunglings, misreadings and mislayings which can be traced to unconscious wishes and intentions. The presence of the unconscious is also betrayed in jokes, which for Freud have a largely libidinal, anxious or aggressive content. Where the unconscious is most damagingly at work, however, is in psychological disturbance of one form or another. We may have certain unconscious desires which will not be denied, but which dare not find practical outlet either; in this situation, the desire forces its way in from the unconscious, the ego blocks it off defensively, and the result of this internal conflict is what we call neurosis. The patient begins to develop symptoms which, in compromising fashion, at once protect against the unconscious desire and covertly express it. Such neuroses may be obsessional (having to touch every lamp-post in the street), hysterical (developing a paralysed arm for no good organic reason), or phobic (being unreasonably afraid of open spaces or certain animals). Behind these neuro­ses, psychoanalysis discerns unresolved conflicts whose roots run back to the individual's early development, and which are likely to be focused in the Oedipal moment; indeed Freud calls the Oedipus complex the 'nucleus of the neuroses'. There will usually be a relation between the kind of neurosis a patient displays, and the point in the pre-Oedipal stage at which his or her psychical development became arrested or 'fixated'. The aim of psycho-analysis is to uncover the hidden causes ofthe neurosis in order to relieve the patient of his or her conflicts, so dissolving the distressing symptoms.
Much more difficult to cope with, however, is the condition of psychosis, in which the ego, unable as in neurosis partly to repress the unconscious desire, actually comes under its sway. If this happens, the link between the ego and the external world is ruptured, and the unconscious begins to build up an alternative, delusional The psychotic, in other words, has lost contact with reality at key points, as in paranoia and schizophrenia: if the neurotic may develop a paralysed arm, the psychotic may believe that his arm has turned into an elephant's trunk. 'Paranoia' refers to a more or less systematized state of delusion, under which Freud includes not only delu­sions of persecution but delusional jealousy and delusions of grandeur. The root of such paranoia he locates in an unconscious defence against homo­sexuality: the mind denies this desire by converting the love-object into a rival or persecutor, systematically reorganizing and reinterpreting reality to confirm this suspicion. Schizophrenia involves a detachment from reality and a turning in on the self, with an excessive but loosely systematized production of fantasies: it is as though the 'id', or unconscious desire, has surged up and flooded the conscious mind with its illogicality, riddling associations and affective rather than conceptual links between ideas. Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.
Psychoanalysis is not only a theory of the human mind, but a practice for curing those who are considered mentally ill or disturbed. Such cures, for Freud, are not achieved just by explaining to the patient what is with him, revealing to him his unconscious motivations. This is a part of psycho­analytical practice, but it will not cure anybody in itself. Freud is not in this sense a rationalist, believing that if only we understand ourselves or the world we can take appropriate action. The nub of the cure for Freudian theory is what is known as 'transference', a concept sometimes popularly confused with what Freud calls 'projection', or the ascribing to others of feelings and wishes which are actually our own. In the course of treatment, the analysand (or patient) begin unconsciously to 'transfer' on to the figure of the analyst the psychical conflicts from which he or she suffers. If he has had difficulties with his father, for example, he may unconsciously cast the analyst in that role. This poses a problem for the analyst, since such 'repetition' or ritual re-enactment of the original conflict is one of the patient's unconscious ways of avoiding having to come to terms with it. We repeat, sometimes compulsively, what we cannot properly remember, and we cannot remember it because it is unpleasant. But transference also pro-vides the analyst with a peculiarly privileged insight into the patient's psy­chicallife, in a controlled situation in which he or she can intervene. (One of the several reasons why psychoanalysts must themselves undergo analysis in training is so that they can become reasonably aware of their own uncon­scious processes, thus resisting as far as possible the danger of 'counter­transferring' their own problems to their patients.) By virtue of this drama of transference, and the insights and interventions which it permits the analyst, the patient's problems are gradually redefined in terms of the ana­lytic situation itself. In this sense, paradoxically, the problems which are handled in the consulting room are never quite at one with the real-life problems of the patient: they have, perhaps, something of the 'fictional' relation to those real-life problems which a literary text has to the real-life materials it transforms. Nobody leaves the consulting room cured of exactly the problems with which he walked in. The patient is likely to resist the analyst's access to her unconscious by a number of familiar techniques, but if all goes well the transferential process will allow her problems to be 'worked through' into consciousness, and by dissolving the transference relation at the right moment the analyst will hope to relieve her of them. Another way of describing this process is to say that the patient becomes able to recollect portions of her life which she has repressed: she is able to recount a new, more complete narrative about herself, one which will interpret and make sense of the disturbances from which she suffers. The 'talking cure', as it is called, will have taken effect.
The work of psychoanalysis can perhaps best be summarized in one of Freud's own slogans: 'Where id was, there shall ego be.' Where men and women were in the paralysing grip of forces which they could not compre­hend, there reason and self-mastery shall reign. Such a slogan makes Freud sound rather more of a rationalist than he actually was. Though he once commented that nothing in the end could withstand reason and experience, he was about as far from underestimating the cunning and obstinacy of the mind as it is possible to be. His estimate of human capacities is on the whole conservative and pessimistic: we are dominated by a desire for gratification and an aversion to anything which might frustrate it. In his later work, he comes to see the human race as languishing in the grip of a terrifying death drive, a primary masochism which the ego unleashes on itself. The final goal of life is death, a return to that blissful inanimate state where the ego cannot be injured. Eros, or sexual energy, is the force which builds up history, but it is locked in tragic contradiction with Thanatos or the death drive. We strive onwards only to be constantly driven backwards, struggling to return to a state before we were even conscious. The ego is a pitiable, precariousentity, battered by the external world, scourged by the cruel upbraidings of the superego, plagued by the greedy, insatiable demands of the id. Freud's compassion for the ego is a compassion for the human race, labouring under the almost intolerable demands placed upon it by a civilization built upon the repression of desire and the deferment of gratification. He was scornful of all utopian proposals for changing this condition; but though many ofhis social views were conventional and authoritarian, he nevertheless looked with a certain favour upon attempts to abolish or at least reform the institu­tions of private property and the nation state. He did so because he was deeply convinced that modern society had become tyrannical in its repres­siveness. As he argued in The Future of an Illusion, if a society has not developed beyond a point at which the satisfaction of one group of its members depends upon the suppression of another, it is understandable that those suppressed should develop an intense hostility towards a culture whose existence their labour has made possible, but in whose riches they have too small a share. 'It goes without saying,' Freud declares, 'that a civilization which leaves so large a number ofits participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence. '
Any theory as complex and original as Freud's is bound to be a source of fierce contention. Freudianism has been attacked on a great number of grounds, and should in no way be taken as unproblematical. There are problems, for instance, about how it would test its doctrines, about would count as evidence for or against its claims; as one American behaviourist psychologist remarked in conversation: 'The trouble with Freud's work is that it just isn't testicle!' It all depends, of course, on what you mean by 'testable'; but it would seem true that Freud sometimes invokes a nineteenth-century concept of science which is no longer really acceptable. Disinterested and objective though it strives to be, his work is shot through with what might be called. 'counter-transference', shaped by his own unconscious desires and sometimes distorted by his conscious ideological beliefs. The sexist values we have touched on already are a case in point. Freud was probably no more patriarchal in attitude than most other nineteenth-century Viennese males, but his view of women as passive, narcissistic, masochistic and penis-envying, less morally conscientious than men, has been searchingly criticized by feminists. 1 One has only to compare the tone of Freud's case study ofa young women (Dora) with the tone of his analysis of a small boy (little Hans) to catch the difference of sexual attitude:brisk, suspicious and at times grotesquely off-target in the case of Dora; genial, avuncular and admiring towards that proto-Freudian philosopher little Hans.
Equally serious is the complaint that psychoanalysis as a medical practice is a form of oppressive social control, labelling individuals and forcing them to conform to arbitrary definitions of 'normality'. This charge is in fact more usually aimed against psychiatric medicine as a whole: as far as Freud's own views on 'normality' are concerned, the accusation is largely misdirected. Freud's work showed, scandalously, just how 'plastic' and variable in its choice of objects libido really is, how so-called sexual perversions form part of what passes as normal sexuality, and how heterosexuality is by no means a natural or self-evident fact. It is true that Freudian psychoanalysis does usually work with some concept of a sexual 'norm'; but this is in no sense given by Nature.
There are other familiar criticisms of Freud, which are not easy to sub­stantiate. One is a merely commonsensical impatience: how could a little girl possibly desire her father's baby? Whether this is true or not, it is not 'common sense' which will allow us to decide. One should remember the sheer bizarreness of the unconscious as it manifests itself in dreams, its distance from the daylight world of the ego, before rushing to dismiss Freud on such intuitive grounds. Another common criticism is that Freud 'brings everything down to sex' that he is, in the technical term, a 'pan-sexualist'. This is certainly untenable: Freud was a radically dualistic thinker, no doubt excessivelyso, and always counterposed to the sexual drives such non-sexual forces as the 'ego-instincts' of self-perservation. The seed of truth in the pan-sexualist charge is that Freud regarded sexuality as central enough to human life to provide a component of all our activities; but that is not a sexual reductionism'.
One criticism of Freud still sometimes heard on the political Left is that his thinking is individualist that he substitutes 'private' psychological causes and explanations for social and historical ones. This accusation re­flects a radical misunderstanding of Freudian theory. There is indeed a real problem about how social and historical factors are related to the uncon­scious; but one point of Freud's work is that it possible for us to think of the development of the human individual in social and historical terms. What Freud produces, indeed, is nothing less than a materialist theory of the making of the human subject. We come to be what we are by an interrelation of bodies by the complex transactions which take place during infancy between our bodies and those which surround us. This is not a biological reductionism: Freud does not of course believe that we are nothing but our bodies, or that our minds are mere reflexes of them. Nor isit an asocial model of life, since the bodies which surround us, and our relations with them, are always socially specific. The roles of parents, the practices of child care, the images and beliefs associated with all of this are cultural matters which can vary considerably from one society or one point in history to another. 'Childhood' is a recent historical invention, and the range of different historical set-ups encompassed by the word 'family' makes the word itself of limited value. One belief which has apparently not varied in these institutions is the assumption that girls and women are inferior to boys and men: this prejudice would seem to unite all known societies. Since it is a prejudice with deep roots in our early sexual and familial development, psychoanalysis has become of major importance to some feminists.
One Freudian theorist to whom such feminists have had recourse for this purpose is the French psychoanalyst jacques Lacan. It is not that Lacan is a pro-feminist thinker: on the contrary, his attitudes to the women's move­ment are in the main arrogant and contemptuous. But Lacan's work is a strikingly original attempt to 'rewrite' Freudianism in ways relevant to all those concerned with the question of the human subject, its place in society, and above all its relationship to language. This last concern is why Lacan is also of interest to literary theorists. What Lacan seeks to do in his Ecrits is to reinterpret Freud in the light of structuralist and post-structuralist theories of discourse; and while this leads to a sometimes bafflingly opaque, enigmatic body of work, it is nevertheless one that we must now briefly consider if we are to see how post-structuralism and psychoanalysis are interrelated.
I have described how for Freud, at an early point in the infant's develop­ment, no clear distinction between subject and object, itselfand the external world, is yet possible. It is this state of being which Lacan names the 'imaginary', by which he means a condition in which we lack any defined centre of self, in which what 'self' we have seems to pass into objects, and objects into it, in a ceaseless closed exchange. In the pre-Oedipal state, the child lives a 'symbiotic' relation with its mother's body which blurs any sharp boundary between the two: it is dependent for its life on this body, but we can equally imagine the child as experiencing what it knows of the external world as dependent upon itself. This merging of identities is not quite as blissful as it might sound, according to the Freudian theorist Melanie Klein: at a very early age the infant will harbour murderously aggressive instincts towards its mother's body, entertain fantasies of tearing it to bits and suffer paranoid delusions that this body will in turn destroy it.2
If we imagine a small child contemplating itself in a mirror Lacan's so­called 'mirror stage' we can see how, from within this 'imaginary' state of being, the child's first development of an ego, of an integrated self-image, begins to happen. The child, who is still physically uncoordinated, finds reflected back to itselfin the mirror a gratifyingly unified image of itself; and although its relation to this image is still of an 'imaginary' kind - the image in the mirror both is and is not itself, a blurring of subject and object still obtains - it has begun the process of constructing a centre of self. This self, as the mirror situation suggests, is essentially narcissistic: we arrive at a sense of an'!' by finding that'!' reflected back to ourselves by some object or person in the world. This object is at once somehow part of ourselves - we identify with it and yet not ourselves, something alien. The image which the small child sees in the mirror is in this sense an 'alienated' one: the child 'misrecognizes' itself in it, finds in the image a pleasing unity which it does not actually experience in its own body. The imaginary for Lacan is pre­cisely this realm of images in which we make identifications, but in the very act of doing so are led to misperceive and misrecognize ourselves. As the child grows up, it will continue to make such imaginary identifications with objects, and this is how its ego will be built up. For Lacan, the ego is just this narcissistic process whereby we bolster up a fictive sense of unitary selfhood by finding something in the world with which we can identify.
In discussing the pre-Oedipal or imaginary phase, we are considering a register of being in which there are really no more than two terms: the child itself and the other body, which at this point is usually the mother, and which represents external reality for the child. But as we have seen in our account of the Oedipus complex, this 'dyadic' structure is destined to give way to a 'triadic' one: and this happens when the father enters upon and disrupts this harmonious scene. The father signifies what Lacan calls the Law, which is in the first place the social taboo on incest: the child is disturbed in its libidinal relation with the mother, and must begin to recog­nize in the figure of the father that a wider and social network exists of which it is only part. Not only is the child merely a part of this network, but the role it must play there is already predetermined, laid down for it by the practices of the society into which it has been born. The appearance of the father divides the child from the mother's body, and in doing so, as we have seen, drives its desire underground into the unconscious. In this sense the first appearance of the Law, and the opening up of unconscious desire, occur at the same moment: it is only when the child acknowledges the taboo or prohibition which the father symbolizes that it represses its guilty desire, and that desire just is what is called the unconscious.
For the drama of the Oedipus complex to come about at all, the child must of course have become dimly aware of sexual difference. It is the entry of the father which signifies this sexual difference; and one of the key-terms in Lacan's work, the phallus, denotes this signification of sexual distinction. It is only by accepting the necessity of sexual difference, of distinct gender roles, that the child, who has previously been unaware of such problems, can become properly 'socialized'. Lacan's originality is to rewrite this process, which we have already seen in Freud's account of the Oedipus complex, in terms of language. We can think of the small child contemplating itself before the mirror as a kind of 'signifier' - something capable of bestowing meaning and of the image it sees in the mirror as a kind of 'signified'. The image the child sees is somehow the 'meaning' of itself. Here, signifier and signified are as harmoniously united as they are in Saussure's sign. Alternatively, we could read the mirror situation as a kind of metaphor: one item (the child) discovers a likeness of itselfin another (the reflection). This, for Lacan, is an appropriate image of the imaginary as a whole: in this mode of being, objects ceaselessly reflect themselves in each other in a sealed circuit, and no real differences or divisions are yet apparent. It is a world of plenitude, with no lacks or exclusions of any kind: standing before the mirror, the 'signifier' (the child) finds a 'fullness', a whole and unblemished identity, in the signified of its reflection. No gap has yet opened up between signifier and signified, subject and world. The infant is so far happily unplagued by the problems of post-structuralism - by the fact that, as we have seen, language and reality are not so smoothly synchronized as this situation would suggest.
With the entry of the father, the child is plunged into post-structuralist anxiety. It now has to grasp Saussure's point that identities come about only as a result of difference that one term or subject is what it is only by excluding another. Significantly, the child's first discovery of sexual differ­ence occurs at about the same time that it is discovering language itself. The baby's cry is not really a sign but a signal: it indicates that it is cold, hungry or whatever. In gaining access to language, the small child unconsciously learns that a sign has meaning only by dint of its difference from other signs, and learns also that a sign presupposes the absence of the object it signifies. Our language 'stands in' for objects: all language is in a way 'metaphorical', in that it substitutes itself for some direct, wordless possession of the object itself. It saves us from the inconvenience of Swift's Laputans, who carryon their back a sack full of all the objects they might need in conversation, and simply hold these objects up to each other as a way of talking. But just as the child is unconsciously learning these lessons in the sphere of language, it is also unconsciously learning them in the world of sexuality. The presence of the father, symbolized by the phallus, teaches the child that it must take up a place in the family which is defined by sexual difference, by exclusion (it cannot be its parent's lover) and by absence (it must relinquish its earlier bonds to the mother's body). Its identity as a subject, it comes to perceive, is constituted by its relations of difference and similarity to the other sub­jects around it. In accepting all of this, the child moves from the imaginary register into what Lacan calls the 'symbolic order': the pre-given structure ofsocial and sexual roles and relations which make up the family and society. In Freud's own terms, it has successfully negotiated the painful passage through the Oedipus complex.
All, however, is not entirely well. For as we have seen, in Freud the subject who emerges from this process is a 'split' one, radically divided between the conscious life of the ego and the unconscious, or repressed desire. It is this primary repression of desire which makes us what we are. The child must now resign itself to the fact that it can never have any direct access to reality, in particular to the now prohibited body of the mother. It has been banished from this 'full', imaginary possession into the 'empty' world of language. Language is 'empty' because it is just an endless process of difference and absence: instead of being able to possess anything in its fullness, the child will now simply move from one signifier to another, along a linguistic chain which is potentially infinite. One signifier implies another, and that another, and so on ad infinitum: the 'metaphorical' world of the mirror has yielded ground to the 'metonymic' world of language. Along this metonymic chain of signifiers, meanings, or signifieds, will be produced; but no object or person can ever be fully 'present' in this chain, because as we have seen with Derrida its effect is to divide and differentiate all identities.
This potentially endless movement from one signifier to another is what Lacan means by desire. All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill. Human language works by such lack: the absence of the real objects which signs designate, the fact that words have meaning only by virtue of the absence and exclusion of others. To enter language, then, is to become a prey to desire: language, Lacan remarks, is 'what hollows being into desire'. Language divides up articulates the fullness of the imagin­ary: we will now never be able to find rest in the single object, the final meaning, which will make sense of all the others. To enter language is to be severed from what Lacan calls the 'real', that inaccessible realm which is always beyond the reach of signification, always outside the symbolic order. In particular, we are severed from the mother's body: after the Oedipus crisis, we will never again be able to attain this precious object, even though we will spend all of our lives hunting for it. We have to make do instead with substitute objects, what Lacan calls the 'object little a', with which we try vainly to plug the gap at the very centre of our being. We move among substitutes for substitutes, metaphors of metaphors, never able to recover the pure (if fictive) self-identity and self-completion which we knew in the imaginary. There is no 'transcendental' meaning or object which will ground this endless yearning - or if there is such a transcendental reality, it is the phallus itself, the 'transcendental signifier' as Lacan calls it. But this is not in fact an object reality, not the actual male sexual organ: it is merely an empty marker of difference, a sign of what divides us from the imaginary and inserts us into our predestined place within the symbolic order.
