Tag: freud

Masochism at its finest; the Princess takes back

Reading Materials for the Week: “Perils of the Princess: Gender and Genre in Video Games.” – Sharon R. Sherman; “The Other Side of the Valley; Or, Between Freud and Videogames – Kent Aardse; “Love Thy Neighbor? No Thanks!” (chapter in The Plague of Fantasies) – Slavoj Zizek.

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Alice: Madness Returns is a new take on Alice, Through the Looking Glass, taking the Burton-esque of interpretation of Alice’s Adventures (both of Lewis’ novels) to another level completely. Developed by Chinese game company Spicy Horse and released by EA Games, the game draws from American McGee’s Alice. It is essentially a re-make of this game, but with a few twists added and a few tweaks made. For example, the voice actors of American McGee’s Alice have American accents – and, let’s face it, it doesn’t work at all. Whether they’re bad voice actors or they just don’t fit the graphics doesn’t really matter; what matters is that the new voice actors of Alice and her compatriots do work, with British accents that actually fit the characters (visually) they voice. Not only that, but the artistry of the game is phenomenal; much of the character design is visually stunning (the character of Alice, particularly), with a lot of focus on little details. That being said, the game is quite glitchy; but it seems to work well with the content given that we jump back and forth from the interior (imaginary) space of Wonderland to (the real space of) London quite often.

After one has collected enough memories, Alice will come across a waiting wooden door behind which flames flicker. She opens the door and walks into the flames of her past. In this way she continually embraces death, and through this death, the death of memories (that moment of the past where she forgot them). She is trying to embrace the Real through a journey to the deepest recesses of her mind; it involves death, but does not culminate in it. This task gives her a way to touch-base with reality instead, fomenting a trajectory of travel out of these sewing marks as she stitches the Real and the unconscious together. Let us align the past with the present.

Zizek writes:

Here we can see clearly how fantasy is on the side of reality, how it sustains the subject’s ‘sense of reality’: when the phantasmic frame disintegrates, the subject undergoes a ‘loss of reality’and starts to perceive reality as an ‘irreal nightmarish universe with no firm ontological foundation; this nightmarish universe is not ‘pure fantasy’ but, on the contrary, that which remains of reality after reality is deprived of its support in fantasy. So when Schumann’s Carnaval – with its ‘regression’ to the dream-like universe in which intercourse between ‘real people’ is replaced by a kind of masked ball where one never knows what or who is hidden beneath the mask which laughs crazily at us: a machine, a slimy life-substance, or (undoubtedly the most horrifying case) simply the real double of the mask itself – sets Hoffmann’s Unheimliche to music, what we obtain is not the ‘universe of pure fantasy’ but, rather, the unique artistic rendering of the decomposition of the fantasy-frame. (84)

Something has evidently happened at the outset of the game (which opens with one of her therapy sessions) to draw her back into Wonderland, which is now completely changed. When Alice arrives in Wonderland, she serenely and matter-of-factly notes this, as if this disturbingly twisted Wonderland is merely a scientific phenomenon. Emotion has no place here. When the Cheshire Cat points out this change again later on, she immediately refers to the authority of her psychologist: “Doctor Bumby says that change is constructive, that different is good.” Alice has been desensitized by the authoritative psychoanalytic framework she has been forced to view her thoughts through. But her unconscious (in the form of the cat) tells her otherwise: “Different denotes neither bad nor good, but it certainly means not the same.” As we find out at the end of the game, her psychologist is actually responsible for the deaths of her family, and the burning of her home. The purpose of entering Wonderland is her mind’s way of pointing her in the right direction. When Alice comes across the vorpal blade early in the game, she (her consciousness) says “I’ve not come back here looking for a fight.” “Really?” The Cheshire Cat replies “That’s a pity. One’s certainly looking for you.” Alice is thus being called by her own mind to commit masochism in the aim of freedom, murdering the disgusting and dangerous creatures created inside her, out of the external forces that have acted and caused her to unleash hell unto herself. What this yields, Zizek illustrates, is how the framework of reality was originally constructed and how to create a new one.

