FEMININITY , NARRATIVE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS--Juliet Mitchell

FEMININITY, NARRATIVE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
Juliet Mitchell

[ This post is an attempt to explain the essay to undergraduate students of Indian Universities. ]
Dr. S. Sreekumar

Juliet Mitchell——a brief biographical note

Juliet Mitchell was born in New Zealand in 1940. Later her family moved to London. She read English at Oxford and taught at the universities of Leeds and Reading. In the 1960s, Mitchell was actively involved in politics and was on the editorial committee of the journal, New Left Review. In 1974 she published Psychoanalysis and Feminism and subsequently trained at the institute of Psychoanalysis. At present she works as a psychoanalyst in London.

Feminism and Psychoanalysis——certain issues

Psychology and Literature--Carl Gustav Jung

Bharathiar University  

MPhil (English) Study Materials  

PAPER II – APPROACHES TO LITERATURE

Unit IV

C.G.Jung (Lodge, pp 175-227)

Psychology and Literature

Carl Gustav Jung

By S. Sreekumar

Carl Gustav Jung (1875 –1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung’s work has been influential not only in psychiatry but also in anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy and religious studies. Freud wanted him to be his potential heir to carry on his "new science" of psychoanalysis. However, Jung's researches and personal vision were different from Freud’s and a breach took place between the two.

WHAT IS AN AUTHOR ? Michael Foucault

WHAT IS AN AUTHOR ?

[Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?]

Michael Foucault

[Critical summary of the essay for Students of Indian Universities]

Dr. S. Sreekumar

Overview

This is a lecture on literary theory given at the Collège de France on 22 February 1969 by Michel Foucault. It considers the relationship between author, text, and reader; concluding that: “The Author is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes and chooses. The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.”  Foucault's lecture responds to Roland Barthes' essay "The Death of the Author".

Works

Mental Illness and Psychology (1954), Madness and Civilization (1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1963),  Death and the Labyrinth (1963),  The Order of Things (1966),  The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Discipline and Punish (1975),  The History of Sexuality (1976–1984).

Michel Foucault uproots all our conventional notions about the relationship between a book and its author.  However, the element of surprise is not there in Foucault’s position as Roland Barthes (1916-1980) has traversed the same ground before him. “What is an Author?” echoes many of the thoughts of Barthes on the subject of authorship expressed a decade earlier in Writing Degree Zero (1953).Foucault’s concept of author-function is characteristic of some discourses like fiction but it is not the trait of discourses like letter writing. Author function is connected to the system of property ownership that became common in eighteenth century.

Foucault’s attack on the concept of author is much stronger than that of Barthes. Barthes did not transgress the boundaries of literary theory. He merely wanted to activate the reader and place him at the center of discourse.

Let us conclude this overview with an observation that to women and people of color the question, “What does it matter who is speaking?” is relevant. For them ‘who writes’ makes a difference. As one commentator puts it, “it is important to know “who is writing” in order to interpret a statement in the context of gender and race”.

CREATIVE WRITERS AND DAY DREAMING -- FREUD--Criticism & Theory

CREATIVE WRITERS AND DAY DREAMING

FREUD

Sigmund Freud is one of the ‘seminal minds of modern era. He is recognized as the founder of psycho-analysis. Most human mental activity, according to Freud, is unconscious and the primary source of psychic energy –LIBIDO—is sexual. Freud divides the human mind into 3 zones:

1.      The ID--unconscious.

2.      The Ego—conscious personality

3.      The Super EGO—conscience.

Dreams and neurotic symptoms are the result of drives rising from the ID, being repressed by the EGO and the super Ego and finding expression in displaced forms.

            Freud begins the essay by asking: “What is the source from which the creative writer draws his materials?

ÜFor this even the creative writer cannot give a satisfactory reply.

Ü  His attempt is always to lessen the distance between him and the common run of humanity.