Lacan, as we have seen in our discussion of Freud, regards the uncon­scious as structured like a language. This is not only because it works by metaphor and metonymy: it is also because, like language itself for the post­structuralists, it is composed less of signs - stable meanings - than of signifiers. If you dream of a horse, it is not immediately obvious what this signifies: it may have many contradictory meanings, may be just one of a whole chain of signifiers with equally multiple meanings. The image of the horse, that is to say, is not a sign in Saussure's sense - it does not have one determined signified tied neatly to its tail - but is a signifier which may be attached to many different signifieds, and which may itselfbear the traces of the other signifiers which surround it. (I was not aware, when I wrote the above sentence, of the word-play involved in 'horse' and 'tail': one signifier interacted with another against my conscious intention.) The unconscious is just a continual movement and activity of signifiers, whose signifieds are often inaccessible to us because they are repressed. This is why Lacan speaks of the unconscious as a 'sliding of the signified beneath the signifier', as a constant fading and evaporation of meaning, a bizarre 'modernist' text which is almost unreadable and which will certainly never yield up its final secrets to interpretation.
If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would ofcourse never be able to speak coherently at all. Ifthe whole of language were present to me when I spoke, then I would not be able to articulate anything at all. The ego, or consciousness, can therefore only work by repressing this turbulent activity, provisionally nailing down words on to meanings. Every now and then a word from the unconscious which I do not want insinuates itselfinto my discourse, and this is the famous Freudian slip ofthe tongue or parapraxis. But for Lacan all our discourse is in a sense a slip of the tongue: if the process of language is as slippery and ambiguous as he suggests, we can never mean precisely what we say and never say precisely what we mean. Meaning is always in some sense an approximation, a near-miss, a part-failure, mixing non-sense and non-communication into sense and dialogue. We can certainly never articulate the truth in some 'pure', unmediated way: Lacan's own notoriously sybilline style, a language of the unconscious all in itself, is meant to suggest that language of the unconscious all in itself, is meant to suggest that any attempt to convey a whole, unblem­ished meaning in speech or script is a pre-Freudian illusion. In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the 'imaginary' level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis. The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it. There is a radical split between these two levels of being - a gap most dramatically exemplified by the act of referring to myself in a sentence. When I say 'Tomorrow I will mow the lawn,' the'!' which I pronounce is an immediately intelligible, fairly stable point of reference which belies the murky depths of the'!' which does the pronouncing. The former'!' is known to linguistic theory as the 'subject of the enunciation', the topic designated by my sentence; the latter'!', the one who speaks the sentence, is the 'subject of the enunciating', the subject of the actual act of speaking. In the process of speaking and writing, these two '1's' seem to achieve a rough sort of unity; but this unity is of an imaginary kind. The 'subject of the enunciating', the actual speaking, writing human person, can never represent himself or herself fully in what is said: there is no sign which will, so to speak, sum up my entire being. I can only designate myself in language by a convenient pronoun. The pronoun'!' stands in for the ever-elusive subject, which will always slip through the nets of any particular piece of language; and this is equivalent to saying that I cannot 'mean' and 'be' simultaneously. To make this point, Lacan boldly rewrites Descartes's 'I think, therefore I am' as: 'I am not where I think, and I think where I am not.'
There is an interesting analogy between what we have just described and those 'acts of enunciation' known as literature. In some literary works, in particular realist fiction, our attention as readers is drawn not to the 'act of enunciating', to how something is said, from what kind of position and with what end in view, but simply to what is said, to the enunciation itself. Any such 'anonymous' enunciation is likely to have more authority, to engage our assent more readily, than one which draws attention to how the enunciation is actually constructed. The language of a legal document or scientific text­book may impress or even intimidate us because we do not see how the language got there in the first place. The text does not allow the reader to seehow the facts it contains were selected, was excluded, why these facts were organized in this particular way, what assumptions governed this process, what forms of work went into the making ofthe text, and how all of this might have been different. Part of the power of such texts thus lies in their suppression of what might be called their modes of production, how they got to be what they are; in this sense, they have a curious resemblance to the life of the human ego, which thrives by repressing the process of its own making. Many modernist literary works, by contrast, make the 'act of enunciating', the process of their own production, part of their actual 'con­tent'. They do not try to pass themselves off as unquestionable, like Barthes's 'natural' sign, but as the Formalists would say 'lay bare the device' of their own composition. They do this so that they will not be mistaken for absolute truth - so that the reader will be encouraged to reflect critically on the partial, particular ways they construct reality, and so to recognize how it might all have happened differently. The finest example of such literature is perhaps the drama of Bertolt Brecht; but many other instances are available in the modern arts, not least in film. Think on the one hand of a typical Hollywood film which simply uses the camera as a kind of 'window' or second eye through which the viewer contemplates reality - which holds the camera steady and allows it simply to 'record' what is happening. Watching such a film, we tend to forget that 'what is happening' is not in fact just 'happening', but is a highly complex construct, involving the actions and assumptions of a great many people. Think then on the other hand of a cinematic sequence in which the camera darts restlessly, nervously from object to object, focusing first on one and then discarding it to pick out another, probing these objects compulsively from several different angles before trailing away, disconsolately as it were, to frame something else. This would not be a particularly avant-garde procedure; but even this highlights how, in contrast to the first type of film, the activity of the camera, the way of mounting the episode, is being 'foregrounded', so that we cannot as spectators simply stare through this obtrusive operation to the objects them­selves.' The 'content' of the sequence can be grasped as the product of a specific set of technical devices, not as a 'natural' or given reality which the camera is simply there to reflect. The 'signified' the 'meaning' of the sequence - is a product of the 'signifier' - the cinematic techniques rather than something which preceded it.
In order to pursue further the implications of Lacan's thought for the human subject, we shall have to take a brief detour through a famous essay written under Lacan's influence by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. In 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses', contained in his book Lenin and Philosophy (1971), Althusser tries to illuminate, with the implicit aid of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, the working of ideology in society. How is it, the essay asks, that human subjects very often come to submit themselves to the dominant ideologies of their societies ideologies which Althusser sees as vital to maintaining the power of a ruling class? By what mechanisms does this come about? Althusser has sometimes been seen as a 'structuralist' Marxist, in that for him human individuals are the prod­uct of many different social determinants, and thus have no essential unity. As far as a science of human societies goes, such individuals can be studied simply as the functions, or effects, of this or that social structure - as occupying a place in a mode of production, as a member of a specific social class, and so on. But this of course is not at all the way we actually experience ourselves. We tend to see ourselves rather as free, unified, autonomous, self­generating individuals; and unless we did so we would be incapable of playing our parts in social life. For Althusser, what allows us to experience ourselves in this way is ideology. How is this to be understood?
As far as society is concerned, I as an individual am utterly dispensable. No doubt someone has to fulfil the functions I carry out (writing, teaching, lecturing and so on), since education has a crucial role to play in the repro­duction of this kind of social system, but there is no particular reason why this individual should be myself. One reason why this thought does not lead me to join a circus or take an overdose is that this is not usually the way that . I experience my own identity, not the way I actually 'live out' my life. I do not feel myself to be a mere function of a social structure which could get along without me, true though this appears when I analysethe situation, but as somebody with a significant relation to society and the world at large, a relation which gives me enough sense of meaning and value to enable me to act purposefully. It is as though society were not just an impersonal struc­ture to me, but a 'subject' which 'addresses' me personally - which recog­nizes me, tells me that I am valued, and so makes me by that very act of recognition into a free, autonomous subject. I come to feel, not exactly as though the world exists for me alone, but as though it is significantly 'centred' on me, and I in turn am significantly 'centred' on it. Ideology, for Althusser, is the set of beliefs and practices which does this centring. It is far more subtle, pervasive and unconscious than a set of explicit doctrines: it is the very medium in which I 'live out' my relation to society, the realm of signs and social practices which binds me to the social structure and lends me a sense of coherent purpose and identity. Ideology in this sense may include the act of going to church, of casting a vote, of letting women pass first through doors; it may encompass not only such conscious predilections as my deep devotion to the monarchy but the way I dress and the kind of car I drive, my deeply unconscious images of others and of myself.
What Althusser does, in other words, is to rethink the concept of ideology in terms of Lacan's 'imaginary'. For the relation of an individual subject to society as a whole in Althusser's theory is rather like the relation ofthe small child to his or her mirror-image in Lacan's. In both cases, the human subject is supplied with a satisfyingly unified image of selfhood by identifying with an object which reflects this image back to it in a closed, narcissistic circle. In both cases, too, this image involves a misrecognition, since it idealizes the subject's real situation. The child is not actually as integrated as its image in the mirror suggests; I am not actually the coherent, autonomous, self­generating subject I know myself to be in the ideological sphere, but the. 'decentred' function of several social determinants. Duly enthralled by the image of myself I receive, I subject myself to it; and it is through this 'subjection' that I become a subject.
Most commentators would now agree that Althusser's suggestive essay is seriously flawed. It seems to assume, for example, that ideology is little more than an oppressive force which subjugates us, without allowing sufficient space for the realities of ideological struggle: and it involves some rather serious misinterpretations of Lacan. Nevertheless, it is one attempt to show the relevance of Lacanian theory to issues beyond the consulting room: it sees, rightly, that such a body of work has deep-seated implications for several fields beyond psychoanalysis itself. Indeed, by reinterpreting Freudianism in terms of language, a pre-eminently social activity, Lacan permits us to explore the relations between the unconscious and human society. One way of describing his work is to say that he makes us recognize that the unconscious is not kind of seething, tumultuous, private region 'inside' us, but an effect of our relations with one another. The unconscious is, so to speak, 'outside' rather than 'within' us or rather it exists 'between' us, as our relationships do. It is elusive not so much because it is buried deep within our minds, but because it is a kind of vast, tangled network which surrounds us and w-eaves itself through us, and which can therefore never be pinned down, The best image for such a network, which is both beyond us and yet is the very stuff of which we are made, is language itself; and indeed for Lacan the unconscious is a particular effect of lan­guage, a process of desire set in motion by difference. When we enter the symbolic order, we enter into language itself; yet this language, for Lacan as for the structuralists, is never something entirely within our individual control. On the contrary, as we have seen, language is what internally divides us, rather than an instrument we are confidently able to manipulate. Language always pre-exists us: it is alwaysalready 'in place', waiting to assign us our places within it. It is ready and waiting for us rather as our parents and we shall never wholly dominate it or subdue it to our own ends, just as we shall never be able entirely to shake off the dominant role which our parents play in our constitution. Language, the unconscious, the parents, the symbolic order: these terms in Lacan are not exactly synonymous, but they are intimately allied. They are sometimes spoken of by him as the 'Other' as that which like language is always anterior to us and will always escape us, that which brought us into being as subjects in the first place but which always outruns our grasp. We have seen that for Lacan our uncon­scious desire is directed towards this Other, in the shape of some ultimately gratifying reality which we can never have; but it is also true for Lacan that our desire is in some way always received from the Other too. We desire what others our parents, for instance unconsciously desire for us; and desire can only happen because we are caught up in linguistic, sexual and social relations the whole field of the 'Other' which generate it.
Lacan himself is not much interested in the social relevance of his the­ories, and he certainly does not 'solve' the problem of the relation between society and the unconscious. Freudianism as a whole, however, does enable us to pose this question; and I want now to examine it in terms of a concrete literary example, D. H. Lawrence's novel Sons and Lovers. Even conserva­tive critics, who suspect such phrases as the 'Oedipus complex' as alien jargon, sometimes admit that there is something at work in this text which looks remarkably like Freud's famous drama. (It is interesting, incidentally, how conventionally-minded critics seem quite content to employ such jar­gon as 'symbol', 'dramatic irony' and 'densely textured', while remaining oddly resistant to terms such as 'signifier' and 'decentring'.) At the time of writing Sons and Lovers, Lawrence, as far as we know, knew something of Freud's work at second hand from his German wife Frieda; but there seems no evidence that he had any direct or detailed acquaintance with it, a fact which might be taken as striking independent confirmation of Freud's doc­trine. For it is surely the case that Sons and Lovers, without appearing to be at all aware of it, is a profoundly Oedipal novel: the young Paul Morel who sleeps in the same bed as his mother, treats her with the tenderness of a lover and feels strong animosity towards his father, grows up to be the man Morel, unable to sustain a fulfilling relationship with a woman, and in the end achieving possible release from this condition by killing his mother in an ambiguous act of love, revenge and self-liberation. Mrs Morel, for her part, is jealous of Paul's relationship with Miriam, behaving like a rival mistress. Paul rejects Miriam for his mother; but in rejecting Miriam he is also unconsciously rejecting his mother in her, in what he feels to be Miriam's stifling spiritual possessiveness.
Paul's psychological development, however, does not take place in a social void. His father, Walter Morel, is a miner, while his mother is of a slightly higher social class. Mrs Morel is concerned that Paul should not follow his father into the pit, and wants him to take a clerical job instead. She herself remains at home as a housewife: the family set-up of the Morels is part of what is known as the 'sexual division of labour', which in capitalist society takes the form ofthe male parent being used as labour-power in the produc­tive process while the female parent is left to provide the material and emotional 'maintenance' of him and the labour-force of the future (the children). Mr Morel's estrangement from the intense emotional life of the home is due in part to this social division one which alienates him from his own children, and brings them emotionally closer to the mother. If, as with Walter Morel, the father's work is especially exhausting and oppressive, his role in the family is likely to be further diminished: Morel is reduced to establishing human contact with his children through his practical skills about the house. His lack of education, moreover, makes it difficult for him to articulate his feelings, a fact which further increases the distance between himselfand his family. The fatiguing, harshly disciplined nature ofthe work process helps to create in him a domestic irritability and violence which drives the children deeper into their mother's arms, and which spurs on her jealous possessiveness of them. To compensate for his inferior status at work, the father struggles to assert a traditional male authority at home, thus estranging his children from him still further.
In the case of the Morels, these social factors are further complicated by the class-distinction between them. Morel has what the novel takes to be a characteristically proletarian inarticulateness, physicality and passivity: Sons and Loversportrays the miners as creatures of the underworld who live the life of the body rather than the mind. This is a curious portraiture, since in 1912, the year in which Lawrence finished the book, the miners launched the biggest strike which Britain had ever seen. One year later, the year of the novel's publication, the worst mining disaster for a century resulted in a paltry fine for a seriously negligent management, and class-warfare was everywhere in the air throughout the British coalfields. These develop­ments, with all their acute political awareness and complex organization, were not the actions of mindless hulks. Mrs Morel (it is perhaps significant that we do not feel inclined to use her first name) is of lower-middle-class origin, reasonably well-educated, articulate and determined. She therefore symbolizes what the young, sensitive and artistic Paul may hope to achieve:
his emotional turning to her from the father is, inseparably, a turning from the impoverished, exploitative world of the colliery towards the life of emancipated consciousness. The potentially tragic tension in which Paul then finds himself trapped, and almost destroyed, springs from the fact that his mother - the very source of the energy which pushes him ambitiously beyond home and pit - is at the same time the powerful emotional force which draws him back.
A psychoanalytical reading of the novel, then, need not be an alternative to a social interpretation of it. Weare speaking rather of two sides or aspects of a single human situation. We can discuss Paul's 'weak' image of his father and 'strong' image of his mother in both Oedipal and class terms; we can see how the human relationships between an absent, violent father, an ambi­tious, emotionally demanding mother and a sensitive child are understand­able both in terms of unconscious processes and in terms of certain social forces and relations. (Some critics, of course, would find neither kind of approach acceptable, and opt for a 'human' reading of the novel instead. It is not easy know what this 'human' is, which excludes the characters' concrete life-situations, their jobs and histories, the deeper significance of their personal relationships and identities, their sexuality and so on.) All of this, however, is still confined to what may be called 'content analysis', looking at what is said rather than how it is said, at 'theme' rather than 'form'. But we can carry these considerations into 'form' itself - into such matters as how the novel delivers and structures its narrative, how it delineates character, what narrative point of view it adopts. It seems evident, for example, that the text itself largely, though by no means entirely, identifies with and endorses Paul's own viewpoint: since the narrative is seen chiefly through his eyes, we have no real source of testimony other than him. As Paul moves into the foreground of the story, his father recedes into the background. The novel is also in general more 'inward' in its treatment of Mrs Morel than it is of her husband; indeed we might that it is organized in a way which tends to highlight her and obscure him, a formal device which reinforces the protagonist's own attitudes. The very way in which the narrative is structured, in other words, to some extent conspires with Paul's own unconscious: it is not clear to us, for example, that Miriam as she is presented in the text, very much from Paul's own viewpoint, actually merits the irritable impatience which she evokes in him, and many readers have had the uneasy sense that the novel is in some way 'unjust' to her. (The real-life Miriam, Jessie Chambers, hotly shared this opinion, but this for our present purposes is neither here nor there.) But how are we to validate this sense of injustice, when Paul's own viewpoint is consistently 'foregrounded' as our source of supposedly reliable evidence?
On the other hand, there are aspects ofthe novel which would seem to run counter to this 'angled' presentation. As H. M. Daleski has perceptively put it: 'The weight of hostile comment which Lawrence directs against Morel is balanced by the unconscious sympathy with which he is presented dramati­cally, while the overt celebration of Mrs Morel is challenged by the harsh­ness of her character in action. '4 In the terms we have used about Lacan, the novel does not exactly say what it means or mean what it says. This itself can partly be accounted for in psychoanalytical terms: the boy's Oedipal relation to his father is an ambiguous one, for the father is loved as well as uncon­sciously hated as a rival, and the child will seek to protect the father from his own unconscious aggression towards him. Another reason for this ambigu­ity, however, is that on one level the novel sees very well that though Paul must reject the narrowed, violent world of the miners for his venture into middle-class consciousness, such consciousness is by no means wholly to be admired. There is much that is dominative and life-denying as well as valuable in it, as we can see in the character of Mrs Morel. It is Walter Morel, so the text tells us, who has 'denied the god in him'; but it is hard to feel that this heavy authorial interpolation, solemn and obtrusive as it is, really earns its keep. For the very novel which tells us this also shows us the opposite. It shows us the ways in which Morel is indeed still alive; it cannot stop us from seeing how the diminishing ofhim has much to do with its own narrative organization, turning as it does from him to his son; and it also shows us, intentionally or not, that even if Morel has'denied the god in him' then the blame is ultimately to be laid not on him but on the predatory capitalism which can find no better use for him than as a cog in the wheel of production. Paul himself, intent as he is on extricating himself from the father's world, cannot afford to confront these truths, and neither, explicitly, does the novel: in writing Sons and Lovers Lawrence was not just writing about the working class but writing his way out of it. But in such telling incidents as the final reunion of Baxter Dawes (in some ways a parallel figure to Morel) with his estranged wife Clara, the novel 'unconsciously' makes reparation for its upgrading of Paul (whom this incident shows in a much more negative light) at the expense ofhis father. Lawrence's final reparation for Morel will be Mellors, the 'feminine' yet powerful male protagonist of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Paul is never allowed by the novel to voice the kind of full, bitter criticism of his mother's possessiveness which some of the 'objective' evidence would seem to warrant; yet the way in which the relationship between mother and son is actually dramatized allows us to see why this should be so.
