Louann Russell

Comm 342

Dr. Williams

Psychoanalysis

Good morning and welcome to Communications 342. Todays discussion will focus on psychoanalysis. HUH? What does psychoanalysis have to do with communication? Why would communication students need to have any concept of psychoanalytic theory? Psychoanalysis, according to the Encarta Encyclopedia, is the name applied to a specific method of investigating unconscious mental processes and to a form of psychotherapy. The term refers, as well, to the systematic structure of psychoanalytic theory, which is based on the relation of conscious and unconscious psychological processes. (Encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia). This is important to communication because the underlying psyche of the environment is as important, if not more so, than the spoken word. It helps scholars understand people as a creation of their cultures, and of their internal desires and instincts. Although there have been many theorists in the field of psychoanalysis, three major practitioners come to the forefront. Psychoanalytic theory was developed by Sigmund Freud, who sought understanding of the structure and functioning of the human mind. He adopted the talking cure that his friend Dr. Breuer had used on one of Breuers own patients that was suffering from hysteria. By allowing the patient to express verbally and communicate her anxieties, she made progress in dealing with them. Freud allowed his patients to freely associate their thoughts, which he felt came from their repressed unconscious, as did puns, slips of the tongue, and double entendres. He also asked his patients carefully selected questions with the intent of disarming the superego, or the watchdog of the psyche, permitting the patient to confront unresolved conflicts with his conscious mind. Language also comes to play in dreams. By having his patients share their dreams with him, Freud linked the unconscious release of desires to the conscious world of conversation and thus communication. Freud became involved in correspondence with a second psychoanalytical practitioner, Carl Jung, whom he met in 1907.

Jung started as an admirer of Freud until they had an ideological parting of the ways. Jung agreed with Freud about the ego which he says is the conscious mind. He moves on to what he terms the personal unconscious or the part of the psyche that is not conscious but could be. Finally, Jung theorizes that all humans have a well of shared memories that do not come from experience. This is the collective unconscious. This is the reservoir of our experiences as a species. A kind of knowledge we are all born with.(Jung, Collected Works of Carl G. Jung, vol.7, pp.64-79). The collective unconscious is home to the archetypes. The archetypes are recognizable in myths, legends, religions, and ideologies. Jung felt that these often came to the conscious through dreams. Dreams contain symbols which are universal in Jungs opinion. By examining the symbols in dreams, Jung opened a dialogue between therapist and patient. Once again language became an important aspect of therapy. The symbols in the dreams were signifiers that pointed to signifieds, which could then be interpreted.

Professor, how are we going to remember all these terms and their meanings? We will get into that after we meet the players. Jacques Lacan is the third practitioner, a bit more contemporary than the other two.

Lacan considered himself most aligned with Freud. He deems that language is of major importance because that is the way that knowledge is formed. His theory is that the unconscious is structured as a language, the source of communication. The two parts of Freuds unconscious, condensation and displacement, have their basis in linguistics, according to him. The first is metaphoric and the second is metonymic. He also uses the science of semiology developed by Ferdinand Saussure. Lacan accepts the signifier but says that it is only a signifier that merely leads to another signifier. No one signifier has a constant meaning. Lacan theorizes that the infant, upon the acquisition of language, joins society at large and becomes part of that culture. This is how the infant begins to acquire its sense of self. After acquiring language and sense of self, humans begin to desire what they learn from others is worth attaining. They learn desire from what Lacan called the Other. Humans constantly strive to become part of the Other. This is the connection between people in a culture.

So, before we get into the final part of our discussion lets look at some terms and their meaning and how we can relate them today.

Archetypes

Archetypes: Primitive modes of thought that tend to personify natural processes in terms of mythological concepts. (Microsoft@Encarta@OnlineEncyclopedia).

Carl Jung considered archetypes the primitive images that make up the collective unconscious, which is the part of the psyche made up of memories, ideas, and ways of thinking that comes from ancestors and the entire human race. (Microsoft@Encarta@Online Encyclopedia).

Since Shrek is a fairy tale, the characters are definitely archetypes. Shrek is the hero, given the quest of freeing Fiona, the princess, from her entrapment in a castle tower. Farquaad is the villain that desires a kingdom and will do anything to acquire it. He is also the dispatcher who sends Shrek on the quest. Donkey is the helper that accompanies Shrek on his trek.

