The
Interpreter’s Freud
Geoffrey
Hartman
Introduction
Hartman is professor of English and
Comparative Literature at Yale. He is a leading member of the deconstructionist
school of criticism. Hartman was not happy with the limitations of New
Criticism. Like many American’s of his generation, he responded eagerly to the
stimulus of post-structuralist theory, especially the work of Derrida.
His
works
Beyond
Formalism, Saving the Text, The Fate of Reading
Main Argument of the essay
Ö Derrida and Lacan speak about the essential instability of
language. This is the perpetual sliding of the signified under the signifier or
the endless deferral of the determinate meaning.
Ö The above-mentioned features of the language liberate the
critic from the obligation to produce interpretive closure. The critic can
explore the potential meaning of a text in a style of semantic free play not
basically different from poetic composition.
Ö In the essay, Hartman suggests that Freud’s analysis of
dreams by means of ‘free association’ led him inexorably to the same
conclusion: HUMAN COGNITION IS ESSENTIALLY POLYSEMOUS. Paradoxically, Freud
believed in the possibility of a ‘scientific discourse of the mind’.
Ö Hartman demonstrates the paradox through an acute reading
of a well-known poem of Wordsworth: ‘A Slumber did my Spirit Seal’. The
analysis shows how the deconstructionist reading of the text can reveal new
richness of meaning in it.
This essay can be divided
into 3 parts[ s.k]
F
|
reud wished to found a science of
mind. His first major work The Interpretation
of Dreams planted the banner of
rational and methodical enquiry in the very swamp of unreason, where few had
ventured and, of those, very few had come back, their sanity intact. Though
psychoanalysis is not a religion, it displays many features of past religions,
including reasoning about unreason, about the irrational forces we live with
and cannot entirely control.
What
is the role of language in this field of forces?
è The language of the interpreter takes for its subject other
language constructs, presenting themselves as textual, like literary
artifacts.
è The discourse of the analyst remains within the affective
sphere of the discourse it interprets
è It is as much a supplement as a clarification
è Instead of an aseptic and methodological purism. This
isolates the interpreter’s language form the so-called object-language,
creating in effect two monologues.
[The analysand’s
discourse is a stream of words that …the analyst cannot shut up in a box. The
analyst runs after the analysand’s words”—Andre Green]
(To understand Freud’s power as an interpreter
it is necessary to read him with an attention solicited by his own immense
culture, in which sensitivity to language stimulated by literature played its
part.
(Freud’s dream analysis does no more and no
less than discloses a life in images or words that has its own momentum.
( Ambiguities, overdetermined meanings, and
strange linkages are more obvious than the coherent design they seem to flee
from.
(Freud’s interpretative method is not as
separate as one might expect from the dream which is its object.
(Both dream and dream analyses are associative
structures.
(The only difference between reported dream and
analytic commentary is that the dream is more elliptical in the way it passes
from sentence to sentence or image to image.
(Freud’s interpretation fills up these ellipses
or ‘absences’ in the dream.
(Freud introduces explanatory material that
branches off with a digressive life of its own.
An Illustration : In trying to understand a dream about
three women, one of them making dumplings (knodel), Freud recalls the ending of
the first novel he had ever read, in which the
hero goes mad and keeps calling out the names of the three women who had
brought him the greatest happiness—and sorrow. One was called Pelagie; and by an eccentric path, the
three women become the three fates; Pelagie
becomes a bridge to the word ‘plagiarize’.In literary studies we often ask
what the genre of a work may be. It is a question when the reader confronts a
new or puzzling form; and it certainly arises when we read The
Interpretation of Dreams.
þ
It is hard
to call the book a work of science, and leave it at that.
þ
What then
is the genre of this book?
[A long quotation from Freud
where he lays bare some of his innermost feelings associated with the term
‘knodel’—Freud speaks about his teachers, his feelings of guilt—a chain of
other associations intimately connected to the personal life of the man]
þ
Hartman
writes, “My quotation from the ‘knodel’ dream suggests that Freud finds a
strange and original way to write a Confession. I mean an autobiography
that lays bare what ever it may be—certainly sexual wishes, guilt feelings, and
social envy, as well as the infantile emotions that spur the quest for
scientific fame”. As Kenneth Burke remarks “…Freud had perfected a method for
being frank”.
þ
Freud’s
way of interpreting dreams becomes a powerful hermeneutics, rivaling that of
the great western religions.