In reading Sons and Loverswith an eye to these aspects ofthe novel, we are constructing what may be called a 'sub-text' for the work a text which runs within it, visible at certain 'symptomatic' points of ambiguity, evasion or overemphasis, and which we as readers are able to 'write' even if the novel itself does not. All literary works contain one or more such sub-texts, and there is a sense in which they may be spoken of as the 'unconscious' of the work itself. The work's insights, as with all writing, are deeply related to its blindnesses: what it does not say, and how it does not say it, may be as important as what it articulates; what seems absent, marginal or ambivalent about it may provide a central clue to its meanings. We are not simply rejecting or inverting 'what the novel says', arguing, for example, that Morel is the real hero and his wife the villain. Paul's viewpoint is not simply invalid: his mother is indeed an incomparably richer source of sympathy than his father. We are looking rather at what such statements must inevit­ably silence suppress, examining the ways in which the novel is not quite identical with itself. Psychoanalytical criticism, in other words, can do more than hunt for phallic symbols: it can tell us something about how literary texts are actually formed, and reveal something of the meaning of that formation.
Psychoanalytical literary criticism can be broadly divided into four kinds, depending on what it takes as its object of attention. It can attend to the author of the work; to the work's contents; to its formal construction; or to the reader. Most psychoanalytical criticism has been of the first two kinds, which are in fact the most limited and problematical. Psychoanalysing the author is a speculative business, and runs into just the same kind of problems we examined when discussing the relevance of authorial 'intention' to works of literature. The psychoanalysis of 'content' - commenting on the uncon­scious motivations of characters, or on the psychoanalytical significance of objects or events in the text - has a limited value, but, in the manner of the notorious hunt for the phallic symbol, is too often reductive. Freud's own sporadic ventures into the field of art and literature were mainly in these two modes. He wrote a fascinating monograph on Leonardo da Vinci, an essay on Michelangelo's statue 'Moses' and some literary analyses, notably of a short novel by the German writer Wilhelm Jensen entitled Gradiva. Theseessays either offer a psychoanalytical account of the author himself as he reveals himself in his work, or examine symptoms of the unconscious in art as one would in life. In either case, the 'materiality' of the artefact itself, its specific formal constitution, tends to be overlooked.
Equally inadequate is Freud's best-remembered opinion of art: his com­parison of it to neurosis.' What he meant by this is that the artist, like the neurotic, is oppressed by unusually powerful instinctual needs which lead him to turn away from reality to fantasy. Unlike other fantasists, however, the artist knows how to work over, shape and soften his own day-dreams in ways which make them acceptable to others - for, envious egoists that we are, we tend in Freud's opinion to find others' day-dreams repulsive. Crucial to this shaping and softening is the power of artistic form, which affords the reader or viewer what Freud calls 'fore-pleasure', relaxes his defences against others' wish-fulfilments and so enables him to lift his repression for a brief moment and take forbidden pleasure in his own unconscious processes. The same is roughly true of Freud's theory of jokes, in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905): jokes express a normally cen­sored aggressive or libidinal impulse, but this is made socially acceptable by the joke's 'form', its wit and word-play. '
Questions of form, then, do enter into Freud's reflections on art; but the image of the artist as neurotic is surely much too simple, the solid citizen's caricature of the distraught, moonstruck Romantic. Much more suggestive for a psychoanalytical literary theory is Freud's commentary in his master­'piece, The Interpretation ofDreams (1900), on the nature of dreaming. Liter-ary works of course involve conscious labour, while dreams do not: in this sense they resemble dreams less than they resemble jokes. But with this reservation in mind, what Freud argues in his book is highly significant. The 'raw materials' of a dream, what Freud calls its 'latent content', are uncon­scious wishes, bodily stimuli while sleeping, images reaped from the previ­ous day's experiences; but the dream itself is the product of an intensive transformation of these materials, known as the 'dream-work'. The mech­anisms of the dream-work we have looked at already: they are the uncon­scious's techniques of condensing and displacing its materials, together with finding intelligible ways of representing it. The dream which is produced by this labour, the dream we actually remember, is termed by Freud the 'mani­fest content'. The dream, then, is not just the 'expression' or 'reproduction' of the unconscious: between the unconscious and the dream we have, a process of 'production' or transformation has intervened. The 'essence' of the dream, Freud considers, is not the raw materials or 'latent content', but the dream-work itself: it is this 'practice' which is the object of his analysis. One stage of the dream-work, known as 'secondary revision', consists in the reorganization of the dream so as to present it in the form of a relatively consistent and comprehensible narrative. Secondary revision systematizes the dream, fills in its gaps and smooths over its contradictions, reorders its chaotic elements into a more coherent fable.
Most of the literary theory we have examined so far in this book could be considered a form of 'secondary revision' of the literary text. In its obsessive pursuit of 'harmony', 'coherence', 'deep structure' or 'essential meaning', such theory fills in the text's gaps and smooths over its contradictions, domesticating its disparate aspects and defusing its conflicts. It does this so that the text may be, so to speak, more easily 'consumed' so that the path is made straight for the reader, who will not be ruffled by any unexplained irregularities. Much literary scholarship in particular is resolutely devoted to this end, briskly 'resolving' ambiguities and staking the text down for the reader's untroubled inspection. An extreme example of such secondary revision, although one not altogether untypical of much critical interpreta­tion, is the kind of account ofT. S. Eliot's The Waste Land which reads the poem as the story ofa little girl who went on a sledge-ride with her uncle the Archduke, changed sex a few times in London, got caught up in a hunt for the Holy Grail and ended up fishing glumly on the edge of an arid plain. The diverse, divided materials of Eliot's poem are tamed to a coherent narrative, the shattered human subjects of the work unified to a single ego.
Much of the literary theory we have looked at also tends to view the literary work as an 'expression' or 'reflection' of reality: it enacts human experience, or embodies an author's intention, or its structures reproduce the structures of the human mind. Freud's account of the dream, by con­trast, enables us to see the work of literature not as a reflection but as a form of production. Like the dream, the work takes certain 'raw materials' language, other literary texts, ways of perceiving the world and transforms them by certain techniques into a product. The techniques by which this production is carried out are the various devices we know as 'literary form'. In working on its raw materials, the literary textwill tend to submit them to its own form of secondary revision: unless it is a 'revolutionary' text like Finnegans Wake, it will try to organize them into a reasonably coherent, consumable whole, even if, as with Sons and Lovers, it will not be always successful. But just as the dream-text can be analysed, deciphered, decom­posed in ways which show up something of the processes by which it was produced, so too can the literary work. A 'naive' reading of literature might stop short at the textual product itself, as I might listen to your gripping account of a dream without bothering to probe it further. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, is in the phrase of one of its interpreters a 'hermeneutic of suspicion': its concern is not just to 'read the text' of the unconscious, but to uncover the processes, the dream-work, by which that text was produced. To do this, it focuses in particular on what have been called 'symptomatic' places in the dream-text distortions, ambiguities, absence and elisions which may provide a specially valuable mode of access to the 'latent content', or unconscious drives, which have gone into its making. Literary criticism, as we saw in the case of Lawrence's novel, can do something similar: by attending to what may seem like evasions, ambivalences and points of intensity in the narrative - words which do not get spoken, words which are spoken with unusual frequency, doublings and slidings of language it can begin to probe through the layers of secondary revision and expose some­thing of the 'sub-text' which, like an unconscious wish, the work both conceals and reveals. It can attend, in other words, not only to what the text says, but to how it toorks?
Some Freudian literary criticism has pursued this project to a certain extent. In his The Dynamics ofLiterary Response (1968), the American critic Norman N. Holland, following Freud, sees works of literature as setting in motion in the reader an interplay of unconscious fantasies and conscious defences against them. The work is enjoyable because by devious formal means it transforms our deepest anxieties and desires into socially acceptable meanings. If it did not 'soften' these desires by its form and language, allowing us sufficient mastery of and defence against them, it would prove unacceptable; but so would it if it merely reinforced our repressions. This, in effect, is little more than a restatement in Freudian guise of the old Romantic opposition between turbulent content and harmonizing form. Literary form for the American critic Simon Lesser, in his Fiction and the Unconscious (1957), has a 'reassuring influence', combating anxiety and cel­ebrating our commitment to life, love and order. Through it, according to Lesser, we 'pay homage to the superego'. But what of modernist forms which pulverize order, subvert meaning and explode our self-assurance? Is literature just a sort of therapy? Holland's later work would suggest that he thinks so: Five ReadersReading (1975) examines the unconscious responses of readers to literary texts in order to see how these readers come to adapt their identities in the process of interpretation, yet thereby discover a reas­suring unity in themselves. Holland's belief that it is possible to abstract from an individual's life an 'unchanging essence' of personal identity aligns his work with so-called American 'ego-psychology' - a domesticated version of Freudianism which diverts attention from the 'split subject' of classical psychoanalysis and it instead on to the unity of the ego. It is a psychology concerned with how the ego adapts to social life: by therapeutic techniques, the individual is 'fitted' into his natural, healthy role as an aspiring executive with the appropriate make of automobile, and any distressing personality traits which might deviate from this are 'treated'. With this brand of psychology, the Freudianism which began as scandal and affront to middle-class society becomes a way of underwriting its values.
Two very different American critics indebted to Freud are Kenneth Burke, who eclectically blends Freud, Marx and linguistics to produce his own suggestive view of the literary work as a form of symbolic action, and Harold Bloom, who has used the work of Freud to launch one of the most daringly original literary theories of the past decade. What Bloom does, in effect, is to rewrite literary history in terms of the Oedipus complex. Poets live anxiously in the shadow ofa 'strong' poet who came before them, as sons are oppressed by their fathers; and any particular poem can be read as an attempt to escape this 'anxiety of influence' by its systematic remoulding of a previous poem. The poet, locked in Oedipal rivalry with his castrating 'precursor', will to disarm that strength by entering it from within, writing in a way which revises, displaces and recasts the precursor poem; in this sense all poems can be read as rewritings of other poems, and as 'misreadings' or 'misprisions' of them, attempts to fend off their over­whelming force so that the poet can clear a space for his own imaginative originality. Every poet is 'belated', the last in a tradition; the strong poet is the one with the courage to acknowledge this belatedness and set about undermining the precursor's power. Any poem, indeed, is nothing but such an undermining a series of devices, which can be seen both as rhetorical strategies and psychoanalytic defence mechanisms, for undoing and outdo­ing another poem. The meaning of a poem is another poem.
Bloom's literary theory represents an impassioned, defiant return to the. Protestant Romantic 'tradition' from Spenser and Milton to Blake, Shelley and Yeats, a tradition ousted by the conservative Anglo-Catholic lineage (Donne, Herbert, Pope,]ohnson, Hopkins) mapped out by Eliot, Leavis and their followers. Bloom is the prophetic spokesman for the creative imagina­tion in the modern age, reading literary history as an heroic battle of giants or mighty psychic drama, trusting to the 'will to expression' of the strong poet in his struggle for self-origination. Such doughty Romantic individual­ism is fiercely at odds with the sceptical, anti-humanist ethos of a deconstructive age, and indeed Bloom has defended the value of individual poetic 'voice' and genius against his Derridean colleagues (Hartman, de Man, Hillis Miller) at Yale. His hope is that he may snatch from the jaws of a deconstructive criticism he in some ways respects a Romantic humanism which will reinstate author, intention and the power of the imagination.
Such a humanism will wage war with the 'serene linguistic nihilism' which Bloom rightly discerns in much American deconstruction, turning from the mere endless undoing of determinate meaning to a vision of poetry as human will and affirmation. The strenuous, embattled, apocalyptic tone of much of his own writing, with its outlandish spawning of esoteric terms, is witness to the strain and desperateness of this enterprise. Bloom's criticism starkly exposes the dilemma of the modern liberal or Romantic humanist the fact that on the one hand no reversion to a serene, optimistic human faith is possible after Marx, Freud and post-structuralism, but that on the other hand any humanism which like Bloom's has taken the agonizing pressures of such doctrines is bound to be fatally compromised and contaminated by them. Bloom's epical battles of poetic giants retain the psychic splendour of a pre-Freudian age, but have lost its innocence: they are domestic rows, scenes of guilt, envy, anxiety and aggression. No humanistic literary theory which overlooked such realities could offer itselfas reputably 'modern' at all; but any such theory which takes them on board is bound to be sobered and soured by them to the point where its own capacity to affirm becomes almost maniacally wilful. Bloom advances far enough down the primrose path of American deconstruction to be able to scramble back to the heroically hu­man only by a Nietzschean appeal to the 'will to power' and 'will to persua­sion' of the individual imagination which is bound to remain arbitrary and gestural. In this exclusively patriarchal world of fathers and sons, everything comes to centre with increasing rhetorical stridency on power, struggle, strength of will; criticism itself for Bloom is just as much a form of poetry as poems are implicit literary criticism of other poems, and whether a critical reading 'succeeds' is in the end not at all a question of its truth-value but of the rhetorical force of the critic himself. It is humanism on the extreme edge, grounded in nothing but its own assertive faith, stranded between a discredited rationalism on the one hand and an intolerable scepticism on the other.
Watching his grandson playing in his pram one day; Freud observed him throwing a toy out of the pram and exclaiming fort! (gone away), then hauling it in again on a string to the cry of da! (here). This, the famous fort­da game, Freud interpreted in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) as the infant's symbolic mastery of its mother's absence; but it can also be read as the first glimmerings of narrative. Fort-do is perhaps the shortest story we can imagine: an object is lost, and then recovered. But even the most complex narratives can be read as variants on this model: the pattern of classical narrative is that an original settlement is disrupted and ultimately restored. From this viewpoint, narrative is a source of consolation: lost objects are a cause of anxiety to us, symbolizing certain deeper unconscious losses (of birth, the faeces, the mother), and it is always pleasurable to find them put securely back in place. In Lacanian theory, it is an original lost object the mother's body - which drives forward the narrative of our lives, impelling us to pursue substitutes for this lost paradise in the endless metonymic movement of desire. For Freud, it is a desire to scramble back to a place where we cannot be harmed, the inorganic existence which precedes all conscious life, which keeps us struggling forward: our restless attach­ments (Eros) are in thrall to the death drive (Thanatos). Something must be lost or absent in any narrative for it to unfold: if everything stayed in place there would be no story to tell. This loss is distressing, but exciting as well: desire is stimulated by what we cannot quite possess, and this is one source of narrative satisfaction. Ifwe could neverpossess it, however, our excitation might become intolerable and turn into unpleasure; so we must know that the object will be finally restored to us, that Tom Jones will return to Paradise Hall and Hercule Poirot will track down the murderer. Our excita­tion is gratifyingly released: our energies have been cunningly 'bound' by the suspenses and repetitions of the narrative only as a preparation for their pleasurable expenditure." We have been able to tolerate the disappearance of the object because our unsettling suspense was all the time shot through by the secret knowledge that it would finally come home. Fort has meaning only in relation to da.
But, of course, vice versa too. Once installed within the symbolic order, we cannot contemplate or possess any object without seeing it unconsciously in the light of its possible absence, knowing that its presence is in some way arbitrary and provisional. If the mother goes away then this is merely preparatory to her return, but when she is with us again we cannot forget the fact that she might always disappear, and perhaps always not return. Classi­cal narrative of the realist kind is on the whole a 'conservative' form, which slides our anxiety at absence under the comforting sign of presence; many modernist texts, such as those of Brecht and Beckett, remind us that what we are seeing might always have happened differently, or not happened at all. If for psychoanalysis the prototype of all absence is castration - the little boy's fear that he will lose his sexual organ, the little girl's supposed disappoint­ment that she has 'lost' hers then such texts, post-structuralism would say, have accepted the reality of castration, the ineluctability of loss, absence and difference in human life. Reading them, we too are brought to encounterthese realities to prise ourselves loose from the 'imaginary', where loss and difference are unthinkable, and where it seemed that the world was made for us and we for the world. There is no death in the imaginary, since the world's continuing existence depends upon my life just as much as my life depends upon it; it is only by entering the symbolic order that we confront the truth that we can die, since the world's existence does not in fact depend upon us. As long as we remain in an imaginary realm of being we misrecognize our own identities, seeing them as fixed and rounded, and misrecognize reality as something immutable. We remain, in Althusser's terms, in the grip of ideology, conforming to social reality as 'natural' rather than critically questioning how it, and ourselves, came to be constructed, and so could possibly be transformed.
We have seen in our discussion of Roland Barthes how much literature conspires in its very forms to forestall such critical interrogation. Barthes's 'naturalized' sign is equivalent to Lacan's 'imaginary': in both cases an alienated personal identity is confirmed by a 'given', inevitable world. This is not to say that literature written in such a mode is necessarily conservative in what it says; but the radicalism of its statements may be undermined by the forms in which they are held. Raymond Williams has pointed to the interesting contradiction between the social radicalism of much naturalistic theatre (Shaw, for example) and the formal methods of such drama. The discourse of the play may be urging change, criticism, rebellion; but the dramatic forms itemize the furniture and aim for an exact 'verisimilitude' - inevitably enforce upon us a sense of the unalterable solidity of this social world, all the way down to the colour of the maid's stockings." For the drama to break with these ways of seeing, it would need to move beyond naturalism altogether into some more experimental mode - as indeed did the later Ibsen and Strindberg. Such transfigured forms might jolt the audience out of the reassurance of recognition the self-security which springs from contemplating a world which is familiar. We can contrast Shaw in this with Bertolt Brecht, who uses certain dramatic techniques (the so-called 'estrangement effect') to render the most taken-for-granted aspects of social reality shockingly unfamiliar, and so to rouse the audience to a new critical awareness of them. Far from being concerned to reinforce the audience's sense of security, Brecht wants, as he says, to 'create contradic­tions within them' - to unsettle- their convictions, dismantle and refashion their received identities, and expose the unity of this selfhood as an ideo­logical illusion.
We can find another meeting-point of political and psychoanalytical theo­ries in the work of the feminist philosopher Julia Kristeva. Kristeva's think­ing is much influenced by Lacan; yet for any feminist such influence clearly poses a problem. For the symbolic order of which Lacan writes is in reality the patriarchal sexual and social order of modern class-society, structured around the 'transcendental signifier' of the phallus, dominated by the Law which the father embodies. There is no way, then, in which a feminist or pro-feminist may uncritically celebrate the symbolic order at the expense of the imaginary: on the contrary, the oppressiveness of the actual social and sexual relations of such a system is precisely the target of the feminist critique. In her book La Revolution du langage poetique (1974), Kristeva therefore opposes to the symbolic not so much the imaginary, as what she terms the 'semiotic'. She means by this a pattern or play of forces which we can detect inside language, and which represents a sort of residue of the pre­Oedipal phase. The child in the pre-Oedipal phase does not yet have access to language ('infant' means 'speechless'), but we can imagine its body as criss-crossed by a flow of 'pulsions' or drives which are at this point rela­tively unorganized. This rhythmic pattern can be seen as a form oflanguage, though it is not yet meaningful. For language as such to happen, this heterogeneous flow must be as it were chopped up, articulated into stable terms, so that in entering the symbolic order this 'semiotic' process is repressed. The repression, however, is not total: for the semiotic can still be discerned as a kind of pulsional pressure within language itself, in tone, rhythm, the bodily and material qualities of language, but also in con­tradiction, meaninglessness, disruption, silence and absence. The semiotic is the 'other' of language which is none the less intimately entwined with it. Because it stems from the pre-Oedipal phase, it is bound up with the child's contact with the mother's body, whereas the symbolic, as we have seen, is associated with the Law of the father. The semiotic is thus closely connected with femininity: but is by no means a language exclusive to women, for it arises from a pre-Oedipal period which recognizes no distinctions of gender.