Id, Ego, and Superego

Id: The reservoir of the libido which seeks alternative expression for impulses humans consider evil or excessively sexual, impulses humans often felt were perfectly natural at an earlier or archaic stage and have since repressed. It is governed by the pleasure-principle. (cla.purdue.edu).

Ego: Representative of the outer world to the id. Represents and reinforces the reality-principle. Could also be said to be a defense against the superego. (cla.purdue.edu)

Superego: The faculty that seeks to police what it deems unacceptable desires; it represents all moral restrictions and is the advocate of a striving for perfection. (cla.purdue.edu).

Freud considered the ego to be the part of the psyche that dealt with the real world and is present in the conscious. It seeks to replace the pleasure principle of the id, or the internal instinct side found in the unconscious, with the reality principle. The id controls the passions and the ego takes charge of reason and sanity. The superego deals with the Oedipus complex. This is where guilt and the conscience come from. (Felluga).

Each of the three main characters in Shrek personifies one of the aspects of the psyche. Shrek is an ogre that has to deal with the real world every day. He sees things as they really are and deals with what is necessary. This is the ego. Farquaad is the id, living in the pleasure principle at all times. He doesnt care who gets hurt as a result of his actions as long he achieves his ends. Fiona is the superego in that she has high morals and has the conscience to want to tell Shrek the truth about the spell she is under. She feels guilty that she doesnt share it with him.

Identification

Identification: The process whereby ones ego seeks to emulate another. (Felluga).

To resolve the Oedipus complex, Freud felt that identification was important. According to Freud, If a boy identifies with his father, he wants to be like his father (Freud, in Strachey).

Pinocchio sees himself as a real boy, a true human son to his carver, Gipetto, a real man. Since he is not a real boy, his nose grows when he makes this statement to the buyer of the fairy tale creatures.

Desire

Desire: To wish or long for; want; crave. (American Heritage Dictionary).

Jacques Lacan theorizes that desire comes from fantasy and thus can never be fulfilled. Desire is caught up in social structures once language is acquired. Humans desire things when they, through language with others, find that something is considered desirable. When this fantasy object which Lacan called the object petit a is attained, the desire for it is diminished and lost.

Princess Fiona desires to be rescued from the castle by her one true love so that the spell that causes her to change from human to ogre at sundown will be lifted and she will remain human. She achieves her desire when she is rescued by Shrek and Donkey. She then loses her desire to remain human when she falls in love with Shrek, an ogre.

Anima/Animus

Anima/ Animus: Gender specific archetypical structures in the collective unconscious that are compensatory to conscious gender identity. Thus, animus images primarily depict the unconscious masculine in a woman and anima images primarily depict the unconscious feminine in a man. (answers.com)

Woman is compensated by a masculine element and therefore her unconscious has, so to speak, a masculine element. (Carl Jung, Psychological Types, 1921).

Evidence of the anima/animus archetypical structures is revealed in Shrek when the male side of Fiona singlehandedly defeats Robin Hood and his men with her karate kick and amazing throws. For Shrek, his female side is shown when, having dinner alone and feeling lonely, he lights a candle for the ambiance, not for the light.

Puns Double Entendre, and Freudian Slips

Pun: A humorous substitution of words that are alike in sound but different in meaning. (answers.com)

Double Entendre: A French phrase for double meaning adopted in English to denote a pun in which a word or phrase has a second, usually sexual, meaning. An accidental double entendre is often termed a Freudian Slip. ( answers.com)

In his 1901 book, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud recognizes the differences between errors of speech (Versprechen), memory (Vergessen), and action (Vergreifen). He attributed these faulty actions to the unconscious. (Davis, Haverford, p. 109)

There are many examples of both puns and double entendres in Shrek. A double entendre comes out of the mouth of the Gingerbread Man when he is being tortured by Farquaad as to the whereabouts of the fairy tale creatures. In response to a verbal threat the cookie replies, Eat me! One way of looking at it is that he is indeed a cookie. The other is a very derogatory insult.

Willing Suspension of Disbelief

Willing suspension of Disbelief: Alleged willingness of a reader or viewer to accept as true the premise of a work of fiction, even if they are fantastic, impossible, or otherwise contradictory to reality. (answers.com)

The phrase was coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817. It was tested from the neuro-psychanalytic view by Norman N. Holland in 1968. His findings were published in his book The Dynamics of Literary Response. He determined that this is a psychoanalytic regression to an oral merger of infant and nurturing other in a potential space. (Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response).

