Page 74 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 65

Critical theory: from ideology critique to the sociology of culture

and must therefore be repressed if social cohesion is to exist.
Desires that cannot be fulfilled are thus channelled into socially
useful activities, in a process he termed ‘sublimation’. Indeed, civil-
isation itself is founded upon a necessary repression of these
unconscious drives and desires. If the sexual drives are too strong,
Freud suggests, they might manifest themselves in such ‘perverse’
activity as homosexuality or sadomasochism. If they can be neither
expressed in perversion nor sublimated into such acceptable
cultural activities as work, sport, art or intellectuality, then they
manifest themselves as neurosis.
In his first major work, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud
outlined the methods he had used to understand hysteria and
neurosis in his own patients. The central technique was to
persuade them to describe their dreams and to talk about the
possible connections between these and their childhood experi-
ences, especially traumatic events related to sexuality and
conflict with their parents. Through his work on dream analysis,
Freud refined a progressively more complex model of early child-
hood psychic development. He argued that both males and
females are bisexual and polymorphously ‘perverse’ during what
he termed the ‘oral’ and ‘anal’ stages of early childhood devel-
opment. Their sexuality is dispersed, uninhibited and not yet
centred on genitality: ‘it spreads in all directions and can embrace
all objects and bodily parts, it is purely and simply about pleasure
with no thought for propriety or procreation’ (Frosh, 1999, p. 46).
When the pan-sexuality underlying these pleasure-seeking
instincts, the so-called ‘pleasure principle’, enters into conflict
with the social order, or the ‘reality principle’, it undergoes trans-
formation through repression, displacement and sublimation. The
period of sublimation begins during the ‘phallic stage’, the pre-
cursor to adult sexuality, when both boys and girls become
fascinated by their genitalia and when the presence or absence
of a penis becomes the primary marker of sexual difference.
Freud hypothesised that in the latter part of the phallic stage,
children enter into society and culture through a process he
named the ‘Oedipal phase’, after Sophocles’ tragedy, Oedipus Rex.
He explained the continuing power of this play by the fact
that Oedipus’ destiny ‘might have been ours...It is the fate of

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