þ
Freud’s
dream book cannot be called a Scripture. It is more like a Confession. But it
fashions a secular key out of phenomena that civilization has repressed by
calling it sacred, irrational, or trivial.
þ
Freud not
only redeems this excluded mass from insignificance, he also introduces strange
new texts for our considerations: texts that are neither literary not
Scriptural but whose discovery throws doubt on the transcription of all
previous inner experience.
þ
Freud
reveals much more than a code for the decipherment of dreams: he invents a
new textuality by transcribing dreams in his own way. It is not just the dream
that is important, but also the dream text.
þ
Psychoanalysis,
thus, creates new texts as well as transforming our understanding of those
already received.
] TWO FEATURES THAT DISTINGUISH PSYCHOANALYTIC
TNTERPRETATION FROM RELIGIOUS
INTERPRETATION:
a. The transactive relation of text
and commentary.
The
dream text is not an object with Scriptural fixity. Scripture itself [the many
books or ‘biblia’ we now call the Bible] had to be edited and fixed by a number
of interpretive communities. But Freud allows us to see the commentary entering
the text, incorporating itself with the dream. His self-analysis invests and
supplements an original version that it becomes less of an object and more of a
series of linguistic relays that could lead anywhere. The dream is like a
sentence that cannot find closure. Freud keeps coming up with fragments of
something already recounted adding meaning to meaning.
Q This extreme indeterminacy is not available to
us in Scriptures.
b. Psychoanalytic interpretation is Kakangelic
rather
than evangelic in nature.
[Kakangelic is a word coined
by Hartman. The New Testament claims to bring good news. If the Gospels
emphasize mankind’s guilt, they also counter it by the possibility of
salvation. But Freud brings bad (kaka) news about the psyche, and offers no
cure except through the very activity –analysis-- which reveals the truth]
i. The dream analysis reflects the Kakangelic
vision. The language of the dream is not
scientific. It is distinctively vernacular. The chain of associations
characterizing the vernacular fails to transform the text into a pure discourse
or sacred instrument of the scientist. The dream discloses what infantile jealousies
can still occur in a scientific project.
o
‘Behold
the dreamer cometh’. That is said mockingly of Joseph in the Pentateuch [Pentateuch
(Greek penta,”five”; teuch,”book”), collectively, first five books of the Old
Testament, that is, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The
term was used by the Christian theologian Origen to denote what the Jews of his
time called the “Five-Fifths of Torah (teaching).” Pentateuch is the
translation of the Hebrew term for this concept. The Torah is the holiest and
most beloved of the sacred writings of the Jews.]
o
Yet Joseph gains
fame not as a dreamer but as a dream interpreter. [Joseph won favour with the
Pharaoh by correctly interpreting the latter’s dreams].
o
We see in Freud the
dreamer rising to fame not through vainglorious dreams but through the art or
science of dream interpretation, which he called ‘the royal road’.
H
|
artman
turns to Wordsworth
respecting Freud’s statement –“the poets were there before me”.
Hartman’s text is the Lucy poems, a group of short lyrics on
the death of a young girl. The poems evoke three highly charged themes: incompleteness,
mourning, and memory.
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I
had no human fears
She
seemed a thing that could not feel
The
touch of earthly years.
No
motion has she now, no force;
She
neither hears nor sees;
Rolled
round in earth’s diurnal course,
With
rocks, and stones, and trees.
‘A slumber did my spirit seal’:
after this line one would expect a dream vision. Yet there is no vision. The boundary
between slumber and vision seems elided.
G That the poet had no human fears, that he
experienced a curious anaesthesia vis – a – vis the girl’s mortality or his
own, may be what he names a slumber.
G As out
of Adam’s fist sleep an Eve arose, so out of this sealed but not unconscious
spirit a womanly image arises with the same idolatrous charm. {But Wordsworth’s image seems to come from within; it is a
delusive daydream, yet still a revision of that original vision}
G There is
no sense of an eruption from the unconscious.
G There is an uncanny displacement on the
structural level that is consonant with what Freud calls the omnipotence of
thoughts.
G This displacement is a transference. In the
initial stanza, the poet is sealed in slumber; in the second that slumber has
passed over to the girl. She falls asleep for ever. Her death is a
quasi-immortality.
G ‘Rolled
round in earth’s diurnal course’ she indeed cannot ‘feel / The touch of earthly
years’.
G This subtle transfer is anticipated by one
local condensation. “Human’ in ‘human fears’ is a transferred epithet. [The
line should read: ‘I had no such fears as would have come to me had I
considered her a human –- that is, mortal – being.’]
