Learning about/from Psychoanalysis

“Indeed if the artistic value of such an experiment be measured by the intellectual echoes it may again, long after, set in motion, the case would make in favour of this little firm fantasy-which I seem to see draw behind it today a train of associations. I ought doubtless to blush for thus confessing them so numerous that I can but pick among them for reference.”-alluding to the ways in which all stories can convey deeper meanings which often only appear when an individual has a unique and individualistic response to the material“what is perceived as the most scandalous thing about this scandalous story is that we are forced to participate in the scandal, that the reader's innocence cannot remain intact: there is no such thing as an innocent reader of this text. In other words, the scandal is not simply in the text, it resides in our relation to the text, in the text's effect on us, its readers: what is outrageous in the text is not simply that of which the text is speaking, but that which makes it speak to us”-the scandal of forcing something on the reader, of forcing the story to exist within the reader’s mind to further illustrate the pervasiveness and power of stories and suggestion“Edmund Wilson for the first time suggests explicitly that The Turn of the Screw is not, in fact, a ghost story but a madness story, a study of a case of neurosis: the ghosts, ac- cordingly, do not really exist; they are but figments of the gov- erness's sick imagination, mere hallucinations and projections symp- tomatic of the frustration of her repressed sexual desires”“Wilson's article will provoke a veritable barrage of indignant refutations, all closely argued and based on "irrefutable" textual evidence.”-truly fascinating to see how irrefutable evidence is juxtaposed against the complete subjectivity of psychoanalysis“the "psychoanalytical" camp, which sees the governess as a clinical neurotic deceived by her own fantasies and destructive of her charges; and the "metaphysical," religious, or moral camp, which sees the governess as a sane, noble saviour engaged in a heroic moral struggle for the salvation of a world threatened by supernatural Evil.”" In Heilman's view, James's statement that he has given the governess "authority," is referring but to her narrative authority, to the formal fact that the story is being told from her point of view, and not, as Wilson would have it, to "the relentless English 'authority' which enables her to put over on inferiors even purposes which are totally deluded."-who gets to determine what can be further examined and what must be taken at face value?“The Turn of the Screw may seem a somewhat slight work to call forth all the debate. But there is something to be said for the debate. For one thing, it may point out the danger of a facile, doctrinaire application of formulae where they have no business and hence compel either an ignoring of, or a gross distortion of, the material”“We run again into the familiar clash between scientific and imaginative truth. This is not to say that scientific truth may not collaborate with, subserve, and even throw light upon imaginative truth; but it is to say that the scientific prepossession may seriously impede the imaginative insight”“What is a "Freudian reading" (and what is it not)? What in a text invites-and what in a text resists-a psychoanalytical interpretation? In what way does literature authorize psychoanalysis to elaborate a discourse about literature, and in what way, having granted its authorization, does literature disqualify that discourse?”-who gets to determine these qualifications? Isn’t everything fair game? At what point does something get to be depicted and considered a Freudian reading? Sexuality.“The one characteristic by which a "Freudian reading" is generally recognized is its insistence on sexuality, on its crucial place and role in the text. The focal theoretical problem raised by a psycho- analytical reading would thus appear to be the definition of the very status of sexuality as such in a text”-Wilson’s theory is: “that the governess who is made to tell the story is a neurotic case of sex repression, and that the ghosts are not real ghosts but hallucinations of the governess” -highlights all symbols associated with sex“Considered from the "Freudian point of view," sexuality, valorized as both the foundation and the guidepost of the critical interpretation, thus takes on the status of an answer to the question of the text”“The Freudian critic's job, in this perspective, is but to pull the answer out of its hiding place- not so much to give an answer to the text as to answer for the text: to be answerable for it, to answer in its place, to replace the question with an answer. It would not be inaccurate, indeed, to say that the traditional analytical response to literature is to provide the literary question with something like a reliably professional "answering service."-who gets to answer though and who allows for someone to answer on James behalf and as an extension of Freud?