Psychoanalysis

It has been over a century since Freud discovered the unconscious, and despite multiple attempts to "move beyond Freud," the fundamental insights of Psychoanalysis have remained robust and thought provoking, while attempts to sidestep him have floundered. Although Lacan ultimately described his project as Dialectical Materialism, it was Slavoj Žižek who popularly reaffirmed the importance of Psychoanalysis for Marxism with his 1989 Sublime Object of Ideology. Alongside an understanding of Heidegger, Psychoanalysis is one of the avenues by which one may discern and avoid the failures of the western left, as Infrared has proven by employing it in their own theoretical revolution.

Psychology concerns itself with the state of mind and the structure of the personality of the individual in question, e.g. in literary criticism, the author. There have been 'proto-Freudian' psychological theories such as that of John Keble, who said that the overpowering emotion, ruling taste or feeling, the direct indulgence of the individual, when repressed leads to some sort of 'indirect expression' e.g. poetry (in literature). This repression is due to the overpowering sentiments of "reticence" (meaning unwillingness to do something or talk about something as a part of one being nervous or careful) and "shame" in an individual. The conflict between the need for expression, on one hand, and compulsion to repress such self-revelation, on the other, is resolved in the case where the poet's ability leads to a “healing relief to secret mental emotion, yet without detriment to modest reserve” by a literary “art which under certain veils and disguises ... reveals the fervent emotions of the mind.” For Keble this concealed mode of self-expression serves as “a safety valve, preserving men from madness.”

However, it was Sigmund Freud who laid the the concrete foundation of psychoanalysis, which became widespread since the inception of twentieth century. He developed a dynamic form of psychology that he called "psychoanalysis" which was a procedure for the analysis and therapy of mental conditions as neurosis.

Freudian Psychoanalysis

For Freud, dreams, neurotic symptoms, and even art for that matter contain the imagined or fantasied wishes or the imaginary fulfilment of the individual wishes and which are refused by the reality or the prohibition of those desires due to extant social norms, order, morality, etc. The "libidinal" wishes which are forbidden and predominantly sexual come into conflict with the "censor" which in every individual is an internal representative of the standards of morality and norms in a society. The forbidden elements are repressed by the censor into the unconscious realm but are permitted to get a superficial satisfaction with distorted forms that hides the real motives and forbidden elements from the conscious mind.

For Freud, the residual traces of earlier stages of psychosexual development in a child are present in the unconscious of every individual and are present in adulthood as "fixations". Due to some later event in adult life a repressed wish is revived and it prompts a fantasy in a hidden way, it is a gratification which is akin to the way in which the wish had been fulfilled in early childhood. The job of a psychoanalyst is to unravel the true content underlying the disguised fantasies which Freud calls the 'manifest content' and in doing so we would arrive at the 'latent content' which are the unconscious wishes and desires hidden in the earlier disguised expression where one finds a semblance of satisfaction in. By doing so we arrive at the real and suppressed meanings.

An important concept of Freudian psychoanalysis is the power to 'sublimate' i.e. to direct the instinctual drives which have a sexual signification to higher, nonsexual goals. In literature, this process has its initiation from an author who now has the ability to elaborate fantasied wish fulfillments into the manifold features of a work of art in a way that conceals or deletes their merely personal elements, and so makes them capable of satisfying the unconscious desires that other people share with the individual artist. It opens "the way back to reality" especially for the reader or an audience who "obtain solace and consolation from their own unconscious sources of gratification which had become inaccessible” to them. For example, Christopher Marlowe, despite being amoral character of his times, like other University Wits is able to produce a drama like 'Doctor Faustus' which serves as a work of reference for people to not to disobey the source of good and a righteous life, i.e. the Church and to not overreach.

The core of Freudian psychoanalysis is that of a mind as having three functional aspects: the 'id' (that incorporates libidinal, forbidden and innate desires), the 'superego' (the internalization of the norms, morality, etc. which exists in a society) and the 'ego' (it acts to best negotiate or mediate between the uncontrollable desires of the 'id' and the stringent 'superego' which does not let one have moment of pure gratification). In Freudian psychoanalysis role of 'ego' is important in elaborating the manifest content, that how 'ego' manages to mediate between the opposing demands of 'id' and 'superego'.

