My Beef with Lacan and Freud

Earlier today in class we spent a lot of time discussing a Freudian slip of news producer who referenced the Iraq war instead of the Vietnam war. We discussed a lot of different reasons for why this slip could’ve happened, mostly talking about how the producer was likely unconsciously comparing the two wars. One possibility of this mix up wasn’t brought up, that the producer could’ve just been used to entering the Iraq war, lost focus for a half a second, and just repeated what he had typically been doing because it was 2005 and a lot of news was about Iraq.

This discussion in our class brought up my biggest problem with Freud and to a smaller extent Lacan. They avoid interpreting actions, behaviors, and signs in the most straightforward, simple, or logical way, and instead go for grandiose and elaborate interpretations about the subjects subconscious which no evidence can be provided for or against. By suggesting that someone has unconscious ideas or motives for doing something, there is no way to prove that they do or do not have those unconscious ideas. By making the motives for an action unconscious, the person who is actually acting is no longer credible for an explanation of those actions, the interpreter then becomes the only person that can decide why a person did something. Freud and Lacan’s suggestion of the unconscious creates a way of interpreting things that relies solely on the opinions and attitudes of the person doing the interpreting. It doesn’t even necessarily need plausible reasoning to be accepted too, for example the Oedipus Complex. Looking back at our discussion of the news error, yes there are obvious similarities between the Vietnam War and the War in Iraq, but there are also obvious differences like the perception that Iraq with WMD’s could directly endanger the lives of Americans, while Vietnam was more about the indirect threat of Communism spreading elsewhere in the world. Our interpretation tells me more about how our class views the relationship between Iraq and Vietnam, it doesn’t provide any hard evidence that the news producer was comparing the two. My point is this, not everything is necessarily linked with a deeper or hidden meaning, sometimes the an obvious and simple interpretation works too.

Loss and Power

In this work, Freud discusses the pleasure that one finds in both pain and repetition. Although I strongly disagree with some of his ideas, such as neurosis being derived from the infantile sexual life (434), I do admit that his writing brought me to some realizations. I found his analysis of the child’s play, for example, to be the most interesting aspect of the work.

At the beginning of the text, Freud discusses a game in which a child makes his toy “gone” and then rediscovers it. Freud claims that this game reflects the child’s “greatest cultural achievement” (432). This achievement, he says, is the child’s ability to allow his mother to leave him without panicking. I think that Freud makes a bit of a jump in connecting the game to the child’s familial relationships. However, I do find his analysis of why the child gains pleasure from the game really interesting. In his analysis, Freud provides us readers with three possibilities on how the game provides the child with pleasure. The first possibility is that departure is necessary in order to experience the pleasure of the return. I completely agree that one can experience pleasure through this kind of pain. His idea brought to my mind the common idea that one must experience loss in order to feel true happiness. It also somewhat reminds me of the idea of delayed gratification. If a person has something all the time, they may not be able to fully appreciate it.  Likewise, if a person delays their pleasure, they could possibly experience it stronger later.  The second idea that Freud presents is that the boy is passive and has no choice in so many matters, such as his mother leaving. He uses this game as a way of controlling what usually is out of his own control. Later in the text, Freud argues that “it is obvious that all their play is influenced by a wish that dominates them the whole time- the wish to be grown up” (432). I found this to be the most interesting suggestion. It reminded me of my Folklore of Children class that I am currently taking. In that course, we must observe children on a regular basis, analyzing their types of play and how they communicate with each other. In my limited observation, I have already noticed the ways in which children use play to gain power. Whether it’s creating their own social hierarchy or playing house, playtime is an incredibly important way in which children take control. Furthermore, Freud posed a third possibility. The last one argues that the child throwing away the toy might satisfy a grudge against his mother (432). I find this one to be a huge stretch. He really has no evidence for this idea, and it’s certainly not something that I would assume from this sort of play.

Although I do not agree with all of Freud’s ideas in this text, I do think that they are worth considering. It is interesting to think about how people derive both power and pleasure (which he suggests are synonymous in some cases) from pain and loss. I found the example of the child particularly interesting, because children’s play is and easily identifiable (but difficult to analyze) display of pleasure. It can reveal to us the different ways in which people find pleasure- from pain in loss to control and power.

Pain Versus Apathy (Beyond the Pleasure Principle First Pass)

Beyond the Pleasure Principle provides a counter-intuitive yet widespread assertion that pleasure is not only caused by feelings of joy, fulfillment and comfort, but also by pain. In Freud’s analysis of the small boy’s behavior (the repetitive game of throwing and then retrieving his toys), pleasure and pain are not binaries; pleasure and pain are integrated together and oppose apathy. In this way, the negative and positive are not separated but are instead mushed together into an overarching category that could be labeled “experience” or “emotion” – something that can be distinctly understood as a power that elicits a strong reaction – while apathy simply is nothing. The little boy recognizes the necessity of pain to achieve later pleasure (“her departure had to be enacted as a necessary preliminary to her joyful return, and that it was in the latter that lay the true purpose of the game” (pg 432)); this could pinpoint the pleasure of pain to be anticipation – although discomfort is current, it signifies a greater pleasure to come relatively immediately after. The pain may be present, but at least something is present.

An alternative way of viewing the pleasure in pain is mentioned by Freud on page 433 when he discribes adult pleasure through tragic plays that “do not spare the spectators the most painful experiences and can yet be felt by them as highly enjoyable.” I think that many people have created meaning in an emotionally all-encompassing human experience; people don’t believe that they are fulfilled until they have a diverse range of experiences and emotions, and they get pleasure from having those negative emotions and thinking of themselves as complete. Overall, I think Freud was on point in his analysis of people’s perceptions of pain being pleasurable by its nature of power and extremity.