G We do not know which way the transfer goes:
from the girl to the poet or vice versa. Surely it might have taken place as an
illusion. The poet does not take pains to demystify it.
G The supernatural illusion preserves the girl
from a certain kind of touch, ‘of earthly years’ in the first stanza but in the
second she is totally distanced.
[Coleridge surmised that the lyric was
an imaginary epitaph for Wordsworth’s sister. F.W. Bateson says that the poem
arose from incestuous emotions and expressed a death with by the brother
against the sister.]
: The poem removes an object of love by moving it beyond
touch. Freud says that neurotics evade reality by putting it beyond touch or
contact by a widening fear of contagion.
: Hartman says that the poet is using the word ‘slumber’ as a
euphemism. The entire second stanza means that ‘she is dead’.
: The ‘slumber’ may remind us of bewitchment or fascination,
even of hypnosis. It could be a hypnoid state in which one hears voices without
knowing it, or performs actions on the basis of these voices.
: Language is a synthesis not only of sounds but of speech
acts, and especially——if we look to infancy ——of threats, promises,
admonitions, ‘yeses and nos’ that come
to the child as ideas of reference in vocal from even if not every word is understood.
[Ordinary speech is
a form of sleep-walking, the replication of internalized phrases or commands
without conscious effect; poetic speech is an exposure of that condition, a
return to a sense of language as virtually alive.]
Q
The second
stanza of ‘A Slumber’ is a periphrasis. [1. The use of overly long or indirect
speech in order to say something. 2. an expression that states something
indirectly]
Q
As a
periphrasis for ‘she is dead’, it embellishes and amplifies that reluctant
phrase.
♣ The second stanza can be considered as a form
of epitaph.
♣ Epitaphs are generally consoling. But here not
all the words are consoling. There are 6 negative expressions: ‘no’, ‘neither’
etc.
♣ Wordsworth’s language is penetrated by
inappropriate puns also. So ‘diurnal’ divides into ‘die’ and ‘urn’, ‘course’
may recall the older pronunciation of ‘corpse’.
♣ These condensations are troublesome rather
than expressive. The power of the second stanza resides predominantly in the
euphemistic displacement of the word ‘grave’ by an image of ‘gravitation’.
[‘Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course]
♣ The poet closes the poem with ‘trees’. Hartman
says that if we read it as ‘ tears’ an anagram of ‘trees’, it will rhyme with
‘fears’, ‘years’ and ‘hears’.[hearse= vehicle in which a decedent is carried]
Pastoral elegy,
in which rocks, woods, and streams are called upon to mourn the death of a
person or to echo the complaint of a lover, seems too extravagant a genre for
this chastely fashioned inscription. Yet the muted presence of the form reminds
us what it means to be a nature poet.
From childhood on, as the autobiographical Prelude
tells us, Wordsworth was aware of ‘unknown modes of being’ and of strange
sympathies emanating from nature. He was haunted by an animistic [the belief that
things in nature, for example, trees, mountains, and the sky, have souls or
consciousness, the belief that a supernatural force animates and organizes the
universe, the belief that people have
spirits that do or can exist separately from their bodies] universe that seemed to stimulate, share, and
call upon his imagination. The Lucy poems evoked a nature spirit in human form,
perhaps modelled after his sister, and the forerunner of Cathy Linton in Wuthering Heights
Ž
F
|
reud and
Wordsworth
Freud wants to place
psychotherapy on a firm, scientific foundation that he exempts himself from an
overestimation of psychical acts. At the same time he has made it hard for us
to value interpretations not based on the priority of a psychological factor.
Animism
is considered as a functional belief only in fiction –in Wordsworth’s poems or
in Wuthering
Heights
Q Freud’s analysis shares the delusional
qualities of the superstitions it wants to dispel.
Q He was
always distrustful towards the eudemonic feelings [a eudemon is a benevolent spirit or demon.], the kind that Wordsworth expressed in ‘A
Slumber’.
Q He
considered them a ‘thalassal regression’ [‘Thalassal’
means pertaining to the state of marine life. The phrase used by Sandor
Ferenczi appears to refer to a reversal of the evolutionary process.]
Q Wordsworth’s attitude was very different. In
all his most interesting work he describes a developmental impasse [ a point at which no
further progress can be made or agreement reached, a road or passage that has no way out or
through, for example, a dead end or a blockage caused by an accident] centring
on eudemonic sensations experienced in early childhood and associated with
nature.