Aardse’s piece on the ‘Uncanny Valley’, stemming from the writings of Freud and Mori, was inspiring in light of this psychoanalytically based game. Freud (2003) makes a distinction between our perception of familiar things (“heimlich”) and our perception of unfamiliar things (“unheimlich”), to say that unheimlich is necessarily connected as an idea to heimlich. “[A]mong the various shades of meaning that are recorded for the word heimlich there is one in which it merges with its formal antonym, unheimlich, so that that which is called heimlich becomes unheimlich.” (132) Unheimlich, he shows, deals with the removal of something from one’s vision, or at least the sense that something is secret or hidden in the confrontation. I also read recently De Beauvoir’s chapter called “Childhood” in The Second Sex. She talks about the doll that the girl is given as reparation for the fact that she lacks a penis, which, for the little boy, brings him to assume his “subjectivity” “boldly”, given that he easily dominates his fear of castration. “[T]he very object in which he alienates himself becomes a symbol of autonomy.” (293) Thus “the little girl pampers her doll and dresses her how she dreams of being dressed and pampered; inversely, she thinks of herself as a marvelous doll.” (293) Relating this notion to Freud’s discussion of the automaton Olympia in E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Sandman, an interesting idea about the control of a female character emerges. Freud writes: “the theme of the doll Olympia, who is to all appearances a living being, is by any means the only, or indeed the most important, element that must be held responsible for the quite unparalleled atmosphere of uncanniness evoked by the story.” (Aardse, 2014, 3) If we consider the mystification of women, then the fact that the game is centered in and around the unconscious mind of this female becomes salient. Alice is a digital woman, and by this definition brings forth the uncanny experience. She is the doll we caress and play with in the absence of a phallus. This brings me to the following questions: When a female plays the game, is it empowering? And when a male plays the game, is it uncanny? It seems to me (on a De Beauvoirian reading), that the female has been given a phallus by utilizing the video game controller. She can do the same as man, now that she has been given the implement she requires. And surely the male feels uncertain at playing the female heroine, as the boys that Sherman interviews affirm. But the male player does not experience this fear of the unfamiliar in Alice, for everything about her speaks of a masculine drive/purpose; yet, the princess is not absent. The male player can feel as though he is the prince saving the princess at the same time, even if it is actually the princess who saves herself.

Alice herself treats the situation with blunt purposefulness; she treats her own (conscious) self like a tool. Could this be connected to De Beauvoir’s penis envy? She recalls a case when a little girl, upon seeing a boy peeing proclaimed “How practical!”; the female at this age has no sexual interest in the penis, but rather in the conceptual phallus constructed around and out of the penis itself. She wants the power of controlling an object in this way. Indeed, Alice herself searches for Law inside Wonderland, concerned about the ethics at play. To what governing system must she adhere in this new, horrifying unconscious? “Changes here are the cause, or their the reflection, or the effect. What’s going on? What are the new rules?” she asks. She is here attempting to find a symbolic language in this world that imposes itself, like the masculine register in place back in London. She (her consciousness) does not yet realize that it is her job – her goal – to re-discover/re-create the symbolic register for herself. She must destroy the creatures that retain elements of the dingy, industrial London she hails from (many of them have pipes spurting oil out of their bodies, for example) in order to be freed. Thus in the masochistic impulse lies a prospective future of pleasure; once again, Alice will be able to inhabit the ‘magic circle’ of her mind as more than a tool, as a subject who plays in the realm of the unconscious…

Other References:

De Beauvoir, S. The Second Sex.  (C. Borde and S. Malovany-Chevalier, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books.

Freud, S. (2003). The Uncanny. (D. McClintock, Trans.). London: Penguin Books.

Chapter 1 Transcript for Alice: Madness Returns. Accessible from: http://alice.wikia.com/wiki/Transcript:Alice:_Madness_Returns.

 

Reading Freud in Kafka

I only just received my copy of ‘To the Lighthouse’ by Virginia Woolf in the mail today, and so I have not yet had the opportunity to fully complete my readings for the week. Consequently, I decided I would make a post about an observation made while reading Stijn Vanheule’s book, “The Subject of Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective” (2014).

