Reading Note - Psychoanalysis
1. What are the chapter’s main points? List up to three. Be complete and thorough. Psychoanalysis is a long and intensive study of the mind based on Sigmund Freud’s ideas. IL begins Chapter Five with the psychoanalytic understanding of the mind through the unconscious, that is, everything that is not known or not aware of. Repression is when we hold back our drives as a result of being threatened by them. We build defenses up against our natural drives using repression. At the heart of Freud’s theories is his model of gendering using Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex. Freud used the story of Oediupus following his fate and ultimately killing his father and wedding his mother as his basis that infant boys feel attraction to their mothers. As a result of this attraction, the infant continues to grow and develops feelings of jealousy toward the father and begins “an unconscious desire to kill the father” in order to have his mother (IL 119). As repressed, these thoughts and desires continue to linger but only in the unconscious. The boy then identifies with his father in order to win his mother’s undivided love. However, by identifying with his father this helps the boy defend against the desire to kill his father by denying and repressing the desire (120). As he grows into adulthood, he displaces his desire for his mother onto a gender-similar object, that is, women who are not his mother (120). When the boy does not identify with his father and defends against his desire for his mother, Freud believed the boy would then identify with his mother instead and grow up homosexual. Freud went on to admit that he himself was perplexed about the gendering of infant girls, but uses the same model for that story (122).
2. List and define at least three important words or phrases that appear in bold.
Polymorphous perversity – Polymorphous means “many forms” and perversity means “turning upside down or overturning.” Freud believes that people are born without any particular sexual or gender identity, and that instead, infants are born with sexual drives that toss and turn in all directions randomly (118). Using this model states that humans all have homosexual and heterosexual desires as part of their polymorphous perversity, however, some of those desires stay unconscious, while some go on to define a person’s adult sexuality (119).
Dream work – Dream work operates through the broader mechanisms censorship, which rejects threatening unconscious wishes, and compromise, which allows them to enter the dream only after they have changed into something less threatening (129). Censorship and compromise are made of four forms Freud named displacement, condensation, secondary revision and considerations of representation. Displacement is the psychic process of representing one desire and replacing it with another