Kristeva looks to this 'language' of the semiotic as a means of undermin­ing the symbolic order. In the writings of some of the French Symbolist poets and other avant-garde authors, the relatively secure meanings of 'ordi­nary' language are harassed and disrupted by this flow of signification, which presses the linguistic sign to its extreme limit, values its tonal, rhythmic and material properties, and sets up a play of unconscious drives in the text which threatens to split apart received social meanings. The semiotic is fluid andplural, a kind of pleasurable creative excess over precise meaning, and it takes sadistic delight in destroying or negating such signs. It is opposed to all fixed, transcendental significations; and since the ideologies of modern male-dominated class-society rely on such fixed signs for their power (God, father, state, order, property and so on), such literature becomes a kind of equivalent in the realm of language to revolution in the sphere of politics. The reader of such texts is equally disrupted or 'decentred' by this linguistic force, thrown into contradiction, unable to take up anyone, simple 'subject-position' in relation to these polymorphous works. The semiotic throws into confusion all tight divisions between masculine and feminine­it is a 'bisexual' form of writing - and offers to deconstruct all the scrupulous binary oppositions proper/ improper, norm/deviation, sane/mad, mine/yours, authority/obedience - by which societies such as ours survive.
The English-language writer who perhaps most strikingly exemplifies Kristeva's theories is James joyce." But aspects of it are also evident in the writings of Virginia Woolf, whose fluid, diffuse, sensuous style offers a resistance to the kind ofmale metaphysical world symbolized by the philoso­pher Mr Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. Ramsay's world works by abstract truths, sharp .divisions and fixed essences: it is a patriarchal world, for the phallus is the symbol ofsure, self-identical truth and is not to be challenged. Modern society, as the post-structuralists would say, is 'phallocentric'; it is also, as we have seen, 'logocentric', believing that its discourses can yield us immediate access to the full truth and presence of things. Jacques Derrida has conflated two terms to the compound 'phallogocentric', which we might roughly translate as 'cocksure'. It is this cocksureness, by which those who wield sexual and social power maintain their grip, that Woolf's 'semiotic' fiction could be seen as challenging.
This raises the vexed question, much debated in feminist literary theory, as to whether there is a specifically feminine mode of writing. Kristeva's 'semiotic' is not, as we have seen, inherently feminine: indeed most of the 'revolutionary' writers she discusses are male. But because it is closely related to the mother's body, and because there are complex psychoanalyti­cal reasons for holding that women retain a closer relationship to that body than men do, one might expect such writing to be on the whole more typical of women. Some feminists have sharply rejected this theory, fearing that it simply reinvents some 'female essence' of a non-cultural kind, and perhaps also suspecting that it may be no more than a high-falutin version of the sexist view that women babble. Neither of these beliefs is in my view necessarily implied by Kristeva's theory. It is important to see that the semiotic is not an alternative to the symbolic order, a language one could speak instead of 'normal' discourse: it is rather a process within our conven­tional sign-systems, which questions and transgresses their limits. In Lacanian theory, anyone who is unable to enter the symbolic order at all, to symbolize their experience through language, would become psychotic. One might see the semiotic as a kind of internal limit or borderline of the symbolic order; and in this sense the 'feminine' could equally be seen as existing on such a border. For the feminine is at once constructed within the symbolic order, like any gender, and yet is relegated to its margins, judged inferior to masculine power. The woman is both 'inside' and 'outside' male society, both a romantically idealized member of it and a victimized outcast. She is sometimes what stands between man and chaos, and sometimes the embodiment of chaos itself. This is why she troubles the neat categories of such a regime, blurring its well-defined boundaries. Women are represented within male-governed society, fixed by sign, image, meaning, yet because they are also the 'negative' of that social order there is always in them something which is left over, superfluous, unrepresentable, which refuses to be figured there.
On this view, the feminine - which is a mode of being and discourse not necessarily identical with women - signifies a force within society which opposes it. And this has its obvious political implications in the form of the women's movement. The political correlative of Kristeva's own theories - of a semiotic force which disrupts all stable meanings and institutioris - would appear to be some kind of anarchism. If such an unending overthrow of all fixed structure is an inadequate response in the political realm, so too in the theoretical sphere is the assumption that a literary text which undermines meaning is ipso facto 'revolutionary'. It is quite possible for a text to do this in the name of some right-wing irrationalism, or to do it in the name of nothing much at all. Kristeva's argument is dangerously formalistic and easily caricaturable: will reading Mallarme bring down the bourgeois state?She does not, of course, claim that it will; but she pays too little attention to the political content of a text, the historical conditions in which its overturn­ing of the signified is carried out, and the historical conditions in which all of this is interpreted and used. Nor is the dismantling of the unified subject a revolutionary gesture in itself. Kristeva rightly perceives that bourgeois individualism thrives on such a fetish, but her work tends to halt at the point where the subject has been fractured and thrown into contradiction. For Brecht, by contrast, the dismantling of our given identities through art is inseparable from the practice of producing a new kind of subject altogether, which would need to know not only internal fragmentation but social solidarity, which would experience not only the gratifications of libid­inallanguage but the fulfilments of fighting political injustice. The implicit anarchism or libertarianism of Kristeva's suggestive theories is not the only kind of politics which follows from her recognition that women, and certain 'revolutionary' literary works, pose a radical question to existing society precisely because they mark out the frontier beyond which it dare not venture.
There is one simple and evident connection between psychoanalysis and literature which is worth touching on in conclusion. Rightly or wrongly, Freudian theory regards the fundamental motivation of all human behaviour as the avoidance of pain and the gaining of pleasure: it is a form of what is philosophically known as hedonism. The reason why the vast majority of people read poems, novels and plays is because they find them pleasurable. This fact is so obvious that it is hardly ever mentioned in universities. It is, admittedly, difficult to spend some years studying literature in most univer­sities and still find it pleasurable at the end: many university literature courses seem to be constructed to prevent this from happening, and those who emerge still able to enjoy literary works might be considered either heroic or perverse. As we saw earlier in this book, the fact that reading literature is generally an enjoyable pursuit posed a serious problem for those who first established it as an academic 'discipline': it was necessary to make the whole affair rather more intimidating and dispiriting, if 'English' was to earn its keep as a reputable cousin of Classics. Meanwhile, in the world outside, people carried on devouring romances, thrillers and historical novels without the faintest idea that the halls of academia were beset by these anxieties.
It is a symptom of this curious situation that the word 'pleasure' has trivializing overtones; it is certainly a less serious word than 'serious'. To say that we find a poem intensely enjoyable seems somehow a less acceptable critical statement than to claim that we thought it morally profound. It is difficult not to feel that comedy is a more superficial business than tragedy. Between the Cambridge roundheads who speak dauntingly of 'moral seri­ousness', and the Oxford cavaliers who find George Eliot 'amusing', there seems little space for a more adequate theory of pleasure. But psychoanalysis is among other things precisely this: its bristling intellectual armoury is bent on the exploration of such fundamental matters as what people find gratify­ing and what they do not, how they can be relieved of their misery and made more happy. If Freudianism is a science, concerned with an impersonal analysis of psychical forces, it is a science committed to the emancipation of human beings from what frustrates their fulfilment and well-being. It is a theory at the service of a transformative practice, and to that extent has parallels with radical politics. It recognizes that pleasure and displeasure are extremely complex issues, unlike the kind of traditional literary critic for whom statements of personal liking or disliking are merely propositions of 'taste' which it is impossible to analyse any further. For such a critic, saying that you enjoyed the poem is the end-point of the argument; for another . kind of critic, this may be precisely where the argument begins. This is not to suggest that psychoanalysis alone can provide the key to problems of literary value and pleasure. We like or dislike certain pieces of language not only because of the unconscious play of drives they induce in us, but because of certain conscious commitments and predilections we share. There is a complex interaction between these two regions, which needs to be demonstrated in the detailed examination of a particular literary text." The problems of literary value and pleasure would seem to lie some­where at the juncture of psychoanalysis, linguistics and ideology, and little work has been done here as yet. We know enough, however, to suspect that it is a good deal more possible to say why someone enjoys certain arrange­ments of words than conventional literary criticism has believed.
More importantly, it is possible that by a fuller understanding of the pleasures and displeasures readers reap from literature, a modest but signifi­cant light may be cast on some rather more pressing problems of happiness and misery. One of the richest traditions to have emerged from Freud's own writings is one very far removed from the preoccupations of a Lacan: it is a form of political-psychoanalytical work engaged with the question of happi­ness as it affects whole societies. Prominent in this lineage has been the work of the German psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, and the writings of Herbert Marcuse and other members of the so-called Frankfurt school of social enquiry." We live in a society which on the one hand pressurizes us into the pursuit of instant gratification, and on the other hand imposes on whole sectors of the population an endless deferment of fulfilment. The spheres of economic, political and cultural life become 'eroticized', thronged with se­ductive commodities and flashy images, while the sexual. relationships be­tween men and women grow diseased and disturbed. Aggression in such a society is not only a matter of sibling rivalry: it becomes the growing possi­bility of nuclear self-destruction, the death drive legitimated as a military strategy. The sadistic satisfactions of power are matched by the masochistic conformity of many of the powerless. In such a condition, Freud's title The Psychopathology of Everyday Life assumes a new, ominous meaning. One reason why we need to enquire into the dynamics of pleasure and unpleasure is because we need to know how much repression and deferred fulfilment a society is likely to tolerate; how it is that desire can be switched from ends that we would value to ends which trivialize and degrade it; how it comes about that men and women are sometimes prepared to suffer oppression and indignity, and at what points such submission is likely to fail. We can learn from psychoanalytical theory more about why most people prefer John Keats to Leigh Hunt; we can also learn more about the nature of a 'civiliza­tion which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt, [...] neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence' .





Psychoanalytic in Tyson’s book

We’re starting our study of critical theory with psychoanalytic criticism because, whether we realize it or not, psychoanalytic concepts have become part of our everyday lives, and therefore psychoanalytic thinking should have the advantage of familiarity. If you’ve ever told an angry friend “Don’t take it out on me!” you were accusing that friend of displacement, which is the psychoanalytic name for transferring our anger with one person onto another person (usually one who won’t fight back or can’t hurt us as badly as the person with whom we are really angry). Psychoanalytic concepts such as sibling rivalry, inferiority complexes, and defense mechanisms are in such common use that most of us feel we know what they mean without ever having heard them defined. The disadvantage of such common usage, however, is that most of us have acquired a very simplistic idea of what these concepts mean, and in their clichéd form they seem rather superficial if not altogether meaningless. Couple this unfortunate fact with our fear that psychoanalysis wants to invade our most private being and reveal us to ourselves and to the world as somehow inadequate, even sick, and the result is very often a deep-seated mistrust of “psychobabble.” Indeed, our common use of the word psychobabble illustrates our belief that psychoanalysis is both impos-sible to understand and meaningless. Thus, in a culture that uses psychoanalytic concepts in its everyday language we frequently see the wholesale rejection of psychoanalysis as a useful way of understanding human behavior.
I hope this chapter will show you that seeing the world psychoanalytically can be simple without being simplistic. If we take the time to understand some key concepts about human experience offered by psychoanalysis, we can begin to see the ways in which these concepts operate in our daily lives in profound rather than superficial ways, and we’ll begin to understand human behaviors that until now may have seemed utterly baffling. And, of course, if psychoanalysis can help us better understand human behavior, then it must certainly be able to help us understand literary texts, which are about human behavior. The concepts we’ll discuss below are based on the psychoanalytic principles established by SigmundFreud (1856–1939), whose theory of the psyche often is referred to today as clas-sical psychoanalysis. We must remember that Freud evolved his ideas over a long period of time, and many of his ideas changed as he developed them. In addi-tion, much of his thinking was, as he pointed out, speculative, and he hoped that others would continue to develop and even correct certain of his ideas over time. So the attempt in this chapter is to outline those areas of classical psycho-analytic theory that are particularly useful to literary criticism and to show how this view of human behavior is relevant to our experience of literature. Later in the chapter, we’ll also take a brief look at the more recent work of nontraditional psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan.1
The origins of the unconscious
When we look at the world through a psychoanalytic lens, we see that it is com-prised of individual human beings, each with a psychological history that begins in childhood experiences in the family and each with patterns of adolescent and adult behavior that are the direct result of that early experience. Because the goal of psychoanalysis is to help us resolve our psychological problems, often called disorders or dysfunctions (and none of us is completely free of psychologi-cal problems), the focus is on patterns of behavior that are destructive in some way. I say patterns of behavior because our repetition of destructive behavior reveals the existence of some significant psychological difficulty that has prob-ably been influencing us for some time without our knowing it. In fact, it is our not knowing about a problem—or, if we do know we have a problem, not real-izing when it is influencing our behavior—that gives it so much control over us. For this reason, we must begin our discussion with the concept central to all psychoanalytic thinking: the existence of the unconscious.
Do you remember the song “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Rolling Stones? The idea expressed is “You can’t always get what you want, but you get what you need.” This formulation, with the addition of two words, gives us the key to thinking psychoanalytically: “You can’t always get what you con-sciously want, but you get what you unconsciously need.” The notion that human beings are motivated, even driven, by desires, fears, needs, and conflicts of which they are unaware—that is, unconscious—was one of Sigmund Freud’s most radi-cal insights, and it still governs classical psychoanalysis today.
The unconscious is the storehouse of those painful experiences and emotions, those wounds, fears, guilty desires, and unresolved conflicts we do not want to know about because we feel we will be overwhelmed by them. The unconscious comes into being when we are very young through the repression, the expunging from consciousness, of these unhappy psychological events. However, repression doesn’t eliminate our painful experiences and emotions. Rather, it gives them force by making them the organizers of our current experience: we unconsciously behave in ways that will allow us to “play out,” without admitting it to ourselves, our conflicted feelings about the painful experiences and emotions we repress. Thus, for psychoanalysis, the unconscious isn’t a passive reservoir of neutral data, though the word is sometimes used this way in other disciplines and in common parlance; rather, the unconscious is a dynamic entity that engages us at the deepest level of our being.
Until we find a way to know and acknowledge to ourselves the true cause(s) of our repressed wounds, fears, guilty desires, and unresolved conflicts, we hang onto them in disguised, distorted, and self-defeating ways. For example, if I don’t realize that I still long for the love I never received from my long-dead, alcoholic father, I am very liable to select an alcoholic, aloof mate so that I can reenact my relationship with my father and “this time” make him love me. In fact, even when I do realize that I have this kind of psychological issue with my father, it is difficult to recognize when I am “acting it out” with another person. Indeed, I probably won’t see the profound similarity between my father and my beloved: I’ll focus instead on superficial differences (my father has dark hair and my beloved is blond). In other words, I will experience my longing for my neglectful father as longing for my current heartthrob. I will feel that I am in love with my current sweetheart, perhaps even desperately in love, and I will believe that what I really want is for my sweetheart to love me back.
I will not necessarily realize that what I really want in wanting this man is some-thing I never received from my father. The evidence will lie in the similarities between his treatment of me and my father’s treatment of me and in the fact that, should I succeed in gaining the kind of attention I want from my current “crush,” either it will not be enough (he will never be able to convince me that he really loves me; I will think that my insecurity is proof of his indifference), or if he does convince me that he really loves me, I will lose interest in him because the attentive lover does not fulfill my need to reexperience the abandonment I suffered at the hands of my father. The point is that I want something I don’t know I want and can’t have: the love of my neglectful father. In fact, even if my father were still alive and had the kind of psychological rebirth that permitted him to give me his love, I would still have to heal the psychological wounds he inflicted over the course of my childhood—my feelings of inadequacy and aban-donment, for example—before I could benefit from his love.
As you can see in the above example, the family is very important in psycho-analytic theory because we are each a product of the role we are given in the family-complex. In one sense, the “birth” of the unconscious lies in the way we perceive our place in the family and how we react to this self-definition: 
for example, “I’m the failure”; “I’m the perfect child”; “I must always ‘come in second’ to my brother”; “I’m unlovable”; or “I’m responsible for my parents’ prob-lems.” The oedipal conflict (competition with the parent of the same gender for the attention and affection of the parent of the opposite gender) and all the commonplace ideas of old-style Freudian theory (for example, sibling rivalry, penis envy, castration anxiety) are merely descriptions of the dominant ways in which family conflicts can be lived. They give us merely starting points for understanding differences among individuals. For example, in some families, sib-ling rivalry (competition with siblings for the attention and affection of parents) can occur, in an important sense, between a parent and child. If I feel jealous of my mate’s affection for our child, what may be going on is a reenactment of my unresolved childhood rivalry with a sibling I believed was more loved by my parents than I. That is, seeing my mate’s affection for our child reawakens some or all of the hurt I felt when I saw my parents’ affection for the sibling I believed they preferred. And so I now find myself competing with my child for the atten-tion of my mate. 
It is important to note that oedipal attachments, sibling rivalry, and the like are considered developmental stages. In other words, we all go through these experi-ences, and they are a natural and healthy part of maturing and establishing our own identities. It is when we fail to outgrow these conflicts that we have trouble. Here’s an example common to many women. If I remain in competition with my mother for my father’s love (a competition that can go on in my unconscious long after one or both parents are dead), I will probably be most attracted to men who already have girlfriends or wives because their attachment to another woman will allow me to replay my competition with my mother and “this time” win. Of course, I might not win the man this time, and even if I do, once I’ve won him I’ll lose interest in him. Although I probably don’t realize it con-sciously, his desirability lies in his attachment to someone else. Once he’s mine, he’s not so exciting anymore. On the other hand, if as a child I felt that I won my father’s affection from my mother (which he may have given me as a way of punishing or avoiding my mother), then I may be attracted to men who already have girlfriends or wives (and who don’t seem likely to leave them) because I feel I need to be punished for “stealing” Dad from my mother. Of course, another way to punish myself for stealing Dad from my mother (or for wanting to steal him or, if he sexually molested me, for feeling that it was somehow my fault) is to be unable to respond sexually to my mate.
A common way in which men replay unresolved oedipal attachments involves what is often called the “good-girl/bad-girl” attitude toward women. If I remain in competition (usually unconscious) with my father for my mother’s love, I am very liable to deal with my guilt by categorizing women as either “like Mom” (“good girls”) or “not like Mom” (“bad girls”) and then by being able to enjoy sex only with women who are “not like Mom.” In other words, because I uncon-sciously associate sexual desire with desire for my mother, sexual desire makes me feel guilty and dirty, and for this reason I can enjoy it only with “bad girls,” who are themselves guilty and dirty and whom I don’t associate with Mom. This view often creates a seduce-and-abandon pattern of behavior toward women. When I seduce a “bad girl,” I must abandon her (sooner or later) because I cannot allow myself to be permanently attached to someone so unworthy of marriage, that is, unworthy of being classified with my mother. When I seduce a “good girl,” two things happen: (1) she becomes a “bad girl” and, like other “bad girls,” unworthy of my permanent commitment, and (2) I feel so guilty for “soiling” her (which is like “soiling” Mom) that I must abandon her to avoid my guilt. The point is that, for both women and men, only by recognizing the psychological motivations for our destructive behavior can we hope to begin to change that behavior.