Vanheule’s book is divided into two parts, inspired by the strong distinction between Lacan’s early work, and his later work. I have just entered the ‘Second Era: The Age of the Signifier’, where Vanheule goes into greater depth on Lacan’s idea of how language works, which Lacan developed after his doctoral dissertation. This newer work departed from a number of earlier theories, now establishing the body of work for which he is best known. In this later work, Lacan takes paradigm of the signified, signifier, and signification from the linguist de Saussure. Lacan comes to the conclusion that the unconscious follows the logic of the signifier, which is one part of the ‘liguistic sign’. (Vanheule, 2014, 35) It is the analyst’s job to detect these signifiers in a patient’s speech; but unlike Freud, Lacan does not believe that we should determine the underlying cause of speech patterns (therefore psychosis) based off of what we (the analyst) learns from psychotic speech.

The signifier is a identifiable entity in language because it is delimited by the very fact of its existing within the context of a signified chain of speech. As can be surmised by this definition, the signified has an implied connection to a signifier through the verbalization of some idea. Thus, “grammar and syntax have a fundamental effect on the creation of meaning.” (36) Vanheule writes: “speech hooks the signifier to the signified or creates ‘button ties’ in discourse. Their effect is that the sliding of the signified under the signifier comes to a halt.” (37) Language grounds signification of what is in the unconscious; this is the result of the relationship between these two entities.

Much more detail could be gone into regarding the nature of these entities and how they function with regard to a greater social spectrum and to the individual psyche; however, I will refrain from doing so because I wish to address a particular passage of Vanheule’s, where he discusses a case study that interested Lacan – namely, Freud’s Mr. E, who “had an ‘anxiety attack at the age of ten when he tried to catch a black beetle’.” Further:

“During a session Mr. E, when speaking about his anxiety attack, connected the idea of the beetle (Kaefer in German) to the word ladybug (Marienkaefer in German). Before making this connection Mr. E had been talking about his mother, who was called Marie. In other words, the topic of his mother constituted the basis upon which further associations were made. In the path of associations the word ‘Marie’ led to the word Marienkaefer. Furthermore, when talking about his mother Mr. E mentioned that as a child he had heard a conversation between his grandmother and aunt. Freud states that this was about the marriage of his mother, where ‘it emerged that she had not been able to make up her mind for quite some time. As a child Mr. E grew up with a French-speaking nurse, and therefore learned to speak French before German. Regarding the following session with Mr. E, Freud states that just prior to the session ‘the meaning of the beetle [Kaefer] had occurred to him; namely: que faire? – being unable to make up one’s mind…'” (Vanheule, 2014, 38)

Vanheule relates Lacan’s conclusion, which is just that the “acoustic image” relates to two different conceptions. 1) about the bug, and 2) about the mother’s hesitation. The bug is the symbol that represents the mother’s hesitation. The subjective truth of the matter is repressed by Mr. E. (Vanheule, 2014, 38)

This whole idea reminds me of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), and so I went back to read the story on Project Gutenberg (E-book released 2005). From the very first lines of the story, we can detect a metaphor for the concept of a phonetic chain consisting of signifiers. “He lay on his armor-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections.” (Kafka, 2005) We notice too that Kafka displays an interest in surfaces and the ambiguous resonations those walls produce. By resonations, I mean the symbolism implied by the plain and seemingly unassuming insertion of phrases such as “His room, a proper human room although a little too small, lay peacefully between its four familiar walls.” In fact, this particular syntactical construction anthropomorphizes Gregor’s room, pointing out the fact that it is composed of pieces and is not a singular whole. This idea coincides clearly with Lacan’s ideas, if we conceive of part of his issue as arising from the failure to express his feelings of degradation in the job he works. But if we make a connection between Gregor’s story and Freud’s Mr. E, we might turn again to Freud for his model of consciousness in light of his (subsequent, but more important to our reading) model of trauma. Indeed, though Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” was not published until 1920, the corollaries to Kafka’s story are almost uncanny.