“Sexuality, says Freud, is not to be taken in its literal, popular sense: in its analytical extension, it goes "lower and also higher" than its literal meaning, it extends both beyond and below. The relation between the analytical notion of sexuality and the sexual act is thus not a relation of simple, literal adequation, but rather a relation, so to speak, of inadequation: the psychoanalytical notion of sexuality, says Freud, comprises both more and less than the literal sexual act”- The question here is less that of the meaning of sexuality than that of a complex relationship between sexuality and meaning; a relationship which is not a simple deviation from literal meaning, but rather, a problematization of literality as such“The oversimplifying literalization professed by the "wild psycho- analyst" thus essentially misconstrues and misses the complexity of the relationship between sex and sense”“It is indeed because sexuality is essentially the violence of its own non-simplicity, of its own inherent "conflict between two forces," the violence of its own division and self-contradiction, that it is experienced as anxiety and lived as terror. The terrifying aspect of The Turn of the Screw is in fact linked by the text itself, subtly but suggestively, precisely to its non-simplicity”“To participate in a division is, however, at the same time, to fight against division: it is indeed to commit oneself to the elimina- tion of the opponent, and through him, to the elimination of the heterogeneity of meaning, the very scandal of contradiction and ambiguity”“The play of passionate glances becomes even more complex when the act of looking is revealed to be not so much a passive observa- tion but an active operation of substitution. Paradoxically, the intensity of that emotive look directs both the seduction and the story, both the narrative and the emotion toward a rhetorical place rather than an individual object: "he looked at me, but as if, instead of me, he saw what he spoke of."-the implications of this sentence that focus on what the narrator is speaking of and how it is equated to who they are speaking to; thus by being spoken to, the reader finds themselves subject to the story“what Douglas actually "speaks of" is the "general uncanny ugliness and horror and pain" that has to do with ghosts. In becoming, by virtue of his place ("spoken to") the subject of the story ("spoken of"), the reader (as well as the first- person narrator) himself becomes a ghost, occupying the rhetorical ghostly place, bound up in the "uncanniness" of the odd relationship between love, death, and substitution.”“the reader thus becomes the storyteller's ghost (the addressee of his unconscious), the reader, in his turn, transfers on the storyteller or the "author,"-everything transcends and overlaps; the power of transference “transference as the mainspring of psychoanalysis, as the repetitive structural principle of the relation between patient and analyst, and transference as the rhetorical function of any signifying material in psychic life, as the movement and the energy of displacement through a chain of signifier”“Reading, then, begins with an awareness, with a perception of ambiguous signifiers: an enigmatic letter, an unfamiliar and un- canny ghost. The meaning they imply is a knowledge from which the governess is barred ("He's-God help me if I know what he is!"; ch. 5, p. 22). If it is precisely out of lack of knowledge that the reading-process springs, the very act of reading implies at the same time the assumption that knowledge is, exists, but is located in the Other: in order for reading to be possible, there has to be knowledge in the Other (in the text, for instance), and it is that knowledge in the Other, of the Other, which must be read, which has to be appropriated, taken from the Other”-how this relates to the unconscious as the other“As the figure of a knowledge which cannot know itself, which can- not reflect upon nor name itself, the child in the story incarnates, as we have seen, unconscious knowledge. To "grasp" the child, therefore, as both the governess and Wilson do, to press him to the point of suffocating him, of killing or of stifling the silence within him, is to do nothing other than to submit, once more, the silent speech of the unconscious to the very gesture of its repression”-aligns with Freud’s theme of repression“for the governess to be in possession of her senses, the children must be possessed and mad. The governess's very sense, in other words, is founded on the children's madness.”-both cannot be“The paradoxical trap set by The Turn of the Screw is therefore such that it is precisely by proclaiming that the governess is mad that Wilson inadvertently imitates the very madness he denounces, unwittingly participates in it. Whereas the diagnostic gesture aims to situate the madness in the other and to disassociate oneself from it, to exclude the diagnosis from the diagnosed, here, on the contrary, it is the very gesture of exclusion which includes: to exclude the governess-as mad-from the place of meaning and of truth is precisely to repeat her very gesture of exclusion, to include oneself, in other words, within her very madness”“In the textual mechanism through which the roles of the governess and of the children become reversible, and in the text's tactical action on its reader, through which the roles of the governess and of her critic (her demystifier) become symmetrical and interchangeable, - the textual dynamic, the rhetorical operation at work consists precisely in the subversion of the polarity or the alter- native which opposes as such analyst to patient, symptom to interpretation, delirium to its theory, psychoanalysis itself to madness”-exactly! It all turns on each other.“It is through murder that Oedipus comes to be master. It is by killing literary silence, by stifling the very silence which inhabits literary language as such, that psychoanalysis masters literature, and that Wilson claims to master James's text. But Oedipus be- comes master only to end up blinding himself. To blind oneself: the final gesture of a master, so as to delude himself with the impression that he still is in control, if only of his self-destruction, that he still can master his own blindness”“literature (the very literality of letters) is nothing other than the Master's death, the Master's transformation into a ghost, insofar as that death and that transformation define and constitute, precisely, literality as such; literality as that which is essentially impermeable to analysis and to interpretation, that which necessarily remains unaccounted for, that which, with respect to what interpretation does account for, constitutes no less than all the rest: "All the rest is literature," writes Verlaine. “