The defenses, anxiety, and core issues
Our unconscious desires not to recognize or change our destructive behaviors—because we have formed our identities around them and because we are afraid of what we will find if we examine them too closely—are served by our defenses. Defenses are the processes by which the contents of our unconscious are kept in the unconscious. In other words, they are the processes by which we keep the repressed repressed in order to avoid knowing what we feel we can’t handle knowing. Defenses include selective perception (hearing and seeing only what we feel we can handle), selective memory (modifying our memories so that we don’t feel overwhelmed by them or forgetting painful events entirely), denial (believ-ing that the problem doesn’t exist or the unpleasant incident never happened), avoidance (staying away from people or situations that are liable to make us anx-ious by stirring up some unconscious—i.e., repressed—experience or emotion), displacement (“taking it out” on someone or something less threatening than the person who caused our fear, hurt, frustration, or anger), and projection (ascribing our fear, problem, or guilty desire to someone else and then condemning him or her for it, in order to deny that we have it ourselves).
Perhaps one of the most complex defenses is regression, the temporary return to a former psychological state, which is not just imagined but relived. Regression can involve a return either to a painful or a pleasant experience. It is a defense because it carries our thoughts away from some present difficulty (as when Death of a Salesman’s Willy Loman flashes back to his past in order to avoid the unpleasant realities of his present life). However, it differs from other defenses in that it carries with it the opportunity for active reversal, the acknowledgment and working through of repressed experiences and emotions, because we can 
alter the effects of a wound only when we relive the wounding experience. This is why regression is such a useful therapeutic tool.
Many psychological experiences can function as defenses, even when not for-mally defined as such. For example, fear of intimacy—fear of emotional involve-ment with another human being—is often an effective defense against learning about our own psychological wounds because it keeps us at an emotional distance in relationships most likely to bring those wounds to the surface: relationships with lovers, spouses, offspring, and best friends. By not permitting ourselves to get too close to significant others, we “protect” ourselves from the painful past experiences that intimate relationships inevitably dredge up. Having more than one romantic or sexual partner at a time, breaking off romances when they start to evolve past the infatuation stage, and keeping oneself too busy to spend much time with family and friends are just a few of the many ways we can maintain an emotional distance from loved ones without admitting to ourselves what we are doing.
Of course, sometimes our defenses momentarily break down, and this is when we experience anxiety. Anxiety can be an important experience because it can reveal our core issues. Let’s begin our discussion of core issues and their relation-ship to anxiety with some examples of the more common core issues.
Fear of intimacy—the chronic and overpowering feeling that emotional close-ness will seriously hurt or destroy us and that we can remain emotionally safe only by remaining at an emotional distance from others at all times. As we saw above, fear of intimacy can also function as a defense. If this particular defense occurs frequently or continually, then fear of intimacy is probably a core issue.
Fear of abandonment—the unshakable belief that our friends and loved ones are going to desert us (physical abandonment) or don’t really care about us (emotional abandonment).
Fear of betrayal—the nagging feeling that our friends and loved ones can’t be trusted, for example, can’t be trusted not to lie to us, not to laugh at us behind our backs, or in the case of romantic partners, not to cheat on us by dating others. 
Low self-esteem—the belief that we are less worthy than other people and, therefore, don’t deserve attention, love, or any other of life’s rewards. Indeed, we often believe that we deserve to be punished by life in some way. 
Insecure or unstable sense of self—the inability to sustain a feeling of personal identity, to sustain a sense of knowing ourselves. This core issue makes us very vulnerable to the influence of other people, and we may find ourselves continually changing the way we look or behave as we become involved with different individuals or groups.
Oedipal fixation (or oedipal complex)—a dysfunctional bond with a parent of the opposite sex that we don’t outgrow in adulthood and that doesn’t allow us to develop mature relationships with our peers. (Tyson 26–27) 
You may notice that some of the core issues listed above seem related. Just as fear of intimacy can function as both a defense and a core issue, a given core issue can result from another core issue or can cause the emergence of another core issue. For example, if fear of abandonment is my core issue, I am liable to develop fear of intimacy as a core issue as well. My conviction that I will eventually be abandoned by anyone for whom I care might lead me to chronically avoid emo-tional intimacy in the belief that, if I don’t get too close to a loved one, I won’t be hurt when that loved one inevitably abandons me. To use another example, if low self-esteem is my core issue, I might develop fear of abandonment as a core issue as well. My belief that I am unworthy of love might lead me to expect that I will be abandoned eventually by anyone I love. Or my low self-esteem might lead me to develop fear of intimacy. My belief that I am less worthy than other people might lead me to keep others at an emotional distance in the hope that they won’t find out that I am unworthy of them. Of course, these are just some of the ways that core issues are connected to one another. I’m sure you can think of others. 
The most important fact to remember is that core issues define our being in fundamental ways. They do not consist of occasional negative feelings, such as passing episodes of insecurity or low self-image. Having an occasional “bad-hair day,” for instance, does not indicate the presence of a core issue. Rather, core issues stay with us throughout life and, unless effectively addressed, they deter-mine our behavior in destructive ways of which we are usually unaware. In other words, anxiety can tell us a good deal about ourselves because we are anxious in situations in which our core issues are in play. For example, I become anxious when one of my friends goes to the movies with another friend because it makes me relive the abandonment I felt from a neglectful parent whether or not I see the connection between the two events. That is, I feel abandoned now because I was wounded by feeling abandoned as a child, and I am anxious because I don’t want to admit to myself that, in some important way, I was abandoned by my parent. So I become hurt and angry with my friend without consciously knowing why. My unconscious knowledge of the reason why is what makes me anxious. In this way, anxiety always involves the return of the repressed: I am anxious because something I repressed—some painful or frightening or guilty experi-ence—is resurfacing, and I want to keep it repressed. Psychoanalysis, as a form of therapy, is the controlled working in and with anxiety. Its goal (unlike that of ego psychology, which is a popular form of therapy today) isn’t to strengthen our defenses or restore us to social adaptation but to break down our defenses in order to effect basic changes in the structures of our personality and the ways we act.
Under ordinary circumstances, however, our defenses keep us unaware of our unconscious experience, and our anxiety, even if it is somewhat prolonged or recurrent, doesn’t succeed in breaking through our repression. How then, with-out the aid of psychotherapy, can we learn about the operations of our own unconscious? As I noted earlier, patterns in our behavior, if we can recognize them, provide clues, especially in the area of interpersonal relations and, within that domain, especially in our romantic or sexual relationships, because it is here that our initial unresolved conflicts within the family are reenacted. In addition, we have access to our unconscious, if we know how to use it, through our dreams and through any creative activities we engage in because both our dreams and our creativity, independent of our conscious will or desire, draw directly on the unconscious.
Dreams and dream symbols
When we sleep, it is believed that our defenses do not operate in the same manner they do when we are awake. During sleep, the unconscious is free to express itself, and it does so in our dreams. However, even in our dreams there is some censorship, some protection against frightening insights into our repressed experiences and emotions, and that protection takes the form of dream dis-tortion. The “message” our unconscious expresses in our dreams, which is the dream’s underlying meaning, or latent content, is altered so that we don’t readily recognize it through processes called displacement and condensation. Dream  displacement occurs whenever we use a “safe” person, event, or object as a “stand-in” to represent a more threatening person, event, or object. For example, I may dream that an elementary school teacher is sexually molesting me in order to express (and at the same time avoid) my unconscious knowledge that one of my parents sexually molested me. Condensation occurs during a dream when-ever we use a single dream image or event to represent more than one uncon-scious wound or conflict. For example, my dream that I’m battling a ferocious bear might represent psychological “battles” or conflicts both at home and at work. Or, to expand on the above example, my dream that I am being sexu-ally molested by an elementary school teacher might represent my unconscious feeling that my self-esteem is under attack by any number of family members, friends, and colleagues. (A single dream event may thus be a product of both displacement and condensation.)
Because displacement and condensation occur while we dream, these processes are referred to collectively as primary revision. What we actually dream, once primary revision has disguised the unconscious message, or the dream’s latent content, is the dream’s manifest content. The dream images described above—images of an elementary school teacher molesting me and of myself battling a ferocious bear—are examples of manifest content. What these images actually mean is the dreams’ latent content, and that is a matter of interpretation. Is the elementary school teacher a stand-in for one of my parents, or are the images of sexual molestation a stand-in for verbal attacks on my self-esteem? Does the bear represent a psychological conflict, and if so, what is that conflict? In interpreting our dreams then, our goal is to recall the manifest content and try to uncover the latent content. However, we must remember that, at this conscious stage as well, we’re very liable to unconsciously change the dream in order to further pro-tect ourselves from knowing what is too painful to know. For example, we might forget certain parts of the dream or remember those parts somewhat differently from how they actually occurred. This process, which takes place when we are awake, is called secondary revision.
It may be helpful to think of the dream’s manifest content as a kind of dream symbolism that can be interpreted much the way we interpret symbols of any kind, if we keep in mind that there is no one-to-one correspondence between a given symbol and its meaning. That is, while there are some images that tend to have the same symbolic meaning from dreamer to dreamer, at least if those dreamers are members of the same culture, there are also important individual differences in the ways we represent our unconscious experience in our dreams. So to increase our chances of interpreting our dreams accurately, we must learn over time how we tend to represent certain ideas, feelings, and people in our dreams, and we must know the context in which a particular dream image occurred: what happened in the dream before, during, and after a particular dream image appeared?
Certain general principles of dream interpretation tend to apply in most cases, and they are as follows. Because dreamers create all the “characters” in their dreams, there is a real sense in which each person we dream about is really a part of our own psychological experience that we project during the dream onto a stand-in. If I dream that my sister gives birth to a stillborn child, for example, I might be dreaming either that I have given birth to a stillborn child (a failed relationship? a failed career? a failed artistic endeavor?) or that I am a stillborn child (am I feeling abandoned? helpless? depressed?). As this example makes evi-dent, dreams about children almost always reveal something about our feelings toward ourselves or toward the child that is still within us and that is probably still wounded in some way.
Given that our sexuality is such an important reflection of our psychological being, our dreams about our gender roles or about our attitudes toward our-selves and others as sexual beings are also revealing. In order to interpret these dreams, we need to be aware of the male and female imagery that can occur in them. Male imagery, or phallic symbols, can include towers, rockets, guns, arrows, swords, and the like. In short, if it stands upright or goes off, it might be func-tioning as a phallic symbol. For example, if I dream that I am holding my friend at gunpoint, I might be expressing unconscious sexual aggression toward that friend or toward someone else for whom that friend is a safe stand-in (such as my friend’s mate or my mate). In addition, my sexual aggression might be inter-preted in a number of ways: is the emphasis on the sexual, on the aggression, or on both? Do I desire my friend’s mate, or am I jealous of my friend’s mate? Do I want to become more assertive in my sexual relationship with my mate, or do I want to hurt my mate’s sexual self-image as my mate has hurt mine? To decide which interpretation is correct requires more data in the form of other similar dreams, patterns in my waking behavior, and an honest analysis of my feelings about the dream and about the people involved. Analogously, if I dream that I am being held at gunpoint, I might be expressing an unconscious feeling that my sexuality, or my identity in general, is being exploited or endangered.
Female imagery can include caves, rooms, walled-in gardens (like the ones we see in paintings representing the Virgin Mary), cups, or enclosures and containers of any kind. If the image can be a stand-in for the womb, then it might be function-ing as female imagery. Thus, if I dream I am trapped or lost in a small, dark room, I might be expressing an unconscious fear of my mother’s control over me or an unconscious fear that I have never completely matured as a human being. Perhaps I’m expressing both, for these two problems are certainly related. Female imagery can also include milk, fruit, and other kinds of food as well as the containers in which food is delivered, such as bottles or cups (yes, there is an overlap here with womb imagery)—in other words, anything that can be a stand-in for the breast, which is itself a stand-in for emotional nurturing. So if I dream that I am trying to feed a litter of hungry kittens from a small and rapidly diminishing bottle of milk (a dream that either gender can have), I might be expressing an unconscious feeling that too much is being asked of me by my children or by my spouse or by my employer—or by all of them—or that I am putting too much pressure on myself to take care of others. Analogously, if I dream I am hungry or looking for food, I might be expressing an unconscious need for emotional nurturing. 
To move to other kinds of symbols, if I dream about water—which is fluid, changeable, sometimes soothing, sometimes dangerous, and often deeper than it looks—chances are good that I’m dreaming about my sexuality or the realm of the emotions or the realm of the unconscious. So a dream that I’m about to be overwhelmed by a tidal wave probably indicates some fear of being overwhelmed by a repressed emotion that I fear is about to erupt. Of course, water is also related to our experience in the womb, so dreams that involve water, especially immersion in water, might also be about our relationships with our mothers. Dreams about buildings may refer to my relationship with myself, with the attic or the basement as the stand-in for the unconscious. Or dreams about buildings may refer to my relationship with some institution that the building represents for me, for example, the church, the school, the company for which I work, or the law (which, because it represents social rules and definitions, might be a stand-in for my superego). Although we might often dream about fears and wounds that we know we have—that are clearly part of our conscious experi-ence—our dreams about these concerns probably indicate that we need to work further on them, that they bite into us in ways we aren’t ready to admit. Of course, recurring dreams or recurring dream images are the most reliable indica-tors of our unconscious concerns. 
Regardless of how frightening or disturbing our dreams are, they are relatively safe outlets for unconscious wounds, fears, guilty desires, and unresolved con-flicts because, as we have seen, they come to us in disguised form, and we will interpret them only to whatever extent we are ready to do so. In addition, if a dream becomes too threatening, we will wake up, as we most often do during nightmares. However, if my nightmares begin to occur while I’m awake—that is, if the breakdown of my defenses is more than temporary, if my anxiety cannot be abated, if the truth hidden by repression comes out before my conscious self in a manner I can neither disguise nor handle—then I am in crisis, or trauma. 
The meaning of death
Crisis brings into the spotlight wounds, fears, guilty desires, or unresolved con-flicts that I have failed to deal with and that demand action. I am flooded by the past because I can now see what was really going on. This is how I can know myself through crisis. Trauma is also used, of course, to refer to a painful expe-rience that scars us psychologically. Thus, I might experience the childhood trauma of losing a sibling to illness, accidental death, or suicide and, in later life, experience the trauma, or crisis, of being flooded by all the guilt, denial, and conflict I’ve repressed concerning that death. And I might also see, for example, the ways in which my parents unconsciously encouraged my guilt in order to relieve their own. 
In fact, our relationship to death, whether or not we are traumatized by it in childhood, is a principal organizer of our psychological experience. Before we examine how our relationship to death operates in this way, it is important to note that death is the subject that, it seems to me, has given psychoanalytic theorists the most trouble probably because of its importance in their own, as well as everyone else’s, psychological experience. There has been some tendency to treat death as an abstraction—that is, to theorize about it in ways that don’t allow us to feel its force too intimately—presumably because its force is too frightening. So even when, or especially when, theorists have addressed the sub-ject of death directly, they sometimes have done so in ways that tend to keep it at an emotional distance from themselves and, therefore, from us. I think this is the reason—to cite just one example—behind Freud’s theory that death is a biological drive, which he called the death drive, or thanatos. 
In suggesting that human beings have a death drive, Freud’s attempt was to account for the alarming degree of self-destructive behavior he saw both in individuals, who seemed bent on destroying themselves psychologically if not physically, and in whole nations, whose constant wars and internal conflicts could be viewed as little other than a form of mass suicide. He concluded that there must be something in our biological makeup as a species to explain this death work, this psychological and physical self-destruction. Of course, when we conceptualize our death work as a drive, as something natural and unavoidable, we are off the hook of having to probe too deeply into its workings or to try to change it; after all, nothing we do can alter a biological drive. This is why I call the concept of the death drive an abstraction, an idea that operates only on the conceptual level, with no connection to the concrete world of experience. Although the concept of the death drive rests on biology, which is concrete reality, it takes our thoughts and our feelings out of the everyday world of action and responsibility, just as abstractions do. And this is exactly why I think some theorists have found abstract explanations of death attractive. Such explana-tions take us out of the everyday world in which our acts of psychological and physical self-destruction occur. 
A more useful, and I think more accurate, way of understanding our relationship to death is to examine it in relation to the rest of our psychological experience, of which it is an integral part. If we do this, we will see that death, in particular fear of death, is intimately connected to a number of other psychological reali-ties. And we will see that individuals respond to death in various ways because of differences in their psychological makeup. In other words, while the processes I am about to describe probably occur in all of us, they will occur to different degrees and with different results in each individual. 
First and foremost, for many of us, the thought of our own death keys into our fear of abandonment, our fear of being alone. Death is the ultimate abandon-ment: no matter how close we are to our loved ones, no matter how important we are in our communities, when we die we die alone. Even if we die in a plane crash with two hundred other people, we each die our own private death. Thus, one of the greatest comforts religious belief can offer is to assure us that we will not die alone and that after we die we will not be alone: God the Father will be there for us and with us. Our Heavenly Father will not abandon his children even when everyone else we know has done so. 
Fear of abandonment also plays a role when we fear the death of others. When children lose a parent, when adults lose a spouse, the overwhelming feeling of loss is often a feeling of abandonment. How could you leave me? Don’t you love me? What did I do wrong? Sometimes the bereaved feel abandoned even by God. In this context, whether we realize it or not, the death of a loved one pushes our guilt buttons: somehow I must have been inadequate; I must have done some-thing wrong or I wouldn’t be punished in this way. In fact, fear of such a loss, of such intense psychological pain, is probably the biggest reason why some of us are afraid to get too close to another person or are afraid to love too deeply. If I can hold something back, not give my whole self over to the loved one, then I will be better able to bear the loss when the beloved dies. 
Fear of death is thus often responsible—along with other reasons, as we saw earlier—for fear of intimacy. This is one of the ways we can see how fear of death often results in fear of life. That is, our fear of death, of losing our life, can result in our fear of being intimately attached to life. “When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose,” as so many blues and folk songs have pointed out. This fear of life can also be played out as a fear of risk. The ultimate loss, of which I am utterly terrified, is death. Therefore, I can’t take any risk that might result in death. But life itself ultimately and inevitably results in death. There-fore, I can’t risk living my life. I must somehow remove myself from it by doing as little as possible and by feeling as little as possible: I will try to be emotionally dead to avoid being hurt by death. Taken to its logical extreme, this relationship to death will result in suicide. My intense fear of losing my life makes living so painful and frightening that my only escape is death. 