First of all, as Susan Bernofsky (2014) points out, Kafka did not want Insekt on the cover of the story, preferring instead the title we know well. Further, the word Ungezeifer, which stems from the Middle High German, ungezibere, is the word Kafka first uses to introduce Gregor’s state. Ungezibere is supposedly a negation of zebar, meaning “sacrifice” or “sacrificial animal”. Ungeziefer describes the class of insect-creature. The word in German suggests primarily six-legged insects, though it otherwise resembles the English word “vermin”. Ungeziefer is also an informal equivalent of “bug,” though the connotation is “dirty, nasty bug”. Thus, Bernofsky (2014) concludes, the word used to introduce Gregor’s newfound condition is highly ambiguous.

Cvetkovich (2003) writes, Freud invites his reader to “picture a living organism in its most simplified possible form as an undifferentiated vesicle of a substance that is susceptible to stimulation.” (53) The model organism is thus abstract, a “little fragment of living substance”, “suspended in the middle of an external world charged with the most powerful energies” (Freud’s words). (Cvetkovich, 2003) External energies are dangerous for this fragile entity, which is cause for fear of penetration. Thus the creature acquires a shield in order to defend against external penetration; and whatever (and whenever) penetration is experienced, it is deemed traumatic. The shield is formed out of what Cvetkovich calls “the death of its [the organism’s] outer layers” which is submitted so that the rest of the organism may live. It is my contention that Gregor represents an individual who has undergone trauma in his attempts to keep his family financially afloat; it has caused his mental condition, which, Kafka implies, also has every kind of effect on the human body. Gregor’s inability to command regular use of his limbs, such as the fact that his new body does not allow him to sleep on his right side, could represent the fact that, while his outer crust protects him, it separates him in some way from his family, who (at least in his eyes) still ‘alive’. In the unconscious’ attempt to protect the body, the individual is also alienated from the world. He has metaphorically represented mental inhibition and trauma and the (Freudian) reaction of the ego to that trauma.

This idea of Freud’s interests me in particular, and I hope to use it in analyzing future readings for my independent study. It would also be interesting to look at the dialogue of female characters in literature using the Lacanian conception of signification in relation to this concept of creating a protective shield.

Sources:

Franz Kafka (2005). The Metamorphosis. D. Wylie, Trans. (Original work published 1915). Retrieved from: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5200/5200-h/5200-h.htm.

Stijn Vanheule (2014). The Subject of Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Susan Bernofsky (2014, January 14). On Translating Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”, Retrieved from: http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/on-translating-kafkas-the-metamorphosis.

 

 

Reading Melanie Klein

Reading Material of the Week: “Introduction to Melanie Klein” – Juliet Mitchell, in Reading Melanie Klein, edited by Lyndsey Stonebridge and John Phillips; “Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse” – Melanie Klein; “The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego” – Melanie Klein. I also went back and read The Malady of Death by Margurite Duras.

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Melanie Klein’s writings illustrate her experiential studies of the child, going through her interactions in great detail. For Klein, violence centers her exploration of the infant and the child’s ego. She talks about the child’s anxiety and guilt related to the penis and the mother’s body. One could say that the idea of the penis destroying the female body via penetration is her primary thesis point, specifically focusing on translating the Freudian psychoanalytic stages of child development and taking the Oedipus complex for granted. This is an interesting concept, the idea that the male actually destroys the female body, hurts it violently, in the act of hopeful reproduction. In many ways, it is a very feminist reading of the child’s psychosexual development; the language Klein uses, as well as her almost hyper-insistent return to (or repetition of) “the zenith of sadism” being reached, the anxiety (according to Freud’s interpretation) about that sadism [throughout her diagnosis in “Symbol Formation in Ego Development”], gives the Oedipus complex and its manifestations a new tone. In  “The Importance of Symbol Formation,” Klein talks about her engagement with a small boy named Dick, who does not display the Oedipus complex normally (she concludes that the boy represents an instance of childhood schizophrenia, though today he would be considered autistic). Klein manages to find references to the mother and father in everything the small child does (which seems mildly pedantic to me), and that in many ways this hyper-focus results in a biased assessment of the child’s ego. Let me supply a section where this is most salient:

