When a song becomes the soundtrack to your falling in love...

Psychoanalysis is a significant presence in much recent cultural theory, particularly that which is inflected by the work of Jacques Lacan.

We find it in the highly influential n’ inventive works of thinkers from Alain Badiou to Butler to Zizek, where it has led to things such as a reconsideration of theories of ideology and sexual difference, powerful critiques of New Historicism and Foucauldian concepts of the subject, and a powerful framework for discussing things as different as the World Trade Center attack and the logic of ethnic cleansing.

Freud as a cultural theorist is a radical rethinker of that category of culture. This book is a witness to this aspect! And for once, the more you read of Freud, the more you are tempted to see the mighty thoughts of the mighty minds, including the likes of Derrida, within Freud’s profoundest of concepts!

Thought of giving a few excerpts that I found so absorbing from this little, interesting and absorbing read on Freud!

Gleamed from the wonderful, insightful and delightful read titled, Reading Freud: Psychoanalysis as Cultural Theory

The Blurb to the book, before we begin…

Cultural theory has found a renewed interest in psychoanalysis, bringing many new readers to Freud and his work.

This book is an introductory guide to Freud and brings together for the first time:

• an overview of Freud's work which enables the reader to see quickly where, and in which texts, Freud develops his main ideas
• a guide to reading Freud, and to what can be done with the complexities of his texts
• an examination of what recent cultural theory draws from Freud, and of why psychoanalysis is of interest for it
• a discussion about the Freud revealed by recent cultural theory
• an extensive selection of extracts from Freud's texts, with commentary.

This book is the definitive guide to the content of Freud's texts: what's there and where to find it. It will have wide appeal to students new to Freud in cultural studies, literary theory, philosophy and sociology.

Here’s to the lovelyyy excerpts now -

“Borders: A Spilling Out”

By Tony Thwaites

Think of a key moment in your life, a moment that carries a great emotional investment, and without which everything in your life would be quite different.

Think of a moment you fell in love.

Perhaps there was a song playing in the background, and this song has become the soundtrack to your falling in love.

From now on, you will just have to hear that song and it will bring back the intensity of that moment: not necessarily only the happiness of it, but perhaps also the fear and insecurity and vulnerability of handing yourself over to another person.

This song is now your song. It is a private moment: that song may not have the same intensity of connotation even for your partner, even if he or she is feeling that moment and that commitment just as intensely.

You certainly do not expect anyone outside the two of you to share the connotations that song has for you, though the fact of having such a song hardly needs to be explained to anyone.

Everyone falls in love: that is why the question ‘What song did you fall in love by?’ can be asked as a game, around the dinner table at a party, say. It comes to your turn: you’re not sure you want to answer.

It’s not that you doubt your falling in love, it’s just that you doubt your song can really measure up. It wasn’t really much of a song after all, and to link it to your falling in love seems somehow to downgrade the intensity and genuinity of what you felt, and still feel.

You actually don’t even like the song all that much, but you certainly don’t feel like explaining that. In fact, as songs go, it’s actually pretty awful, not really something that expresses your love any more than the drink coaster you also took as a souvenir.

It’s just a little piece of the world that was in the right place at the right time, even if outside of that context it’s a rather worthless or silly one.

But from that moment on it’s forever your falling-in-love made material.

Psychoanalysis is about what happens when things spill-out from one place to another, even to places where there would seem to be little connection.

Little Hans is afraid of horses, to the point where he is terrified of going out into the street where a horse might bite him. But the five-year-old has never had any experience where he has been menaced by a horse. This is a symptom, Freud suggests, of something else: what he is afraid of is really a person, his father.

As his father is actually a loving parent, Hans feels guilty for the violence of his thoughts against him. And because these thoughts are next to impossible to admit directly and yet don’t just go away, the only ways they have of coming out are oblique and indirect ones. As circumstances would have it – and Freud traces the paths of the logic that makes this possible – everything converges on horses.

The fear the little boy has spills out onto something which is seemingly unconnected with it – and which, precisely because of that disconnection, can both express the fear and at the same time hide its true source.

A young woman describes a dream in which she is walking through a field, cutting off ears of barley and wheat. A young man of her acquaintance comes towards her and she tries to avoid him. What has generated the dream has nothing to do with ears of grain, but a lot to do with worries about honour!

The dreamwork turns the source of the worry into something without that burden, and an honourable kiss into a kiss in a wheatfield.

An infant is playing a game with a cotton spool on a string. Holding onto the string, he throws the spool away so that it cannot be seen behind the curtains around his cot, saying a long drawn-out ‘o–o–o–o’ as he does. Then he pulls the string and the reel comes back into view, accompanied by his joyous ‘da!’

Is this, Freud asks, a way of repeating and in some way working through another, potentially more disturbing pattern of absences and presences in the child’s life – the comings and goings of the mother?

It would be easy to multiply the examples, from the case histories and from the hundreds of clinical and anecdotal cases that underpin Freud’s work and which make such encyclopedic compendia out of The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

Psychoanalysis has all sorts of names for this spilling-over and its many aspects: displacement, drive, cathexis, repetition, symptom, unconscious.

We could even say that, for psychoanalysis, this spilling-over in all its forms is one of the very basic mechanisms of the psyche.

And yet, we very quickly find that this is also a spilling-over of what we might imagine to be the boundaries of the psyche.

What seem to be events going on purely within the privacy of a head are really also matters of things in the world, even things as modest or banal as a reel and a piece of string, as silly as an embarrassing song, as contingent as the historical accident that makes two quite separate words sound the same, or the circumstances that yoke our love affair to a song.

And conversely, things in the world reveal themselves to already be part of the psyche’s working-out: material objects, families, customs and law, language, and all sorts of cultural practices.

If we start with the psyche, we seem in no time at all to find ourselves in a densely populated world again.

And this happens in all sorts of multiple and unexpected ways, which have little respect for the divisions we might readily want to make between private and public, individual and social, self and other, or even between the one being analysed and the one doing the analysing.

The same actions seem to play at one and the same time in a number of quite different stories, on quite different and apparently autonomous levels.

image courtesy: journalpsychedotorg