If we complicate matters by realizing that our fear of death is not merely fear of biological death but translates for most of us into fear of loss in general—loss of my mate’s attention, loss of my children’s love, loss of my health, loss of my job, loss of my looks, loss of my money—then we can see how death, emotional death if not biological death, is so attractive, at least on the unconscious level: if I don’t feel anything, then I can’t be hurt. And if we realize that our first experi-ence of death is not biological at all, but the psychological “death” most of us suffered the first time we felt abandoned by a parent, then we can see the ways in which our early experiences of abandonment created our fear of death. This desire not to feel, this desire to insulate ourselves from life in order to insulate ourselves from pain, is probably the most common form of death work. 
Is it any wonder then, given the enormous role that death plays in our lives, that we should be fascinated with it? In fact, I think it’s reasonable to conclude that the greater our fear is, the greater our fascination becomes. Put another way, the greater the role that death work plays in our psychological being, the greater our attraction is, despite the horror that accompanies it, to death in all its forms: we can’t see too many violent movies or docudramas about natural disasters; we can’t keep our eyes off the roadside car wreck; we can’t see too many newsreports about child abuse, rape, and AIDS; we can’t see too many made-for-television movies about people who kill their spouses or their lovers’ spouses, or too many talk shows on which members of dysfunctional relationships display their dys-functions apparently with no more self-awareness than children displaying their favorite toys. Our fascination with media representations of death and death work is another example of how we project our fears and problems onto people and events outside ourselves. This fascination thus operates as a defense: if I think about the child abuser on the other side of town (or from a different social class or ethnic background from mine) I divert my attention from the ways in which I’ve been abused or from my abuse of others.
The meaning of sexuality
Another area of psychological experience that has tended to elicit abstract explanations—and as we saw above, this points to its frightening power in our lives—is human sexuality. For some psychoanalytic theorists, especially in the past, sexuality was a matter of a biological pressure that is discharged in the act of sexual intercourse. Freud called that drive eros and placed it in opposition to thanatos, the death drive. However, Freud didn’t stop there. For one thing, he realized that our sexuality is part and parcel of our identity and thus relates to our capacity to feel pleasure in ways that are not generally considered sexual. This is why he believed that even infants are sexual beings who pass through stages oral, anal, and genital—in which pleasure is focused in different parts of the body. (You can imagine the furor and the misunderstanding that caused in Victorian society!) Theorists have continued to build on Freud’s insights, and psychoanalysis today sees a close connection between our sexuality and our identity because the origin of our sexual being is in the nature of the affirmation or disruption of our sense of self that occurs in childhood. Therefore, our sexu-ality is one of the clearest and most consistent barometers of our psychological state in general. For psychoanalysis, our sexuality is an inescapable human real-ity to which we must live a relationship. Our sexuality is not a matter of biologi-cal drive-discharge mechanisms but a matter of meanings. In analyzing sexual behavior then, the appropriate psychoanalytic question is “What conscious and unconscious meanings and purposes do I express or enact in my sexuality?” Do I use sex to “purchase” something I want from my mate? Do I withhold sex to punish my mate? Do I avoid sexual encounters altogether? Do I seek frequent sexual encounters with different people? It is interesting to note that these last two questions both suggest a fear of intimacy—if I get too close to someone I will lose myself or be emotionally harmed—because varying our sexual partners can protect us from getting close to any one person as effectively as avoiding sexual encounters completely. 
Of course, sexual behavior is also a product of our culture because our culture sets down the rules of proper sexual conduct and the definitions of normal and abnormal sexual behavior. (For psychoanalysis, there is no meaningful differ-ence between normal and abnormal, and the issue isn’t one of moral versus immoral behavior; there are merely psychological differences among individu-als, and the issue is one of nondestructive versus destructive behavior.) Society’s rules and definitions concerning sexuality form a large part of our superego, or the social values and taboos that we internalize (consciously or unconsciously) and experience as our sense of right and wrong. Whereas the word conscience, as it is usually used, generally implies something good—as Jiminy Cricket says, “Let your conscience be your guide”—the word superego often implies feeling guilty when we shouldn’t, feeling guilty only because we are socially programmed (usu-ally through the family) to feel so, as when we feel guilty for taking a lower-pay-ing job even when we know that it is a more satisfying or socially important one, or when we feel guilty, as many of us still do, for having sexual relations with our beloved prior to marriage. 
The superego is in direct opposition to the id, the psychological reservoir of our instincts, and our libido, or sexual energy. The id is devoted solely to the grati-fication of prohibited desires of all kinds—desire for power, for sex, for amuse-ment, for food—without an eye to consequences. In other words, the id consists largely of those desires regulated or forbidden by social convention. Thus, the superego—or cultural taboos—determines which desires the id will contain. The ego, or the conscious self that experiences the external world through the senses, plays referee between the id and superego, and all three are defined by their relationships: none acts independently of the others and a change in one always involves changes in the other two. In this way, the ego is, to a large degree, the product of conflicts between what society says we can’t have and what we (therefore) want. For this reason, the relationships among ego, id, and superego tell us as much about our culture as they do about ourselves. 
Indeed, it is the cultural context that has helped us come to a more meaningful understanding of some of Freud’s early concepts that seem to contradict our own sense of how the world works. For example, many women, whether they consider themselves feminists or not, have a difficult time believing that little girls, upon realizing that little boys have penises, suffer from penis envy, or the desire to have a penis, or that little boys, upon realizing that little girls don’t have penises, suffer from castration anxiety, or the fear that they will lose their penises. The explanation for these two phenomena becomes clear, however, when we realize the cultural context within which Freud observed them: Victorian society’s rigid definition of gender roles, which was used to oppress females of all ages and to elevate males to positions of dominance in all spheres of human activity. Is it any wonder that a little girl will want (at least unconsciously) to be a little boy when she realizes that little boys have rights and privileges she isn’t supposed to even desire? In other words, when you see “penis envy” read “power envy.” It’s power and all that seems to go with it—self-esteem, fun, freedom, safety from physical violation by the opposite sex—that little girls envy. And what little boy, upon realizing his social superiority to, and power over, little girls, isn’t going to have some anxiety about losing it? “You’re a girl, you sissy!” has the power to wound little boys (and big boys!) because it threatens them with just such a loss of power. Castration anxiety is thus best understood as fear of demotion to the powerless position occupied by females. 
Lacanian psychoanalysis
While the classical psychoanalytic theory we’ve discussed so far in this chapter has long been the standard psychoanalytic approach to literature, there is a brand of nontraditional psychoanalytic theory that is beginning to make its way into the undergraduate English curriculum: that of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981). Lacan’s work is rather abstract, often ambiguous, and almost always difficult to understand. In fact, he claimed that writing about the unconscious should be ambiguous and difficult to understand because the unconscious is itself ambiguous (its manifestations in our dreams, our behavior, and our artistic production, for example, usually have multiple meanings), and the unconscious is difficult to understand. Furthermore, there is a good deal of disagreement among interpreters of Lacan concerning what he actually intended by many of his statements. Finally, Lacan sometimes changed the meanings of some of his key terms over time. Despite these challenges, however, I think we need at least to take an introductory look at some of the main concepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis because these concepts are beginning to show up in students’ writing, and all too often they are being used incorrectly. 
As you’ll see shortly, for example, the word symbolic doesn’t have the same mean-ing when Lacan uses it that it has when we generally use the term in our literary studies. Yet beginning students of theory often refer to Lacan’s use of this term as if he intended it to mean what we commonly mean when we write about the symbols in a literary work, a usage of the word that could hardly be farther from Lacan’s. I think perhaps one reason for this problem can be traced to some of the summaries of Lacanian psychoanalysis from which students frequently take their information, which are often too brief and almost as abstract as Lacan’s own writing. Certainly, you won’t emerge from reading the summary of Laca-nian psychoanalysis offered here with a profound and thorough understanding of Lacan’s work, but I hope you will have a better sense of what Lacan’s ideas do not mean as well as a clearer grasp of what they do.
In order to understand the Lacanian concepts that are most relevant to literary interpretation, we need to begin at the beginning with Lacan’s theory of the psychological development of the infant. In its early months, Lacan maintains, the infant experiences both itself and its environment as a random, fragmented, formless mass. Indeed, the infant doesn’t even differentiate itself from its envi-ronment and doesn’t know that parts of its own body are, in fact, parts of its own body because it doesn’t have a sense of itself that is capable of such an understanding. For example, its own toes are objects to be explored, placed in the mouth, and so forth, just like its rattle or other objects in its environment. At some point between six and eight months, however, what Lacan calls the Mirror Stage occurs. Whether the child sees itself in an actual mirror or sees itself “mirrored” back to itself in the reactions of its mother, the point is that the infant now develops during this stage a sense of itself as a whole rather than a formless and fragmented mass. In other words, the child develops a sense of itself as a whole as if it had identified with the whole image of itself that can be seen reflected in a mirror.
Of course, the child doesn’t have words for these feelings, for it is still preverbal. Indeed, Lacan claims that the Mirror Stage initiates what he calls the Imaginary Order, by which he means the world of images. This is not the world of the imagination, but a world of perception. It’s the world that the child experiences through images rather than through words. And it is a world of fullness, com-pleteness, and delight because with the child’s sense of itself as a whole comes the illusion of control over its environment, of which it still perceives itself an inseparable part, and over its mother, with whom it feels it is in a union of mutual satisfaction: my mother is all I need and I am all my mother needs. Remember, the child’s preverbal feeling of complete union with its mother and, therefore, complete control over its world is illusory, but it is nonetheless very satisfying and very powerful. Lacan refers to this experience as the Desire of the Mother, intending to imply the two-way desire just described, that is, the desire of the mother for the child and the child’s desire of the mother. During this period, the child’s feeling of connection with its mother is, for good or ill, its first and most important experience, and this primary dyad, or twosome, continues until the child acquires language, a change that, for Lacan, is of paramount importance.
For Lacan, the child’s acquisition of language means a number of important things. He refers to the child’s acquisition of language as its initiation into the Symbolic Order, for language is first and foremost a symbolic system of significa-tion, that is, a symbolic system of meaning-making. Among the first meanings we make—or more correctly, that are made for us—are that I am a separate being (“I” am “me,” not “you”) and that I have a gender (I am a girl, not a boy, or vice versa). Our entrance into the Symbolic Order thus involves the experi-ence of separation from others, and the biggest separation is the separation from the intimate union we experienced with our mother during our immersion in the Imaginary Order. For Lacan, this separation constitutes our most important experience of loss, and it is one that will haunt us all our lives. We will seek substitutes great and small for that lost union with our mother. We will spend our lives unconsciously pursuing it in the Symbolic Order—maybe I’ll recapture that feeling of union if I find the perfect mate; if I acquire more money; if I con-vert to a different religion; if I become better looking; if I become more popular; or if I buy a flashier car, a bigger house, or whatever the Symbolic Order tells me I should want—but we will never be able to sustain a feeling of complete fulfillment. Why? Lacan explains that it’s because the kind of fulfillment we seek, though we don’t realize that we’re seeking it, is that feeling of complete-ness, plenitude, and union with our mother/our world that disappeared from conscious experience when we entered the Symbolic Order, that is, when we acquired language. 
Lacan refers to this lost object of desire as objet petit a, or “object small a,” with the letter a standing for autre, the French word for other. Lacan scholars offer various reasons for Lacan’s use of this particular piece of formulaic shorthand. One useful explanation might be that, in separating us from our preverbal world of idealized union with our mother, the Symbolic Order changed our mother into an other (someone separate from me) just as it changed everything else in our preverbal world of union into a world of people and things separate from ourselves. Why a small a (autre: other) instead of the capitalized Other Lacan uses, as we’ll discuss shortly, to refer to a particular quality of the Symbolic Order? Perhaps it’s because our relationship to our objet petit a, to our lost object of desire, is so personal, so individual, so utterly private, whereas our experiences in the Symbolic Order are not. Objet petit a is the “little other” that belongs only to me, that influences only me. As we’ll see, Other with a capital O, in contrast, influences everyone.
It is important to note that objet petit a also refers to anything that puts me in touch with my repressed desire for my lost object. For example, when the nar-rator of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1954) tastes for the first time since childhood a small teacake called a madeleine, he experiences a joyful regression to his early youth. He is flooded with unexpected and vivid memories. 
For him, the madeleine is objet petit a. For The Great Gatsby’s Jay Gatsby, perhaps the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock is objet petit a, for one might argue that the light holds for Gatsby not just the promise of Daisy, but the promise of a return to his innocent youth, a return to a time before he was disappointed and corrupted by life. As these examples illustrate, although the lost object of desire is, literally, our preverbal fantasy union with our mother, there can be events or even whole periods of time later in our youth that we unconsciously associate with that fantasy union, that are stand-ins for it, and that we therefore respond to as lost objects of desire.
The importance of loss and lack in Lacanian psychoanalysis cannot be stressed too strongly. The use of language in general, in fact, implies a loss, a lack, because I wouldn’t need words as stand-ins for things if I still felt that I was an insepa-rable part of those things. For example, I need the word blanket as a stand-in for my blanket precisely because I no longer have my former experience of my blanket. If I felt that my blanket and myself were still in union, were still one and the same thing, I wouldn’t need the word blanket to refer to it. Thus, the Symbolic Order, or the world known through language, ushers in the world of lack. I am no longer one with my blanket, my mother, my world. So I need words to represent my concepts of these things.
In addition, the Symbolic Order, as a result of the experience of lack just described, marks the split into conscious and unconscious mind. In fact, the unconscious is created by our initial repression of our desire for the union with our mother we felt we had prior to the advent of the Symbolic Order. For the lack we experienced was repressed—our overwhelming sense of loss, our frus-trated desire, our guilt over having certain kinds of desire, and the fears that accompany a loss of such magnitude—and as we learned earlier in this chap-ter, it is repression that first creates the unconscious. Indeed, Lacan’s famous statement that “the unconscious is structured like a language” (Seminar, Bk. VII 12) implies, among other things, the way in which unconscious desire is always seeking our lost object of desire, the fantasy mother of our preverbal experience, just as language is always seeking ways to put into words the world of objects we inhabit as adults, objects that didn’t need words when we felt, as preverbal infants, one with them.
The unconscious is also structured like a language in another way that involves loss or lack. For Lacan argues that the operations of the unconscious resemble two very common processes of language that imply a kind of loss or lack: meta-phor and metonymy. Now stay with me here. This argument is less dry and more clever than you might expect. Metaphors occur in language when one object is used as a stand-in for another, dissimilar object to which we want to nevertheless compare it. A red rose, for example, can be a metaphor for my love if I want to suggest that, despite their obvious dissimilarities, my love has the qualities of a red rose: striking beauty, softness to the touch, the ability to hurt me (a rose has thorns, after all), and so forth. Metonymy occurs in language when an object associated with or part of another object is used as a stand-in for the whole object. For instance, I might say, “I think the crown should be expected to behave better” to indicate that I do not approve of something the king has done, with crown as the metonym for king because it is associated with the latter. Note that both metaphor and metonymy involve an absence, a kind of loss or lack: they’re both stand-ins for something being pushed aside, so to speak. The qualities of the rose and the function of the crown are momentarily foregrounded here: the metaphor and the metonym occupy the stage, not the individuals whom these figures of speech represent. 
Metaphor, Lacan observes, is akin to the unconscious process called condensation because both processes bring dissimilar things together. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, in the section entitled “Dreams and Dream Symbols,” condensa-tion occurs when we substitute a person or object for several dissimilar persons or objects, which are thus “brought together.” For example, I might dream I am being pursued by a hungry lion when it is actually my creditors, my disgruntled spouse, and my dissatisfied employer that are all upsetting me. Analogously, metonymy is akin to the unconscious process of displacement because both pro-cesses substitute a person or object for another person or object with which the first is, in some way, associated. As described in the previous sections entitled “The Defenses, Anxiety, and Core Issues” and “Dreams and Dream Symbols,” displacement occurs when we substitute a less threatening person or object for the person or object that is actually distressing us. For instance, I might yell at my child (someone who is “under” me) when it is actually my employer (some-one I am “under”) with whom I’m angry. 
In all of these examples of the ways in which the unconscious is structured like a language, note that the key ingredient is loss or lack. In our recent examples, one thing is always being substituted for another that gets pushed into the back-ground. In our earlier example, something lost is always being pursued but is never found. Thus, in entering the Symbolic Order—the world of language—we’re entering a world of loss and lack. We’ve exited the Imaginary Order, the world in which we had the illusion of fulfillment and control. We now inhabit a world in which others have needs, desires, and fears that limit the ways in which and the extent to which we can attend to our own needs, desires, and fears. There is no more illusion of sustained fulfillment here, no more comfort-ing fantasy of complete control. This new world is one in which there are rules we must obey and restrictions by which we must abide.
The first rule, according to Lacan, is the rule that Mother belongs to Father and not to me. For little boys, at least, this initiation into the Symbolic Order is what Freud calls the oedipal prohibition. Junior must find substitutes for Mother because she is no longer his alone. In fact, because she is Father’s, she is no longer Junior’s at all. It should come as no surprise, then, that Lacan says the Symbolic Order marks the replacement of the Desire of the Mother with the Name-of-the-Father. For it is through language that we are socially programmed, that we learn the rules and prohibitions of our society, and those rules and prohibitions were and still are authored by the Father, that is, by men in authority past and pres-ent. Indeed, the phallus (the symbolic equivalent of the penis and therefore a metaphor for patriarchal power) ironically holds the promise of complete power yet is the sign of lack because it is the sign of the Symbolic Order. And Lacan’s pun on the Name-of-the-Father (in French, the Name-of-the-Father is the Nom-du-Père, which is a pun on the Non—or No—du Père: the “No”-of-the-Father) underscores the restrictive dimension of the Symbolic Order.
So enormous is the role of the Symbolic Order in the formation of what we refer to as our “selves,” in fact, that we are not the unique, independent individuals we think we are. Our desires, beliefs, biases, and so forth are constructed for us as a result of our immersion in the Symbolic Order, especially as that immer-sion is carried out by our parents and influenced by their own responses to the Symbolic Order. This is what Lacan means by his claim that “desire is always the desire of the Other” (Seminar, Bk. XI 235). We may think that what we want out of life, or even what we want at any given moment, is the result of our own unique personalities, our own wills and judgments. However, what we desire is what we are taught to desire. If we were raised in a different culture—that is, in a different Symbolic Order—we would have different desires. In other words, the Symbolic Order consists of society’s ideologies: its beliefs, values, and biases; its system of government, laws, educational practices, religious tenets, and the like. And it is our responses to our society’s ideologies that make us who we are. This is what Lacan means when he capitalizes the word other when discussing the Symbolic Order. Other refers to anything that contributes to the creation of our subjectivity, or what we commonly refer to as our “selfhood”: for example, the Symbolic Order, language, ideology—which are virtually synonymous—or any authority figure or accepted social practice. 