The first time Dick came to me, as I said before, he manifested no sort of affect when his nurse handed him over to me. When I showed him the toys I had put ready, he looked at them without the faintest interest. I took a big train and put it beside a smaller one and called them ‘Daddy-train’ and ‘Dick-train’. Thereupon her picked up the train I called ‘Dick’ and made it roll to the window and said ‘Station’. I explained: ‘The station is mummy; Dick is going into mummy.’ He left the train, ran into the space between the outer and inner doors of the room, shut himself in, saying ‘dark’ and ran out again directly. He went through this performance several times. I explained to him: ‘It is dark inside mummy. Dick is inside dark mummy.’ Meantime he picked up the train again, but soon ran back into the space between the doors. While I was saying that he was going into dark mummy, he said twice in a questioning way: ‘Nurse?’ (102)

To our adult minds it does indeed seem as though Dick shows that the child’s position is at least with the mother, (Klein interprets this as importantly inside her, as in, inside/entering the womb). When Klein explains to the child that the train station is the mother and the child responds by going inside the closet, it seems as though Klein has implanted the idea in the child’s head. Her language betrays this, her phraseology “going into mummy” suggests already to the child that he has gone into something, thus requiring an appropriate response to the idea of ‘going into’ and of therefore ‘being inside’. Further, Klein’s claim that when Dick “discover[s] the wash-basin as symbolizing the mother’s body, and displayed an extraordinary dread of being wetted with water,” that “urine represented to him injurious and dangerous substances” (104). It seems to me that the child has rather equated water and basin-shapes with the mother, and thus considers that anything that should go inside the basin-shape already is or will become a part of her.  This is not internal poison; he is worried that he has hurt the mother in some way. In many ways, Klein is projecting a pre-interpretation of the child’s impulses and trapping the boy in a particular psychoanalytic mindset. In this, I am reminded of Zizek’s big Other and how it manifests in Plath’s The Bell Jar; Esther’s Other is the psychoanalytic platform, the established social norm with which one signs (ha) a contract.

I was also reminded of Marguerite Duras’ The Malady of Death.  This is a strange experimental book, consisting of only 60 pages of enlarged text. The platform on which we establish our protagonist is the self – in other words, the reader (individually and collectively, each at once but also not at the same time). Duras addresses the audience directly in second person; “You” are the thing that makes the book happen. Without the “You” Duras’ statements about ‘what you do’ could not exist. “You” are the subject. “You” are the actor of the great play. Imagine an audience; everyone in it has the capacity to be (and already is) the “You” which Duras addresses. And “You” are therefore ambiguous, transitory; but you are also an aggressor, you do things to the woman (who is the primary object, the only other “character” that appears) inside the book, you do things to the book that are unconscious as you read. “The body’s completely defenseless, smooth from face to feet. It invites strangulation, rape, ill usage, insult, shouts of hatred, the unleashing of deadly and unmitigated passions.” (16)

“You” are like an infant yourself. There is a distance established between the self and the “you” on the page by the virtue of narrative. “You” don’t seem to understand how the female works, what she is for, everything is experimental and there is a very real sense that sexual attraction is not present; that violence is latent but always stewing underneath the skin.

“You look at her. She’s very slim, almost frail. Her legs have a beauty distinct from that of the body. They don’t really belong to the rest of the body. You say: You must be very beautiful. She says: I’m right here in front of you. Look for yourself. You say: I can’t see anything. She says: Try. It’s all part of the bargain. You take hold of the body and look at its different areas. You turn it round, keep turning it round. Look at it, keeping looking at it.” (16-17)

“Out of the half-open mouth comes a breath that returns, withdraws, returns again. The fleshly machine is marvelously precise. Leaning over her, motionless, you look at her. You know you can dispose of her in whatever way you wish, even the most dangerous. But you don’t Instead you stroke her body as gently as if it ran the risk of happiness. Your hand is over the sex, between the open lips, it’s there it strokes. You look at the opening and what surrounds it, the whole body. You don’t see anything. You want to see all of a woman, as much as possible. You don’t see that for you it’s impossible.” (35-36)

This echoes Lacan’s conception of courtly love, his understanding of the lack in the woman which the man consistently attempts to find identity in, so as to validate his existence through her. He uses her for this, but can never be satisfied because as Other, she is merely a sight of recognition which is always there but also not there; she is eternally elusive. Imagine her, as if she were the ghostly Francesca, partially shielding herself from the gaze with a kind of fabric just as she moves in rebellion, in order to disrupt that gaze further…