Q Whether beautiful or frightening, they sustain
and nourish him as intimations of immortality; and Wordsworth can be called the
first ego psychologist, the first careful observer of the growth of a mind.
Q If there is death wish in the Lucy poems, it
is insinuated by nature itself and asks lover or growing child not to give up
earlier yearnings—to die rather than become an ordinary mortal.
The
Developmental Impasse is
quite clear in the poem.
Q Divided into two parts, separated formally by
a blank and existentially by a death, the epitaph does not record a
disenchantment.
Q The
mythic girl dies, but that word seems to wrong her. Her star-like quality is
maintained despite her death.
Q The poet’s sense of her immutability deepens
by reversal into an image of participation mystique with the planet
earth.
Q There is loss, but there is also a calculus of
gain and loss which those two stanzas weigh like two sides of a balance.
Q Their balancing point is the impasse. Such a
death could seem better than dying into the light of common day.
Q But if we give too much value to immutability
it will eclipse human life.
Q Ideas of pre-existence or afterlife arise.
Concluding
this part of his argument Hartman says: “My analysis has tried to capture a
complex state of affairs that may resemble religious experiences or
pathological states but which Wordsworth sees as an imaginative constant,
ordinary and incurable. For those who need more closure in interpretation, who
wish to know exactly what the poet felt, I can only suggest a phrase from his
famous ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’.
The meanest flower, he writes, can give him ‘thoughts that do often lie too
deep for tears’. The girl has become such a thought.
♣ Yet even here we meet a euphemism.
Naming something ‘a thought too deep for tears’—is not that a periphrasis for
the inability to grieve?
♣ This inability seems to be a strength rather
than a weakness if we take the figure literally.
♣ “Too deep for tears” suggests a place -– a mental place — beyond fits of passion or feeling.
♣ Yet to call the words euphemistic is to
acknowledge at the same time that they are so affecting that mourning is not
absent but continued in another mode.
♣ The work of writing seems to have replaced
the work of mourning. Is there a link between writing and mourning, such
that writing can be shown to detach us from the lost object and reattach us to
the world?
Freud’s
Kakangelic mode of interpretation and Wordsworth’s euphemism are ordinary
rather than artificial aspect of language, especially when the work of mourning
is taking place.
The
strongest euphemisms in Wordsworth seem to belong to language rather than
imposed on it.
Wordsworth’s
euphemia is nourished by sources in language or the psyche we have not
adequately understood.
They
bring us back to an awareness of how much sustaining power language has, even
if our individual will to speak and write is assaulted daily by the most
trivial as well as traumatic events.
[Hartman returns to
Wordsworth’s poem again—s.sree kumar]
The sustaining power of language is
not easily placed on the side of goodness or love. Writing has an impersonal,
even impersonating quality which brings the poet close to the dead.
It is not surprising that there should
be a hint of the involuntary or mechanical in stanza 2 of ‘A Slumber’: a hint
of the indifference to which the girl’s difference is reduced, and which,
however tragic it may be, obeys a law that supports the stability a survivor’s
speech requires. O blessed machine of language!’ Coleridge once exclaimed. The
very phrase is symptomatic of the euphemia without which speech would soon
cease to be, or turn into an eruptive cursing.
It
is here we link up once more to Freud. Freud created a new hermeneutics by
charting compulsive and forced connections which ‘regarded nothing as sacred’.
The recovered dream thoughts have no connections save in the negative fact that
their capacity for profanation is without limit. All other connections are the
result of secondary process extending from the dream work’s disguises and displacements
to more conscious revisions. At times, the manifest dream content may appear
saner than an interpretation that reverses the dream’s relatively euphemistic
bearing or disintegrates its discursive structure. Instead of completing
‘dreamtexts’ or by extension literary texts, Freud makes them less complete,
less fulfilling. The more interpretation, it seems, the less closure.
Q If the dream is unholy, as is shown to be so
by the above interpretation, the power of that interpretation as it
methodizes and universalizes itself is something very near to holy.
Q One wonders how else Freud could have
continued his work without falling mute, without being overcome by the bad news
he brought.
Q The dream peculiar to Freud, as
interpreter and scientist, a dream which survives all self-analysis, is of a
purified language that remains uncontaminated by its materials, that neither
fulfils not represses an all-too-human-truth.
“I hope Freud’s shade will understand this
parting remark as a blessing on the only scientist I have ever been able to
read”, concludes Hartman
S. Sreekumar
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