It is important to note, however, that in repressing, in rendering unconscious, our desire for the world of our preverbal childhood—the world in which we had the illusion of fulfillment and control, the world in which we believed Mother lived for us alone—we are not repressing the Imaginary Order. Rather, the Imag-inary Order continues to exist in the background of consciousness even as the Symbolic Order holds sway in the foreground. The Symbolic Order dominates human culture and social order, for to remain solely in the Imaginary Order is to render oneself incapable of functioning in society. Nevertheless, the Imaginary Order makes itself felt through experiences of the kind the Symbolic Order would classify as misinterpretations, misunderstandings, or errors of perception. That is, the Imaginary Order makes itself felt through any experience or view-point that does not conform adequately to the societal norms and expectations that constitute the Symbolic Order. Yet in this capacity, the Imaginary Order is also a fertile source of creativity without which we probably wouldn’t recognize ourselves as fully human. One might even argue that the profound value of the Imaginary Order lies in the very fact of its not controlling our lives the way the Symbolic Order does. Ironically, it is this “lack” of control that probably offers us the only resistance we have to the ideological systems that constitute the Symbolic Order. Nevertheless, Lacan posits that both the Symbolic and the Imaginary Orders attempt to control or avoid what he calls the Real. 
Lacan’s notion of the Real is a very difficult concept that he had trouble explain-ing. One way to think of the Real is as that which is beyond all our mean-ing-making systems, that which lies outside the world created by the ideologies society uses to explain existence. That is, the Real is the uninterpretable dimen-sion of existence; it is existence without the filters and buffers of our signifying, or meaning-making, systems. For example, the Real is that experience we have, perhaps on a daily basis even if it’s only for a moment, when we feel that there is no purpose or meaning to life, when we suspect that religion and any or all of the rules that govern society are hoaxes or mistakes or the results of chance. In other words, we experience the Real when we have a moment in which we see through ideology, when we realize that it is ideology—and not some set of timeless values or eternal truths—that has made the world as we know it. We sense that ideology is like a curtain upon which our whole world is embroidered, and we know that behind that curtain is the Real. But we can’t see behind the curtain. The Real is something we can know nothing about, except to have the anxious feeling from time to time that it’s there. That’s why Lacan calls this kind of experience the trauma of the Real. It terrifies us because it tells us that the meanings society has created for us are just that—the creations of society—but it gives us nothing in place of those meanings. The trauma of the Real gives us only the realization that the reality hidden beneath the ideologies society has created is a reality beyond our capacity to know and explain and therefore cer-tainly beyond our capacity to control.
Okay, if you’ve hung on this far, you must be asking, “What does all this have to do with literary interpretation?” Given that Lacanian literary interpretation is quite different from the more standard, or classical, psychoanalytic approach to literature that we address in the rest of this chapter, it might be a good idea just to become generally acquainted with the kinds of literary analysis done by Lacanian literary critics. Our goal here is not to enable you to do a Lacanian 
analysis yourself but simply to familiarize you with this kind of interpretation so that you’ll be more comfortable and knowledgeable when you read Lacanian literary interpretations and, when you’re ready, try one yourself.
Perhaps the most reliable way to interpret a literary work through a Lacanian lens, especially when you first try the approach, is to explore the ways in which the text might be structured by some of the key Lacanian concepts we’ve just discussed and see what this exploration can reveal. For example, do any charac-ters, events, or episodes in the narrative seem to embody the Imaginary Order, in which case they would involve some kind of private and either fantasy or delusional world? What parts of the text seem informed by the Symbolic Order? That is, where do we see ideology and social norms in control of characters’ behavior and narrative events? How is the relationship between these two orders portrayed? What do we learn about characters if we can discover where they’ve invested their unconscious desire for objet petit a? In other words, where has a given character placed (or displaced, to be more precise) his or her unconscious desire for the haunting, idealized mother of infancy? Does any part of the text seem to operate as a representative of the Real, of that dimension of existence that remains so terrifyingly beyond our ability to comprehend it that our impulse is to flee it, to repress and deny it?
Let’s look briefly at two literary examples. First, I’m sure many of you have read the frequently anthologized story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman entitled “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892). In what way might we say that the story’s unnamed narrator spends more and more time in the Imaginary Order until she, in effect, lives there entirely? How is her recourse to the Imaginary Order a rejection of the Symbolic Order, which is evidently embodied in her husband and brother? How might the wallpaper be seen as a representation of the Lacanian Real? How do the narrator’s encounters with the wallpaper illustrate the trauma of the Real? Might we be justified in hypothesizing that “The Yellow Wallpaper” illustrates a situation in which a character finds herself caught between a Lacanian rock and a hard place, so to speak, in that she’s caught between two unlivable alternatives: a Symbolic Order she finds too restrictive and the incomprehensible Real? The only position left her, to which she gradually becomes acclimated and which she finally inhabits entirely, is the Imaginary Order. Indeed, the story ends with the protagonist crawling around the room like a very young child, unable to func-tion as a member of society, which Lacanian theory tells us is always the result of total immersion in the Imaginary Order.
For our second brief example, let’s try Kate Chopin’s frequently anthologized novella The Awakening (1899). Here again, we have a female protagonist, Edna Pontellier, who is drawn to the Imaginary Order: in her case, the world of art, music, sexual freedom, and romance. She is drawn to the Imaginary Order partly in response to the emotionally distant father and older sister who raised her and partly in response to her husband Léonce, who is so thoroughly bound to the Symbolic Order that he is practically its poster child. However, Edna is also drawn to the Imaginary Order in search of something she can’t identify. She is haunted by a longing that can’t be satisfied, not by her art, not by Mademoiselle Reisz’s music, not by her own sexual freedom, and not by romance. A Lacanian reader might say that Edna remains unsatisfied because she doesn’t realize that art, music, sexual freedom, and romance are just her substitutes for objet petit a, the fantasy union with her mother/her world she experienced in infancy and still unconsciously desires. Indeed, we might argue that it is the strength of this unconscious desire that finally draws her, as naked as the day she was born, into her fatal union with the sea, where her last experiences are sensory, not verbal, memories of her youth: she hears the barking of a dog, the clanging of spurs, the hum of bees, and she smells the odor of flowers. In terms of Edna’s experience, then, we might be justified in hypothesizing that The Awakening is structured by the protagonist’s unconscious search for objet petit a, a search that is necessarily unsuccessful, for objet petit a is always a lost object that can never be found.
Of course, Lacanian psychoanalysis employs many more concepts and is much more complex than a brief summary like this can convey. Nevertheless, even these few theoretical concepts and literary examples can allow us to begin to understand the unique perspective on human experience and the interesting insights into literature Lacan offers us. 
Classical psychoanalysis and literature 
Of course, there are also many more concepts in classical psychoanalysis than the ones discussed earlier. And as in every field, there is a good deal of dis-agreement among classical psychoanalytic theorists concerning, for example, the ways in which our personalities are formed and the best ways of treating dysfunctional behavior. Among psychoanalytic literary critics, there is much disagreement concerning how psychoanalytic concepts can best be applied to our study of literature. What role should an author’s literary output play in our psychoanalysis of his or her life? To what extent is it legitimate to psychoanalyze literary characters as if they were real people? When doing so, which psychoana-lytic theorists offer us the best insights? What role do readers play in “creating” the text they’re reading by projecting their own desires and conflicts onto the work? As you’ll see when you read chapter 6 on reader-response criticism, psy-choanalysis and reader-response theory overlap in many ways concerning their attention to the psychological experience of the reader. We’ll also see in chapters 3 and 4 some overlap of psychoanalysis with Marxism and feminism as well as some ways in which Marxism and feminism reject the psychoanalytic perspec-tive. Our purpose at this point, however, is simply to cover the main ideas, the basic principles of psychoanalysis to which most other psychoanalytic concepts are in some way related in order to facilitate your reading of psychoanalytic theorists and literary critics with some understanding of the issues they raise. 
It stands to reason that you won’t find every psychoanalytic concept we’ve dis-cussed represented in every literary work you read. Our job, when we read psy-choanalytically, is to see which concepts are operating in the text in such a way as to enrich our understanding of the work and, if we plan to write a paper about it, to yield a meaningful, coherent psychoanalytic interpretation. From the perspective of classical psychoanalytic theory, which is our primary focus in this chapter, we might attend mainly to the work’s representation of oedipal dynamics or of family dynamics in general; to what the work can tell us about human beings’ psychological relationship to death or to sexuality; to the way the narrator’s unconscious problems keep asserting themselves over the course of the story; or to any other psychoanalytic concepts that seem to produce a useful understanding of the text. 
Some critics have objected to the use of psychoanalysis to understand the behav-ior of literary characters because literary characters are not real people and, therefore, do not have psyches that can be analyzed. However, psychoanalyzing the behavior of literary characters is probably the best way to learn how to use the theory. Furthermore, this practice has been defended by many psychoana-lytic critics on two important grounds: (1) when we psychoanalyze literary char-acters, we are not suggesting that they are real people but that they represent the psychological experience of human beings in general; and (2) it is just as legitimate to psychoanalyze the behavior represented by literary characters as it is to analyze their behavior from a feminist, Marxist, or African American critical perspective, or from the perspective of any critical theory that analyzes literary representations as illustrations of real-life issues.
Let’s look at a few specific examples to see the kinds of insights produced by using classical psychoanalysis to interpret the behavior represented by liter-ary characters. A psychoanalytic reading of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) might examine the ways in which Willy Loman’s flashbacks to the past are really regressive episodes brought on by his present psychological trauma: his own and his son’s lack of success in the business world, success Willy needed in order to assuage the massive insecurity he’s suffered since his abandonment in child-hood by his father and older brother. The play is thus structured by the return of the repressed, for Willy has spent his life repressing, through denial and avoid-ance, his psychological insecurity and the social inadequacy and business failure that have resulted. From a psychoanalytic perspective, then, Death of a Salesman might be read as an exploration of the psychological dynamics of the family: an exploration of the ways in which unresolved conflicts about our roles within the family are “played out” in the workplace and “passed down” to our children.
Similarly, a psychoanalytic reading of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) might analyze the ways in which the novel reveals the debilitating psychological effects of racism, especially when these effects are internalized by its victims, which we see in the belief of many of the black characters that their race has the negative qualities ascribed to it by white America. These psychological effects are evident, for example, in the Breedloves’ conviction that they are ugly simply because they have African features; in Mrs. Breedlove’s devotion to the white family for whom she works, while she neglects her own family; in the self-hatred of the young black boys who mercilessly pick on Pecola for having black skin; in the assumption by black characters as well as white that Maureen Peal, a light-skinned African American girl, is superior in every way to her darker-skinned classmates; and in Geraldine’s inability to relax and enjoy her life or let herself love her husband and son because she fears that the slightest loss of control (whether it be the control of her emotions or of her hair’s natural curl) will make her a “nigger,” as she calls any black person who does not conform to her stan-dard of dress and behavior. As these examples illustrate, the novel shows how internalized racism results in self-contempt on the part of the black characters and in a projection of that self-hatred onto other members of their race. We see particularly damaging forms of this projection in much of the black characters’ treatment of Pecola, whose self-negating desire for blue eyes is the most strik-ing illustration of the psychological destructiveness of racism. Or we might use psychoanalysis to understand the ways in which the Breedloves illustrate the dynamics of the dysfunctional family, the roots of which can be seen in Pauline and Cholly’s youthful experiences of isolation, abandonment, and betrayal. 
Finally, a psychoanalytic reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) might reveal the ways in which Victor’s creation of a monster responsible for the deaths of his family and friends serves his unconscious need to punish his father and mother (for whom Elizabeth is an obvious surrogate) and play out the intense, unresolved sibling rivalry created by their adoption of Elizabeth, the “perfect” child, when Victor was five years old. The total absence of any normal child-hood jealousy on Victor’s part, coupled with his frequent protestations of love for the newcomer who dethroned him as the sole object of parental attention and affection, suggest the repression of feelings of abandonment that, because they are kept in the unconscious, are never resolved. We see numerous signs of these unresolved conflicts in Victor’s adult life, for example, in his failure to mention subsequent siblings during the narrative of his childhood with Elizabeth (we learn of their existence through Elizabeth’s letter to him at the university); in his extremely prolonged absence from his beloved family, including Elizabeth, to whom he is betrothed; in the dream sequence that reveals his psychological merger of Elizabeth and his dead mother and foreshadows the former’s death; in his fits of feverish disorientation, which read like dream sequences and include frequent expressions of fear that he is losing his mind or protestations that he is perfectly sane; and in the uncanny way he seems to always make exactly the right move to facilitate the monster’s next murder. Furthermore, we might cautiously speculate on the relationship between the representation of psycho-logical abandonment in the novel and the experiences of abandonment Mary Shelley apparently suffered in her own life: her mother died shortly after Mary was born; her father found single parenthood more than he could handle; and the woman her father subsequently wed neglected Mary in favor of her own daughter by a previous marriage. 
This might be a good place to pause and answer a frequently asked question concerning psychoanalytic readings of literary works: if we find psychoanalytic concepts operating in a literary text, does it mean that the author has deliber-ately put them there, and how can an author put them there if he or she lived before Freud or never heard of him? The answer is simple: Freud didn’t invent psychoanalytic principles; he discovered them operating in human beings. In other words, Freud named and explained principles of human behavior that were present long before he found them and that would be present even if he didn’t describe them. So any literary text that accurately describes human behavior or that is the product of an author’s unconscious (which we presume all cre-ative works are to some extent) will include psychoanalytic principles whether or not the author had any awareness of those principles when writing the work. For psychoanalysis, literature, and indeed all art forms, are largely products of unconscious forces at work in the author, in the reader, or, for some contempo-rary psychoanalytic critics, in our society as a whole. 
Our use of psychoanalytic concepts is not limited to one literary genre or to one artistic medium; we can use psychoanalytic criticism to read works of fiction, poetry, drama, folklore, and nonfiction, and we can use it to interpret paintings, sculptures, architecture, films, and music. Any human production that involves images, that seems to have narrative content (the way many paintings seem to tell a story), or that relates to the psychology of those who produce or use it (which means just about everything!) can be interpreted using psychoanalytic tools.

Example: “What’s Love Got to Do with It?”: a psychoanalytic reading of The Great Gatsby
One area of human behavior explored in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) that has important implications for psychoanalytic criticism is found in the romantic relationships portrayed in the novel. Indeed, even for readers not viewing the novel through a psychoanalytic lens, one of the most memorable qualities of the book is the force and endurance of Gatsby’s love for Daisy, the emotional magnetism of which, for many fans, renders The Great Gatsby one of the great American love stories. For many nonpsychoanalytic literary critics, in fact, Jay Gatsby is a rather larger‑than‑life romantic hero,2 quite different from the other characters portrayed in the novel. For a psychoanalytic reading, how‑ ever, the interest created by the romance between Gatsby and Daisy lies not in its apparent uniqueness but in the ways in which it mirrors all of the less appeal‑ ing romantic relationships depicted—those between Tom and Daisy, Tom and Myrtle, Myrtle and George, and Nick and Jordan—and thereby reveals a pattern of psychological behavior responsible for a good deal of the narrative progres‑ sion. As we shall see, this pattern is grounded in the characters’ fear of inti‑ macy, the unconscious conviction that emotional ties to another human being will result in one’s being emotionally devastated. This psychological problem is so pervasive in the novel that The Great Gatsby’s famous love story becomes, through a psychoanalytic lens, a drama of dysfunctional love. For the sake of clarity, let’s begin by examining the relationship most obviously based on fear of intimacy: the marriage of Tom and Daisy Buchanan.
Perhaps the clearest indication of fear of intimacy in the novel lies in Tom Buchanan’s chronic extramarital affairs, of which Jordan became aware three months after the couple’s wedding. Jordan tells Nick, 
I saw [Tom and Daisy] in Santa Barbara when they came back [from their honeymoon]. . . . A week after I left . . . Tom ran into a wagon on the Ven-tura road one night and ripped a front wheel off his car. The girl who was with him got into the papers too because her arm was broken—she was one of the chambermaids in the Santa Barbara Hotel. (81–82; ch. 4) 
When we meet Tom, he’s engaged in his latest affair, this time with Myrtle Wilson. Dividing his interest, time, and energy between two women protects him from real intimacy with either. Indeed, Tom’s relationships with women, including his wife, reveal his desire for ego gratification rather than for emo‑ tional intimacy. For Tom, Daisy represents social superiority: she’s not the kind of woman who can be acquired by a “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” (137; ch. 7) like Jay Gatsby. Tom’s possession of Myrtle Wilson—whom Nick describes as a “sensu[ous],” “smouldering” woman with “an immediately perceptible vitality” (29–30; ch. 2)—reinforces Tom’s sense of his own masculine power, which is why he brings her to fashionable restaurants where they are seen by his male acquaintances and why he introduces her to Nick so soon after their reunion at his East Egg home. In fact, Tom’s interest in other women is so routine that Daisy has come to expect it. When Tom tells her he wants to eat supper with a group of strangers at Gatsby’s party, rather than with her, because he finds one of the men amusing, she immediately realizes that her husband is pursuing another woman: she offers him her “little gold pencil” in case he wants to “take down any addresses,” and “[s]he looked around after a moment and told [Nick] that the girl was ‘common but pretty’ ” (112; ch. 6). 
Daisy’s fear of intimacy, though as intense as Tom’s, is not quite as immedi‑ ately apparent. Indeed, her marital fidelity, until her affair with Gatsby, and her distress over Tom’s involvement with Myrtle might suggest to some readers that Daisy desires emotional intimacy with her husband. Jordan’s description of Daisy after her honeymoon reinforces this interpretation: 
I’d never seen a girl so mad about her husband. If he left the room for a minute she’d look around uneasily and say “Where’s Tom gone?” and wear the most abstracted expression until she saw him coming in the door. She used to sit on the sand with his head in her lap by the hour, rubbing her ﬁngers over his eyes and looking at him with unfathomable delight. (81–82; ch. 4) 
However, the history of Tom and Daisy’s relationship suggests psychological motives that point to a different interpretation of Daisy’s “delight” in her husband. 
It is obvious that Daisy didn’t love Tom when she married him: she tried to call off the wedding the evening before when she’d received an overseas letter from Gatsby. In fact, her behavior upon receiving his letter suggests that she married Tom to keep herself from loving Gatsby, to whom she had gotten too attached for her own comfort: she got drunk for the first time in her life, and “she cried and cried. . . . [W]e . . . got her into a cold bath. She wouldn’t let go of [Gatsby’s] letter. . . . [A]nd [she] only let [Jordan] leave it in the soap dish when she saw that it was coming to pieces like snow” (81; ch. 4). Why else would she marry Tom, when she obviously preferred Gatsby, who she believed was “from much the same strata as herself . . . [and] fully able to take care of her” (156; ch. 8)? Yet just three months after the wedding she seemed obsessively fond of her new husband. What happened in this short time to change Daisy’s attitude so dramatically? Given Tom’s compulsive pursuit of women, it is probable that by the time he and Daisy arrived in Santa Barbara, Daisy already suspected him of infidelity. This would explain why she seemed so distracted whenever Tom was out of sight. She had good reason to fear that, if he wasn’t with her, he might be pursuing another woman, as she believes he was doing, for example, when she “woke up out of the ether with a totally abandoned feeling,” after giving birth to Pammy, “and Tom was God knows where” (21; ch. 1). Rather than hate him for such mistreatment, however, Daisy fell head‑over‑heels in love with him. Although such a response may not seem to make sense, it can be explained psychologically. 