[Space 2, Providence, Rhode Island, Francesca Woodman]

“There’s nothing left in the room but you. Her body has vanished. The difference between her and you is confirmed by her sudden absence.” (52)

Is there a way that we can interpret The Malady of Death in terms of Klein? “The Malady of Death is inside you,” says the woman, claiming that you can never start to “begin”. The phallus has been passed down from the father to the son, the progeny of Adam being eternally embedded in the male physiognomy. “You” wish to kill her (“While she lives she invites murder.” (33)) because the possibility of her disappearance and the fact that “you” see your own self projected on her speaks to your own being. “You” see her in relation to the gaping “black sea”, which you look out upon: “It occurs to you that the black sea is moving in the stead of something else, of you and of the dark shape on the bed.” (28)

“You look at the malady of your life, the malady of death. It’s on her, on her sleeping body… You don’t love anything or anyone, you don’t even love the difference you think you embody.” (32-33) Though “your” emotions are practically nonexistent throughout the book, you finally develop to where you can cry about your condition (46), “[going on] with the story about the child” (49). Like Dick – as Klein works with him over time – “You” have finally found some measure of (Lacanian) symbolic articulation – you have found a language of expression [in some capacity], even if the woman does not understand your words.

According to Klein, the expression of anxiety and libidinal interest (that is, of the unconscious phantasy) sets going the mechanism of identification, the forerunner of symbolism, which arises out of the baby’s endeavor to rediscover in every object his own organs and their functioning. Sadism predominates at the phallic stage of development (the third of Freud’s stages, though Klein prefers the idea of ‘position’ rather than ‘stage’, conceptually allowing for “much more flexible to-and-fro process[es] between one and the other” (Hinshelwood, 1991)). At this position, the child wishes to possess every part of the mother and destroy her completely by every weapon of sadism. Klein believes that the child has expectations about what is inside the mother. First, the child expects to find (a) the father’s penis, (b) excrement, and (c) children – and all of this he/she associates with edible substances. The child fears the penis, the breasts, the vagina, and so the child represents these things in objects. The child’s first understanding of sex is that the father becomes one with the mother, and so sadistic acts directed at various objects are aimed at both parents. Anxiety is felt out of fear of punishment, which becomes internalized because of oral-sadistic introjection of the objects which goes to form the moral standards by which the ego operates (the super ego).

The boy that she analyzes appears to be unable to express this anxiety; that is, she concludes, the anxiety he felt about penetrating the mother’s body and what would be done to him [particularly by the father’s penis] – for apart from all else, he was only interested in trains, stations, door-handles, doors and the opening and shutting of them; Dick did not display any interest in most other objects around him. Further, he put a stopper on his ability to actually be aggressive, like normal children. This was manifest because he would not eat properly, and at four years could not hold scissors, knives or tools, but could happily utilize a spoon. Klein hypothesizes that all of these worked in defense against sadistic impulses to mutilate the mother’s body. This had resulted in “the cessation of the phantasies and the standstill of symbol formation.” He was unable to represent his phantasies in the world around him. Klein’s imposition of representation for him helped him begin to act more like the typical child who expresses anxieties in the expected way.

My idea is this: That the “You” of The Malady of Death has failed to express his anxieties in the appropriate way. He knows in some distant way that this is related to the opposite sex but does not understand it, having only the black (meaning dark, empty, expressionless, void-like) sea as company before the woman comes. There is of course Lacan tied up in the interpretation, which I discussed earlier. But with the introduction of woman, we see that the man still cannot establish proper contact with the woman because his phantasies have been repressed to the point that they do not even come to the fore of consciousness once he begins to do things to her that are fundamental to such phantasies. He knows he can kill her, but doesn’t move to; instead, he uses her, objectifies her, until finally he is able to weep before her about his own death. In no way do You recover from the sufficient maltreatment undergone as an infant (that is, the failure of the parents to meet the requirements of each development stage); rather, You find yourself eternally stuck within the pre-oedipal death drive, represented by the house you never leave – which the woman enters, and the sea flanks.