Freud and Lacan

I thought Freud and Lacan were very interesting to read and I definitely understand the material more and more as the semester goes on. I think I have trained my mind to be more open and less rigid when reading this type of material. I do think that some of Freud’s thoughts are a little bizarre but he makes good points. When he talks about dreams being an outlet for our repressed desires or fears that want to make their way into our conscious mind I agree (Barry 99). I feel that dreams always have meaning whether it is blatantly obvious or disguised; there is a reason behind it. I thought the way in which he tied the unconscious to literature was interesting as well. He says, the unconscious is like a play, poem or novel. They all can not speak directly and explicitly but they do so through images, symbols, emblems, or metaphors. Literature as well expresses and shows experience in these same ways. (Barry 102).
Where I started to think he went a little of-the-wall with his ideas was when he discussed Dora. I do not feel she wanted what happened to her to happen. I feel Freud is male oriented in his thoughts and a sexist especially in this case. It just aggravated me that he would say it was her fault that an older man came on to her, because she obviously suffered from this experience and his so called help was definitely no help to her at all. I did however see where he was coming from when he said that Hamlet had the Oedipus complex. I mean I have read the story before and he does hesitate to kill his uncle to avenge his father’s death. I do not know if he did in fact hesitate because he wanted to sleep with his mother but I can see why Freud may think this and I feel his thoughts are more justified here then in Dora’s story.
Lacan was very interesting as well. His thoughts made me think just like Freud’s did. When he changed Descartes’ famous saying of, “I think, therefore I am” to “I am where I think not,” I thought that was very clever of him. I agree with it too. I do believe that our true selves lie in our unconscious and we let those thoughts and feelings out every day in some way whether we are aware of it or not. Our unconscious affects our conscious life.
Lacan feels that language is a system that is already complete before we enter into it. He says that characterization (which needs to be rejected) must be viewed as assemblages (a collection of people or things) of signifiers. When the story by Edgar Allen Poe is discussed I understood what Lacan was getting at. The letter in the story is a symbolic object of the unconscious self because we never find out what the letter says just that is very important and effects all the actions of the story. Just like the letter’s contents being unknown so is our unconscious contents. Our unconscious effects our behavior just as the letter affected the characters behavior in the story. Psychoanalysis which deals with repetition and substitution is represented in the story by the investigation of the crime by Dupin. It is repetitive because Dupin steals the letter from the Minister who stole the letter from the Queen. His theft is achieved by substituting the real letter with a fake one.
When he says that all words are put away letters I understood the idea of the signifier having no simple connection to the signified. The signified is always lost he says. In this story we see the significance of the letter but not what is signified within it. The analogy he uses with the envelopes being the signifiers that can not be opened leaving the signified to remain hidden I thought was a good way to explain this idea.
I really enjoyed reading Poe’s story through Lacan’s ideas. It helped me understand Lacan better and I thought it was interesting. It also made me realize what I want to do for the essay!