Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis
Dr Madeleine Newman

What is it?
A discipline founded by Freud
- a method of investigation focussing on the unconscious meaning of words
- psychotherapeutic model

Sigmund Freud 1856-1939
- Austrian Psychiatrist who revolutionised psychology
- office filled with antiquities from ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt etc
- moved to London to live and work for the last year of his life – resulted in Freud museum
- collection is important as it is linked to the idea of psychoanalysis itself as a kind of archaeology

Sexuality and Development
- Alfred Hitchcock – Spellbound, 1945

Studies on Hysteria
- 1885-1886 Freud worked in a French hospital with neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot working on their interest in neuroses
- Charcot also investigated hypnosis as a diagnostic tool
- Freud used hypnosis until 1896
- Josef Breuer developed the concept of catharsis – the location and replacement of a certain event in ones memory
- Albert Londe – photograph entitled hysterical yawning

(see powerpoint for dictionary definitions of neuroses and catharsis)

Repression
- Freud concluded that sexual emotions that were repressed could cause neurotic symptoms
- lead to investigations into sexual desire

Free Association
- the unconscious mind is seen to be a reservoir for repressed memories of traumatic events that continuously influence conscious thought or behaviour
- psychoanalysis seen as 'the talking cure'

Salvador Dali, Lobster Telephone, 1936
- according to the Tate gallery 'Lobsters and telephones had strong sexual connotation for him, he drew a close analogy between food and sex'

Paula Rego, The Family, 1988

The Three Stages of Infantile Sexuality
- psychoanalysis suggests that as children develop they sense data in the world around them by connecting their bodily sensations to emotions – fear, frustration, satisfaction, anger etc
- for the infant this would be the family unit – the mother as they develop and are weaned

3 Stages – Oral, Anal, Phallic
here the infant's sexual development related to changes in their own body – auto-erotisism


Mary Kelly, Post Partum Document, 1973 1979

The Oedipous Complex
- the concept of being in love with ones mother and jealous of their father
- early childhood emotional relations come into conflict wit each other, producing loving and hostile wishes
- on a basic level this is a desire for the death of the same sex parent and a sexual desire for that of the opposite

Louise Bourgeois - with Filette, photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe, 1968
- The Destruction of The Father, 1974

The Structure of the Mind
The Unconscious
- created when a very young child's drives and instincts start to be disciplined by the cultural rules and norms of society
- the boundary between the conscious mind and the unconscious is breached – dreams, parapraxes etc

Mapping the Mind
- conscious, preconscious and unconscious also followed by the ego, id and super-ego
- Freud's conception of the human psyche in the iceberg diagram
(see vle for full descriptions on these)

Relationship with the external world
- Jacques Lacan – The Mirror Stage (self actualisation) and Lacanaian Psychoanalysis

The Gaze
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still 6, 1977

Dreams/Surrealism
- ideas of dreams as 'disguised hallucinatory fulfillments of repressed wishes'
- dreams are a balance between censorship and expression
- 'The Dream-Work' – the process of understanding dreams and the metaphors and meanings then contain, this is in relation to 'the latent content' and 'the manifest content'

Automatic Writing
The Exquisite Corpse – method of combining words and images.
By Man Ray, Joan Miro and Ybes Tanguy

Paul Nouge, The Subversion of images, 1929-1930
images of sleepwalking, trance-like states and automatic writing in action

As a tool for analysis
- it becomes a critical perspective or tool for analysis within the remit of cultural theory

Conclusions
'For Freud, psychoanalysis is about memories, thoughts, feelings, fantasies, intentions, wishes, ideals, beliefs, psychological conflict and all that stuff inside what we like to call our minds' – Ward and Zarate