 

Power in Pleasure

As much as I tend to disagree with Sigmund Freud’s theories on the “ego” and our infantile development of self (particularly the Oedipus complex), especially as they relate to pleasure, I think Freud makes several good points that can be useful in our interpretations of pleasure.

I noticed an immediate similarity to Barthes definitions of pleasure as repetitive actions that bring us feelings of comfort in the initial discussion of a child throwing his toys about the room. In this instance, Freud notes that the “game” that the young child engages in entails repeated actions where the result is easily predictable and gaining a sense of satisfaction from this activity. For Barthes ideas of pleasure, I think this closely corresponds to text with a foreseeable, straightforward plotline that does not shock us in any way. We derive pleasure from familiarity and from the safe structure that provides a reliable cause and effect rule with no variability, possibly an extension of creating a world that we can comprehend and influence to some degree.

This leads me to another notion of pleasure that a gleaned after a few moments of reflection on the text. A large reason that the child gained pleasure from his game is that he, through his actions exerted a great degree of power in creating a desired result, likely more power than he would have over any other circumstance in his life at this infantile stage. He had control. Is having some sort of control, or the illusion of control, an important component of what gives us pleasure? As I reflect on the things that give me pleasure, the answer to this question appears to be a reluctant yes. While I do believe that it can be the primary factor of pleasure in many cases, in others it appears to have a much-reduced role.

However the last few pages of Beyond the Pleasure Principle held much less *meaning* for me. I was rather confused by many of the ideas put forth and among those that I did manage to understand, I often disagreed with them.

Why We Love Romeo and Juliet and Other Tragedies, According to Freud.

While reading Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, I found myself actually agreeing with the psychoanalyst.

To preface: I am not usually a big fan of his. I think he obsesses a bit too much about phallic symbols, and frankly I find his “Oedipal complex” completely ridiculous. I found traces of the Oedipal complex (among his other strange theories) in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, for example when he describes his case study’s behavior toward his absent soldier father: “He had heard at that time that his absent father was ‘at the front’ and was far from regretting his absence; on the contrary he made it quite clear that he had no desire to be disturbed in his sole possession of his mother” (432).

But besides maintaining his typical views on the prevalence of “mommy/daddy issues” in human behavior, Freud actually makes a good point in his essay regarding the way we gain pleasure from repeating unpleasant experiences through play or art. On 432, he describes a child gaining pleasure by repeating his mother’s perceived abandonment over and over while playing. In play, the child controls the painful event and therefore gains pleasure by repeating that control. He has mastered it. We gain pleasure by controlling things that are normally painful and out of our control.

Freud applies the same idea to adults watching a sad movie or theater production: “the artistic play and artistic imitation carried out by adults, which, unlike children’s, are aimed at an audience, do not spare the spectators (for instance, in tragedy) the most painful experiences and can yet be felt by them as highly enjoyable” (433). Here Freud is essentially saying that we like tragedies, for example Romeo and Juliet, because they allow us to feel painful real life emotions from a safe distance. We may feel sad or empathize Romeo and Juliet’s pain, but we are not actually experiencing their despair in our own lives. It is not our loved one who has died, but theirs. Fictional pain in a movie or play is still pleasurable because we know we can make it stop hurting when the credits roll or the curtain drops.

Control as Pleasure – First Run

In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Sigmund Freud writes about his time living with a little boy and his mother for several weeks, and his observations about the said boy’s play habits. The boy has several different games he plays, each, according to Freud’s psychobabble, having implications about his relationship with his parents.

One of these games involved the child throwing one of his toys away so that picking them up would be a little difficult, and shouting “o-o-o-o,” which was interpreted by Freud as a representation of the German word for “gone.” Freud argued (a little far-fetched, in my opinion) that this was the boy lashing out in resentment for his mother leaving him often, for he had a close relationship with his mother, but never threw a fit when his mother left.

However, this was also play for the boy, which implies that the boy took a certain pleasure from it. But, from a layman’s perspective, why would a child wish to repeat something distressing for him (i.e., his mother’s leaving him) as play? And how could he possibly enjoy this?

Control. The boy has control over this game, because it exists in the space of play, in the boundaries of what is defined as a game, thus, it’s a pleasurable activity. The child is using this self-controlled game to mimic the un-pleasurable act of his mother leaving him, thus, working through the emotions of rejection and abandonment that he must feel every time his mother leaves him through a crude, once-removed form of abreaction.

Children want to make themselves the master of any situation, so they can take the grown-up role. All children’s play is really mimesis of things they see adults do, especially their parents.

But does this apply to adults? Think about the theatre, or even film, when the actors on stage or on screen perform scenes in a story that is sad or anything but pleasurable (e.g., a tragedy or a horror film). The audience will react to such scenes, empathizing with the characters’ painful experiences, but the fact that they went to the play or the movie in the first place implies that it is nonetheless a pleasurable experience for them (unless it’s a shitty movie/play, of course). This is a form of play. The film/play exists in a game space, an entity outside of the audience, which gives the audience the agency to do with the experience whatever they wish, without any risk involved of feeling so much that it’s uncomfortable. It’s this agency, this control, this making oneself the master of the situation, which yields beaucoup pleasure.

Are there any instances where it is in fact the absence of control that yields pleasure? Can there be pleasure in the chaotic? The unfamiliar? Or is this getting a little too close to Bliss?

–Riley Zipper