'Oedipus complex' is the repressed but constant occupancy in the unconscious of a male infant, that is the desire to possess his mother and to eliminate his father. This term was derived by Freud from the Greek tragedy 'Oedipus Rex' whose protagonist killed his father, unknowingly, and married his mother. Critics use the example of 'Oedipus complex' in literature to explain the relevance of particular action or situation, such as critics have used the situation in 'Hamlet' where Hamlet is unable to make up his mind to kill his uncle who was married to his mother.

Lacanian Psychoanalysis

French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan developed a linguistic or more precisely, semiotic interpretation of Freud where he transformed the concepts central to psychoanalysis into the linguistic theory propounded by Ferdinand de Saussure. Lacan's major contribution is his development of a system which emphasises the process of signification. He views the human mind as constituted by the language we use.

Because Lacan's structure of psychoanalysis contains semiotics, it is important to learn the workings of semiology. In semiotics, the important part is the consideration of 'signs' as the 'conveyors of meaning', which extends beyond the limits of language. As per Saussure, a 'sign' has two important parts viz. the 'signifier' and the 'signified'. The 'signifier' contains in it the elements composing the sign (which in semantics would be speech sound or written marks) while the 'signified' is the conceptual meaning of the sign. The 'signifier' and the 'signified' leads to 'signification' which is a French term for 'meaning' or 'significance'. The essence and the focus of semiotics is not in interpreting a particular instance of 'signification' but in establishing the 'general signifying system' that each particular instance relies upon.

Lacan reformulated Freud's early stages of psychosexual development and 'Oedipus complex' which is a prelinguistic stage of development that Lacan calls 'imaginary' and the stage after the acquisition of language is called 'symbolic'. In the 'imaginary' stage there is no clear distinction between the subject (individual self) and the object (the other selves). The intervening between the two stages leads to what Lacan would call 'mirror' stage - it is the moment when an infant learns to develop a cognition of a separate self which is also an illusory autonomous subject as viewed by him/her, it happens first when a child begins to learn about his image, watching himself in the mirror and is later aggravated by the factors such as encounters from other people.

Now, when the infant subject enters the 'symbolic' or 'linguistic' stage, it assimilates the linguistic differences which are discussed above; the infant subject is constituted by the 'symbolic' and it learns to accept its predetermined "position" in linguistic oppositions such as 'male/female', 'father/son', 'mother/daughter'. This symbolic realm of language is also the realm of the law of the father. Here, the "phallus" (symbolically used for male privilege and authority) is the "privileged signifier" that establishes the mode or the chain of all the other signifiers. It can also be defined as the nodal points in a 'symbolic order' with the "master signifier"– where the 'master signifier' is the "signifier of [...] signification as such", as Haz describes it.

'Jouissance' and 'foreclosure' are important in Lacanian psychoanalysis and are even related to each other as they complement each other as if they are in the same network. 'Jouissance' refers to ecstasy which gets lost upon entering the 'symbolic order' and the continuous search for this plentitude of ecstacy due to its lack. In the case of Freud, it was an individual deriving 'death drive', which has been revised by Lacan. Feminist psychoanalytic interpretation of 'jouissance' is premised on feminine libidinal drive being repressed by the 'symbolic order'. The French postmodern thinker Gilles Deleuze owing to his 'schizoanalysis' developed 'jouissance of partial drives', the idea that there is a 'multiplicity of different and partial objects of enjoyment'. It is the de-patriarchal and de-oedipal reality where there is no single father. In Ancient drama (Greek drama) and Renaissance drama there is one father and the plot is defined by this patriarchal figure, a great example of this is William Shakespeare's 'Hamlet'.

'Foreclosure' on the other hand is technically a defense mechanism in classical psychoanalytic terms. It is the expulsion and shunning of the fundamental signifier i.e. the 'castrative' presence of father, who is the source of 'symbolic castration'. It is initiated by the subject through identifying some 'form' in the place of 'the name-of-the-father' which is closely related to the 'master signifier', the 'superego' and the 'phallus'. The 'identifying' of a different 'imaginary form' and 'replacement' of the 'master signifier' is quintessentially 'psychosis' and 'schizophrenic'.

The embrace of the 'name-of-the-father', the 'master signifier', is important to understand Infrared's stance on being patriotic and Infrared's understanding and criticism of the American left, who, in foreclosing the 'name-of-the-father', have taken for granted to have a concrete and firm basis of politics.

Psychoanalysis is important to understand Infrared's stances in politics and the theoretical canon which has been put forward by this media collective over the years. Also, it is important for understanding Continental thinkers of twentieth century and contemporary thinkers like Slavoj Žižek who have a profound influence on the development of Infrared thought.