Page 190 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

PSYCHOANALYSIS

Psychoanalysis points us to the psychic, non-linear, arational and emotional
aspects of culture, subjectivity and identity. The main interest of cultural studies
writers in psychoanalysis has centred on the formation of gendered subjectivity. For
Hall, writing about identity in the 1990s, psychoanalysis has particular significance 167
in shedding light on how discursively constructed subject positions are taken up (or
otherwise) by concrete persons through their fantasy identifications and emotional
‘investments’.
According to Freud, the self is constituted in terms of an ego, or conscious
rational mind, a superego or social conscience, and the unconscious, the source and
repository of the symbolic workings of the mind that functions with a different
logic from reason. Here the self is by definition fractured so that the unified
narrative of the self can be understood as something we attain over time through
entry into the symbolic order of language and culture. Freud argued that the libido
or sexual drive does not have any pre-given fixed aim or object, rather through
fantasy, any object, which includes persons or parts of bodies, can be the target of
desire. Thus, an almost infinite number of sexual objects and practices are within
the domain of human sexuality. Subsequently, Freud’s work is concerned to
document and explain the regulation and repression of this ‘polymorphous
perversity’ through the resolution (or not) of the Oedipus complex into the
normative fate of heterosexual gendered relationships.
In Lacan’s reading of Freud the resolution of the Oedipus complex marks the
formation of the unconscious as the realm of the repressed and the moment of
entry into the symbolic order that enables the very possibility of subjectivity. For
Lacan, the symbolic order is the overarching structure of language and received
social meanings that constitutes the domain of human law and culture. Crucially,
subjectivity is gendered as the Phallus serves to break up the mother–child dyad and
stands for entry into the symbolic order. Indeed, it is the Phallus as ‘transcendental
signifier’ that enables entry into language (for both sexes) and, by standing in for
the fragmented subject, allows the construction of a narrative of wholeness.
For Lacan the unconscious is the site for the generation of meaningful
representations that are structured ‘like a language’. Not only is language the route
to the unconscious, but the unconscious is a site of signification, that is, of
meaningful activity. In particular, the mechanisms of condensation and
displacement, which Freud saw as the most important of the ‘primary processes’, are
held by Lacan to be analogous to the linguistic functions of metaphor and
metonymy.
Both Freud and Lacan have been criticized for being phallocentric. That is, their
work is said to be a set of male-centred discourses in general and more specifically
ones that are focused on the Phallus. Further, though psychoanalysis claims to be
a scientific method it rarely produces empirical and testable experimental evidence
in its support. Thus, psychoanalysis is a historically specific way of understanding
persons even though it makes claims to universality. Indeed, in so far as
psychoanalysis relies on linguistic and cultural processes that are deemed to be
ahistorical and universal, since they mark the psychic processes of humankind
across history, then at the very least it sits uncomfortably within a cultural studies