Freud, Psychoanalysis and Art

Texts:

Freud, Psychoanalysis and Art:

despite the consisent bad press of freud, creates interesting topics and conversations

filtering into the popular concious

Freud: problematic character. Ideas ridiculed in own lifetime. Even if we don't agree , likely to have adopted some of his ideas. Broadly conquer with his theories.

Writing often lengthy and daunting

Understand the workings of the mind and road map of the mind. understand the functions of it, understand the problems and solutions for his patients.

Freudian psychoanalysis very rare to be seen today. Nevertheless all branches stemmed from Freud and his pupils who developed his ideas in new ways.

Medical/clinical practitioner - not discreditted but limited.

Critical anaalysis of artworks that adopt ideas from freud

Freud the clinical practitioner - making people better. Doctors looking after hysterical patients. Mental illness. Working with patients with severe mental distrubance. Consulting room in Vienna. People more with neurotic anxious symptoms, drawn from middle class. Writing direct response to patients. Propositions and models change and shift quite drastically over 40 years.

The Freud Museum in London - seeing Freud's home environment and consulting room, also have exhibitions on. Masses of books - history, archaeology, art as well as psychology. Bring in other subject areas into his own subject. Collecting antiques. Interesting greek and roman artifacts. Similarities between artifacts and archaeology and psychoanalysis and drawing out the mind, unburrying important things.

Freud the theorist - closer to a philisopher 

Freud the provided of particular tools of understanding the world

Key concepts of psychoanalysis: 

-The unconcious and strucutre of the mind - concious is our rationalising thinking explicit way of operating our mind, daytime deliberation, working the way it should be. Under that is the unconcious, interplay between the two. tensions and forces. forbidden to entering conciousness. 

-dreams and 'phantasies' - meaningful, express something profound that we must understand.

-trauma and mental illness. - when things are working properly, when there is something that blocks the normal relationship between the concious and the unconcious. conflicts in the real world eg relationships, family and sexuality.

Medicine and science allows us to understand the body so now we are able to take on the mind, try to understand the mind.

Sexuality at the root. There since childhoon, not puberty and adulthood. Early experiences.

Interesting in tracin ghte spaces where the unconcious leaks out and makes itself known. Psychology of the everyday, slip of the tounge, absences, daydreaming.

Dali - involuntary sculptures. One of many surrealist artists nspired by Freud and working with freudian material. 

The fifth lecture: says rejecting impulses and desires - lead to tensions. concious sensorship. 2 sublimation - tight rope between concious and unconcious, notifies these tensions but puts them to use. art works and literature might  be seen as negotiations of this material. express the tensions. helps us to undertand ourselves. address issues around conflict, desire, sexuality. 3 express that sexuality and desires no matter how weird.

Judith: Psychoanalysis and Gender

The issue of how we become sexualist beings, how we become male and how we become female is fundamental to freud. Issues of sexuality run all the way thorugh freud. 

Feminist politics about the way in which gender is conditioned in society.

SimoneDeBeauvior - not born a man or woman, but become one. culturally made into one or the other.

For femnists this is a funamental issue with Freud. Is our gender biologically determined or culturally determined. Idea of becoming gendered subjects for Freud. Oedipus story. Freud - boy wants to kill father and sleep with mother and vice versa. The desire to supplant your mother/father leads to fear of rejection. So supplants desire for parent of same sex. Freud thinks this is wrong. 

Penis envy: Child recognises sexual difference. Problem for feminists it is always defined in Freud its always the penis or a lack of the penis. If you are a girl you are already at a disadvantage. Lack of penis. For the girl: she substitutes the lack of penis by desiring a penis. Man becomes substitute for the lack of penis. If fail to do so means you become hysteric. Freud: she develops a scar, a sense of inferiority.

Fails to recognise this own prejudices eg his own culture and class and gender.

Thinks your biological sex (male/female) is same as cultural sex (masculine/feminine)

Toril Moi - theorist - articulates clearly whole idea about otherness. It's the riddle of feminity. What is the problem? what makes women so weird? feminitiy and sexual difference are there as something that is not quite right. How do women become women - what freud is trying to work out. 

Joan Riviere: idea that womens gendered identity was performed. Looked at particularly intellectual, professional women. desire to be successful created a need to have ones feminitity confirmed. 

Ana Mendietta.

Judith Butler: Gender Trouble, Feminism and the subversion of identity, 1990

Melanie Klein: relationship between infant and mother. Breast - when given its good, food is good, when denied is bad, hunger is bad.

Jacques Lacan, The Mirror Stage: idea of desire. before stage no speration beyween us and anything else, infanty and mothers body is the same. at the mirror stage this is a realisation that not part of the mother, not the same entity. Trouble is for us all, our own experience can never match that up. Forever desiring something we can never ever achieve. Can identify with others as we see this sepearte thing. Image that generates these ideas. Important for artists as he prioritizes the idea of the image and seeing.

How we learn to negociate our way through society and family structures then identities and relationship. Occupies the same position as DeBeauvior. Through this aquisition that we become gendered subjects. 

Just as problematic as freud, even though he says biology is same as gender but his way of writing suggests different. 

Mary Kelly: work maps her son's entry into subjecthood. each section address different stage. Challenged Freud's idea that only men could have fetishes. 

Why is Freud still important: because we are in a patriarchal society how do we speak as women?

Womans body

Kristeva and the abject:

Photographs from Saltpetriere Hospital: psychic disorder. most of women - to what exent are the illnesses acted out. How do we know what that looks like? Photographs reproduced in advertising - sexualised.