In psychoanalytic terms, a woman who falls in love with a man suffering from severe fear of intimacy probably fears intimacy herself. If she fears intimacy, nothing can make her feel safer than a man who has no desire for it. Upon learning that Tom’s interest did not focus exclusively on her, such a woman would have become very capable of loving him intensely because he posed no threat to her protective shell: he wouldn’t have wanted to break through it even if he could have. And this is just what we see in Daisy’s changed attitude toward Tom, though she certainly wouldn’t use this language to describe her feelings, and it is very unlikely that she was even aware of her psychological motives. 
As we learned earlier in this chapter, fear of intimacy with others is usually a product of fear of intimacy with oneself. Because close interpersonal relation‑ ships dredge up the psychological residue of earlier family conflicts and bring into play aspects of our identity we don’t want to deal with or even know about, the best way to avoid painful psychological self‑awareness is to avoid close inter‑ personal relationships, especially romantic relationships. Why not simply avoid romantic relationships altogether? Although this practice may be an effective form of avoidance for some people who fear intimacy, the psychological wounds responsible for that fear usually demand a stage on which to reenact, in disguised form, the original wounding experience, and a romantic relationship provides an excellent stage. For example, if I was hurt by a parent who was neglectful or abusive, I will seek a mate who has these same characteristics, unconsciously hoping to fulfill whatever psychological needs were left unfulfilled by that par‑ ent. Ironically, choosing a mate who shares my parent’s negative qualities almost guarantees that my unmet psychological needs will remain unmet. However, by this time in my life, due to the low self‑esteem produced by my psychologi‑ cal wounds, I probably feel I don’t deserve to have my needs met. Because the unconscious premise operating here—I wouldn’t have these wounds if I were a good person—remains repressed, its illogic remains unchallenged, and I remain in its grasp. 
For both Tom and Daisy, fear of intimacy is related to low self‑esteem. If Tom were as emotionally secure as his wealth and size make him appear, he wouldn’t work as hard as he does to impress others with his money and power, as he does, for example, when he brags about his house and stables to Nick, when he flaunts Myrtle before Nick and others, when he degrades those who don’t belong to the “dominant race” (17; ch. l), and when he toys with George Wilson concerning whether or not he will sell George a car that the poor mechanic might be able to resell at a profit. Even Tom’s choice of mistresses—all from the lower class—bespeaks his need to bolster an insecure psyche through power over others. 
Daisy’s low self‑esteem, like her fear of intimacy, is indicated in large part by her relationship with Tom. Falling so much in love with a man who was openly unfaithful to her suggests an unconscious belief that she doesn’t deserve better. Furthermore, Daisy’s insecurity, like Tom’s, frequently requires the ego reinforce‑ ment obtained by impressing others, attempts at which we see in her numerous affectations. Nick notes her artifice when she “assert[s] her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belon[g]” (22; ch. 1): 
“I think everything’s terrible anyhow. . . . Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people. And I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen every-thing and done everything.” Her eyes ﬂashed around her in a deﬁant way, rather like Tom’s, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. . . . 
The instant her voice broke off . . . I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. (22; ch. 1) 
We see Daisy’s affected behavior almost every time we see her in a group, as the following examples illustrate. When Nick joins the Buchanans and Jordan Baker for the first time at Daisy’s Long Island home, Daisy tells him, “ ‘I’m p‑ paralyzed with happiness.’ . . . She laughed . . . as if she said something very witty . . . looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had” (13; ch. 1). At Gatsby’s party she tells Nick, “If you want to kiss me any time during the evening . . . just let me know and I’ll be glad to arrange it for you. Just mention my name. Or pres‑ ent a green card” (111; ch. 6). When Gatsby visits the Buchanans with Nick and Jordan, Daisy sends Tom out of the room, and then she “got up and went over to Gatsby, and pulled down his face kissing him on the mouth. . . . ‘I don’t care!’ cried Daisy and began to clog on the brick fireplace” (122–23; ch. 7). Affectation is often a sign of insecurity, of which Daisy clearly has a good deal. 
Tom and Daisy’s fear of intimacy is apparent in their relationships with others as well. Neither of them spends time with Pammy. Their daughter is being raised by her nurse, and Daisy’s artificial behavior toward the child—“ ‘Bles‑sed pre‑ cious,’ she crooned, holding out her arms. ‘Come to your own mother that loves you’ ” (123; ch. 7)—bespeaks, as usual, an eye for the dramatic pose rather than maternal ardor. Neither Tom nor Daisy forms close ties with Nick or Jordan, although the former is Daisy’s cousin and the latter, whom Daisy has known since childhood, spends a good deal of time living under their roof. In this light, the couple’s frequent relocations—as Nick puts it, they “drifted here and there unrestfully” (10; ch. 1)—are not the cause of their lack of intimacy with others, but the result: they don’t stay in one place for any length of time because they don’t want to become close to anyone. 
It is no surprise, therefore, that Tom’s relationship with Myrtle lacks intimacy. He has no desire to be close to his mistress; she is merely the means by which he avoids being close to his wife. And his treatment of Myrtle certainly suggests no deep emotional investment. He calls for her when it suits him, lies to her about Daisy’s religious opposition to divorce in order to keep her from becom‑ ing inconveniently demanding, and casually breaks her nose with “a short deft movement” (41; ch. 2) when she becomes so anyway. Tom’s maudlin account of his final visit to the small apartment he kept for their rendezvous, where he “sat down and cried like a baby” (187; ch. 9), suggests sentimental self‑indulgence, not love. The only ballast for Tom’s insensitivity to her is Myrtle’s lack of real concern for him. 
For Myrtle, Tom Buchanan represents a ticket out of George Wilson’s garage. Through Tom, Myrtle hopes to acquire permanent membership in a world where she can display the “impressive hauteur” we see her enjoy at the party in the couple’s apartment, during which “[h]er laughter, her gestures, her asser‑ tions became more violently affected moment by moment” (35; ch. 2). While economic desperation, rather than fear of intimacy, is the only motive given in the novel for Myrtle’s pursuit of Tom, her other relationships also suggest that she wants to avoid emotional closeness. She was apparently induced to marry George Wilson not by any personal feeling for him but by her mistaken impres‑ sion that he was from a higher class than the one to which he belongs: she “thought he was a gentleman” who “knew something about breeding,” and when she learned that the good suit in which he was married was borrowed, she “cried to beat the band all afternoon” (39; ch. 2). George’s complete emotional depen‑ dence on Myrtle, like his belief that the billboard eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are the eyes of God, suggests psychological disorientation rather than emotional intimacy. With a man as lost in space as George, Myrtle need not fear his getting too close. And her artificial behavior toward her sister and the McKees, appar‑ ently her only friends, indicates that these relationships provide opportunities for social display, not for intimacy. 
The romance between Nick and Jordan reveals that they, too, fear intimacy. Indeed, Nick is first attracted to Jordan by her self‑containment, by the image of emotional distance she projects. He refers approvingly to Jordan’s apparent “complete self sufficiency” (13; ch. 1) and describes her, along with Daisy, in terms that denote the appeal of their emotional aloofness: 
Sometimes [Daisy] and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire. (16–17; ch. 1) 
He frequently uses words such as insolent, impersonal, cool, and contemptuous to describe what he considers the “pleasing” (23; ch. 1) expression on Jordan’s face. And he remains interested in her as long as she seems to belong to a faraway world, the world of “rotogravure pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach” (23; ch. l), a world seemingly untouched by emo‑ tional realities. However, once the household she shares with the Buchanans becomes too emotionally “untidy,” Nick beats a hasty retreat. After returning with her from the scene of Myrtle Wilson’s death, he declines Jordan’s invitation to keep her company in the Buchanan home: “I’d be damned if I’d go in; I’d had enough of them for one day and suddenly that included Jordan too. She must have seen something of this in my expression for she turned abruptly away and ran up the porch steps into the house” (150; ch. 7). 
Nick subsequently avoids Jordan and shortly thereafter ends the relationship in a manner that keeps him emotionally insulated. He represses the memory of breaking up with her on the telephone the day after Myrtle’s death—“I don’t know which of us hung up with a sharp click” (163; ch. 8)—although he did “throw [her] over” (186; ch. 9), as we learn when Jordan later reminds him of the event. And even when he meets with her to discuss what had happened between them, he admits that he “talked over and around” (185; ch. 9) their shared past, implying that there was a good deal of avoidance of painful issues during the conversation. 
That Nick’s fear of intimacy is not limited to his relationship with Jordan is suggested by his two previous romances. Although he claims that he “wasn’t even vaguely engaged” to “an old friend” (24; ch. 1) back home in Wisconsin, he admits that he came east, in part, to escape local rumors to that effect. The only way he could have been, as he puts it, “rumored into marriage” (24; ch. 1) was if the young lady in question didn’t consider herself just an “old friend.” We learn that she was more than a friend when Nick decides that, before getting involved with Jordan, “first [he] had to get [him]self definitely out of that tangle back home” (64; ch. 3). Clearly, this relationship was more serious than he cares to acknowledge, and he wants out. Similarly, in New York City he “had a short affair with a girl . . . who worked in the accounting department” at his place of business, “but her brother began throwing mean looks in [his] direction so when she went on her vacation in July [he] let it blow quietly away” (61; ch. 3). In other words, when the affair became somewhat serious, he dropped her, again in the manner most likely to avoid an emotional scene. In his relationships with women, Nick is a master of avoidance and denial. 
As Jordan’s “cool insolent smile” (63; ch. 3) suggests, she shares Nick’s desire to remain emotionally insulated, and it is no coincidence that her career and the friends she chooses allow her to do so. Her sporting life provides a ready‑made glossy image—“the bored haughty face that she turned to the world” (62; ch. 3)—to shield her from intimacy with others. “[S]he was a golf champion and everyone knew her name” (62; ch. 3), but she made sure, through various “sub‑ terfuges” (63; ch. 3), that that’s all they know about her. Her choice of friends like the Buchanans, who prefer the world of social image to that of genuine emo‑ tional engagement, also protects her from intimacy. They don’t want to be close any more than she does. And as Nick observes, Jordan “instinctively avoided clever shrewd men” (63; ch. 3) who might see through her charade. Surely, in choosing men like Nick, Jordan is safe from the threat of emotional ties.
Although the intense affair between Gatsby and Daisy seems to be offered as counterpoint to the Buchanans’ marriage of psychological convenience, and to all the other emotionally distant relationships in the novel as well, Gatsby and Daisy’s romance has striking similarities to the others. For example, Daisy has no more desire for intimacy with Gatsby than she has for intimacy with Tom. Her extramarital affair, like her earlier romance with her lover, would not have occurred had she known that Gatsby does not belong to her social class. What‑ ever she feels for Gatsby requires the reinforcement of the same social status Tom provides. Indeed, Tom’s revelation of Gatsby’s social origin during their confron‑ tation in the New York hotel room results in Daisy’s immediate withdrawal: 
[Gatsby] began to talk excitedly to Daisy, denying everything, defending his name against accusations that had not been made. But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up 
and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away . . . struggling . . . toward that lost voice across the room. 
The voice begged again to go. 
“Please, Tom! I can’t stand this any more.” 
Her frightened eyes told that whatever intentions, whatever courage she had had, were deﬁnitely gone. (142; ch. 7) 
All the years of Gatsby’s devotion, as well as Daisy’s desire to be part of his life, disappear for her when she learns that Gatsby does not come from “the right side of the tracks.” And Daisy herself disappears shortly thereafter, as she and Tom pack their bags and leave town directly after Gatsby’s death the following day. 
Daisy doesn’t realize it, but Gatsby and Myrtle function in much the same capacity for the Buchanans: as psychological pawns in their relationship with each other. Just as Tom uses Myrtle to avoid the emotional problems in his marriage, so Daisy uses Gatsby. Gatsby came along again just in time to buffer Daisy from what seems to be a new development in Tom’s extramarital activi‑ ties. The insistent Myrtle intrudes herself, by means of repeated telephone calls, right into Daisy’s home. Tom’s flaunting Myrtle out of Daisy’s sight does not invade his wife’s territory as does his accepting his mistress’s telephone calls at home. Just because a mate’s behavior has psychological payoffs for us—as Tom’s affairs do for Daisy—it does not mean that those behaviors do not also give us pain. That’s why psychological problems are so often referred to as conflicts: we unconsciously desire a particular experience because it fulfills a psychological need, but because that need is the result of a psychological wound, the experi‑ ence is often painful. 
Daisy’s marriage has become painful, and her affair with Gatsby provides a wel‑ come distraction. If she has Gatsby, she can tell herself that she doesn’t need Tom, that she doesn’t even have to think about Tom (or, better yet, she can think about how her affair with Gatsby is an appropriate punishment for Tom), and she can therefore afford the blasé attitude toward Tom’s womanizing that she exhibits at Gatsby’s party. Daisy’s affair thus functions as a psychological defense, and as such, it underscores the psychological importance of her dys‑ functional marriage: if her marriage weren’t a powerful force in her life then she wouldn’t have to defend against it. In fact, it is the continued unconscious importance of her marriage that finally makes Daisy feel safe enough to be with Gatsby again. As long as she remains psychologically involved with Tom, she need not fear that she will develop the kind of attachment she had to Gatsby before her marriage. 
Given that Gatsby and Myrtle are psychological tokens in the Buchanans’ mar‑ riage, it is symbolically significant that Tom and Daisy, in effect, kill each other’s 
lover. Although it is apparently a genuine accident, Daisy is the driver who kills Myrtle with Gatsby’s car. Far less of an accident, surely, is Tom’s sending George Wilson, armed and crazed, to Gatsby’s house. Even if, from fear for his and Daisy’s lives, Tom felt he had to tell Wilson that it was Gatsby who killed Myrtle (or so Tom thought), had Tom not hoped Wilson would kill his wife’s lover he could have phoned Gatsby to warn him. That Daisy lets Gatsby take the blame for Myrtle’s death, apparently without a second thought, indicates both her conception of him as an emotional buffer between her and the world and, once her knowledge of his social origin renders him useless as her lover, his expendability. 
For many readers, perhaps the most difficult case to make for fear of intimacy is the case for Gatsby. How can we say that Gatsby fears intimacy when he is committed to Daisy as to “the following of a grail” (156; ch. 8), when he kept a scrapbook of all news items concerning her, when he remained faithful to her even during the long years of her married life, and when all the money he acquired during that time was acquired only to win Daisy back? We can make the case by examining what it is that Gatsby remains devoted to in remaining devoted to Daisy. 
Although Gatsby believes that his ultimate goal is the possession of Daisy—a belief that many readers, as well as Nick, Jordan, Tom, and Daisy, seem to share—Daisy is merely the key to his goal rather than the goal itself. Gatsby had set his sights on the attainment of wealth and social status long before he knew Daisy. The boyhood “schedule” of Jimmy Gatz (Jay Gatsby’s legal name)—in which the young man divided his day, in the self‑improvement tradition of Ben Franklin, among physical exercise, the study of electricity, work, sports, the practice of elocution and poise, and the study of needed inventions—suggests that he’d long planned to live the “rags‑to‑riches” life associated with such self‑ made millionaires as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. 
Gatsby’s desire to move up in the world resulted from his unhappy life with his impoverished parents, “shiftless and unsuccessful farm people” (104; ch. 6). And, apparently, the unhappiness of his boyhood resulted from more than his family’s poverty, as is hinted when Mr. Gatz tells Nick, “He told me I et like a hog once and I beat him for it” (182; ch. 9). Whatever psychological traumas Gatsby suffered in his youth, they were sufficient to make him completely reject his emotional relationship with his parents: “his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all” (104; ch. 6). Thus, from a psychoanalytic perspective, Gatsby’s invented past is more than just a ploy to pass himself off as a member of the upper class; it’s also a form of denial, a psychological defense to help him repress the memory of his real past. And his claim that his invented family “all died and [he] came into a good deal of money” (70; ch. 4) becomes, in this context, a metaphor for his desire to psychologically kill the parents whose wounding influence still inhabits his own psyche and, paradoxically, receive from those parents the psychological nourishment—the “money”—they’d never given him. 
The financial achievements Gatsby planned for himself revealed their ultimate psychological payoff, however, only upon meeting Daisy. “She was the first ‘nice’ girl he had ever known. . . . [H]e had come in contact with such people but always with indiscernible barbed wire between” (155; ch. 8). Through Daisy, he could imagine what it would feel like to be part of her world, to be, as he felt she was, “gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor” (157; ch. 8), the struggles he experienced as a youth, which he can’t help but associate with the psychological pain of that period of his life. Daisy is, for him, not a flesh‑and‑blood woman but an emblem of the emotional insulation he unconsciously desires: emotional insulation from himself, from James Gatz and the past to which he belongs. As we saw in the case of Tom and Daisy, the best way to achieve emotional insulation from oneself is to avoid intimacy with others. Gatsby’s outrageous idealization of Daisy as the perfect woman—she can do no wrong; she can love no one but him; time cannot change her—is a sure sign that he seeks to avoid intimacy, for it is impossible to be intimate with an ideal. In fact, we can’t even know a person we idealize because we substitute the ideal for the real human being, and that’s all we see. Even during the years when his only access to her was through the news items he read in the society pages, Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy protected him from intimacy with other women. 
It is significant, then, that Fitzgerald could not imagine what went on emotion‑ ally between Gatsby and Daisy during their Long Island affair. As the author notes in a letter to Edmund Wilson, he “had no feeling about or knowledge of . . . the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy from the time of their reunion to the catastrophe” (Letters 341–42). I think it is clear, from a psycho‑ analytic perspective, that Fitzgerald was unable to provide us with an account of their emotional relationship because there is none. I’m not suggesting that Gatsby and Daisy don’t experience emotions, but that whatever they feel for each other is always a means of avoiding feeling the effects of something else, something profoundly disturbing that they want to keep repressed, for example, Gatsby’s unhappy youth, Daisy’s dysfunctional marriage, and both characters’ fear of intimacy. 
Clearly, a psychoanalytic lens reveals a much different love story than the one ordinarily associated with The Great Gatsby. As the novel illustrates, romantic love is the stage on which all of our unresolved psychological conflicts are dra‑ matized, over and over. Indeed, it’s the over‑and‑over, the repetition of destruc‑ tive behavior, that tells us an unresolved psychological conflict is “pulling the strings” from the unconscious. All of the characters discussed above illustrate this principle, though its operations are, at once, most dramatic and most camou‑ flaged—that is, most repressed—in Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy. For   Gatsby’s repression of his psychological motives outstrips that of all the other characters put together. His famous words “Can’t repeat the past? . . . Why of course you can!” (116; ch. 6) are especially meaningful in this context because they betoken the implicit premise on which the psychoanalytic content of the novel is based: that our repression of psychological wounds condemns us to repeatedly incur them. Gatsby’s lonely pursuit of Daisy replays the loneliness of his youth, and he seems to feel as much an outsider in the mansion he bought to receive her—the only room he uses or marks with a personal possession is his bedroom—as he must have felt in the home of his parents. Surely, Gatsby could not have been wounded more severely by his parents than he is by Daisy’s abandonment of him, both when she married Tom and when he loses her again to his rival the night of Myrtle Wilson’s death. Thus, whether it intends to do so or not, The Great Gatsby shows us how effectively romantic relationships can facilitate our repression of psychological wounds and thereby inevitably carry us, as the novel’s closing line so aptly puts it, “ceaselessly into the past” (189; ch. 9).