The audience response to Shrek seems to be a willing suspension of disbelief. An ogre who wants to kick fairy tale creatures out of his swamp so he can be alone teams up with a talking donkey to rescue a princess who is human by day and ogre by night. Yet the movie sold millions of tickets, had two sequels made, and Shrek is a name familiar to many people all over the world. People feel happy when Shrek and Fiona are married and Farquaad is eaten by Dragon.

Amplification

Amplification: A method of association based on the comparative study of mythology, religion, and fairy tales used in the interpretation of images in dreams and drawings. (New York Association of Analytical Psychology).

Part of Jungs method of interpretation of clinical and cultural material. It involves the use of mythic, historical, and cultural parallels to clarify material in dreams that may be obscure, thin, and difficult to attend to.

Princess Fiona tells Shrek how her rescue is supposed to go. He is supposed to fight and kill the dragon, remove her from the castle, kiss her and become her true love so they can marry and live happily ever after. She can only know these things from history given the time period, culturally if she has known someone rescued, or has heard it from past stories.

Eros and Thanatos

Eros: In Greek mythology, the personification of love, a cosmogonic force of nature: psychologically, the function of relationship. The counterpart of Eros is Thanatos, the god of mortality and death.(New York Association of Analytical Psychology)

Freud believed that there were a small number of basic instincts that could fit into two broad generic categories. These are Eros, which is the instinct that promotes life and self-preservation and Thanatos, which covers the instinct for aggression, cruelty, and self-destruction. (Thornton, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Fiona and Shrek have a hard time getting along initially. After an argument the night before, Fiona makes breakfast for Shrek as a way of promoting the function of the relationship or make peace between them. This is the eros side of her personality appearing. Shreks thanatos instinct came out when he knowingly went to a castle that was guarded by a giant dragon to rescue her.

Suturing

Suturing: Procedures by means of which cinematic texts confer subjectivity on their viewers. (Fielding, Slouchproductions.net)

Suture theory therefore focuses on how film works with our psyches to position us so that we enter into the imaginary worlds (Ranowlan, uwec.edu)

The audience is drawn into Shrek to the point that they have reactions to the interplay between the characters, begin to hope that Shrek will save Fiona from the evil Farquaad, and actually cheer with the people in the church when Shrek and Fiona will out. It appeals to the psyche, both the conscious and unconscious.

So, moving along lets think about why psychoanalysis is significant and why use it as a theory of communication. Psychoanalysis explores the mind so that humans can better understand their own motivations and the possible motivations of others. It also gives people awareness about where their feeling, fears, and joys come from. This awareness can be useful in communication to help understand personal motives and desires and see why there could be difficulty in communication with other. Looking at the movie Shrek, the world we live in, for the most part seems pretty optimistic. People still admire the hero and cheer when he triumphs over evil. Princess Fiona is her own woman, which appears to be perfectly acceptable, holding her own for the people she cares about. Humor is appreciated by both children and adults. The text, as far as psychoanalysis and film are concerned, highlights both the theories of Freud and Lacan. These include the theories of Lacan that language is integral to the coexistence of different people in a culture and a divisor. The text also looks at both mens theory of the Oedipal complex and what impact it has on becoming the self. The main point of the text is that, although there are differences between people, there are similarities as evidenced by the reaction, in general to the film rendition of the world.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, times up. Class dismissed and have a great day!

Works Cited

Allen, Robert, ed. Channels of Discourse. University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

Davis, David. Sigmund Freud. Haverford University. 2004. http://www.haverford.edu/psych/p.109/fslip.html

Felluga, Dino. Psychoanalysis. Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. 28Nov2003. 25 Nov. 2008.

Fielding, Melissa. Passing, Queering, and Recovery. Feminist Psychoanalysis and the Performance of Plastic Surgery. Slouch Productions. 2007.

Klages, Mary. Jacques Lacan. University of Colorado. 2001. 24 Nov, 2008. http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/Eng2012klages/lacan.html

Nowlan, Robert. Suture. University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. 2001. 23 Nov, 2008.

Sharp, Matthew. Jacques Lacan. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2006. 26 Nov. 2008. http://www.iep.utm.edu

Sharpe, Darrell. Jungian Lexicon. New York Association for Analytical Psychology. 1991. 26Nov. 2008. http://www.nyaap.org/index.php

Williams, Kevin. Psychoanalysis. Shepherd University. Nov. 2008.