nazmi

Cultural Studies — 2026-10-13

Psychoanalysis and Subjectivity

freud, lacan, the uncanny

1. Sigmund Freud: the unconscious

Three classes about paradigms of cultural study since the late 19-early 20th century that influence the programme and methods of CCCS

• marxism
  focus on broader structures in society
  determining influence of economics, class and ideology

• Structuralism and Seminology
  focus on signs and significations
  A-subjectivity language is a system that exceeds the individual
  Structures also underlie society and processes of signification
  Cultural signs myths, part of a larger mythology, a second-order signification system

psychoanalysis a third ‘blow’ to the ego → the unconscious

What is psychoanalysis?

an brief introdoction to freud

form of psychotherapy “the talking cure”
a theory of subjectivity, but also of culture
a worldview
a conceptual apparatus

→ part of everyday life, but also raises resistance
→ vocabulary of psychoanalysis is necessary to understand certain cultural theories
→ analysis of culture was important for psychoanalysis
→ huge influence of culture

Sigmund Freud: the unconscious

Founder of psychoanalysis
Neurologist, psychiatrist, interest in culture

1900: The Interpretation of Dreams
Works about culture: Totem and Taboo (1913), The Uncann (1919), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1921), Civilisation and its Discontents (1930),

how can we explain this ongiong irrationality in society even when we are living in so called civilized, developed times?

The Discovery of the Unconsciousness

With Joseph Breuer: study of hysteria (anna o.)

• unexplained physical and psychological symptoms (paralysis, problems with vision and speech etc.)
• she forgor,
  hypnosis: going back to past, origin of symptoms
  finding words = therapeutic

conclusion: hysterical patiens (mostly women) suffer from ‘memories’: forgotten traumatic experiences
anna o couldnt drink anymore, her fathers friend behaved inappropriately and drank from her glass, this disgusted her.

they suffer from forgotten traumatic experiences, this is expressed through their body = symptoms
when the memory is recovered in language, the symptom disappears
but sometimes they reapper in a different form, long process of psychoanalysis

discovery of the unconscious: there is a realm of the human psyche that we cannot access in a direct way, via consciousness

The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
“the royal road of the dream” (jokes and parapraxes)
freudian slip, things you spill out are not a coincidence,

dreams function like a rebus
wordplay
their meaning is coded

through analysis we can uncover the deeper meaning of dreams
distinction between manifest dream content and latent content

mechanisms: displacement and condenstaion → dream work
you wore a band merch today, this might be displaced from some other event
you dream of an old lady, mixture of your grandmother or a teacher from school,

freud would call this the dream work

dreams express unconscious desires, they are expressions of things that are repressed.

waking up = form of alarm or censorship to signal the return of the repressed

A theory of the subject and the human psyche

Instinct versus drives

People, like animals, are driven by instincts

• Sexual urges
• Self preservation

Unlike in animals, those instincts also have a psychologcal component, we eat because we want to stay alive, but we don’t just eat anything. food is also culture

sexuality is not merely procreation, we cant fuck everything/everyone

drive (trieb) instead of instinct: on the border between biological urges and psychological drives

Development of the subject

the first five years of life is crucial in development

Infants completely dependent and lame
most animals
governed by impulses/drives: hunger, need for love, the baby cries for help
symbiotic relation with primary caregiver

pleasure principle
=avoid tension (displeasure) and maximum gratification
growing up: pleasure principle is replaced my reality principle
suddenly what was cute for a baby to do is no longer

gradually baby must learn to control impulses
postpone immediate gratification
dream and fantasy: imaginary gratification can replace real gratification and offer some compensation

child development = gradual process towards independence and autonomy
through a number of phases, biological development coincides with psychic development

Oral Phase (first 3-6 months) sucking/introjection
illusion, everyone around you is a part of you

Anal Phase (1,5 - 2 years) Potty training / importance of boundaries
the child learns how to say no, it sets a boundary and seperates the subject with the object

Genital Phase (2 - 3 years) discovery of infantile sexuality
crucial phase, it will lead to:

Oedipal Phase (5 yrs)
we dont run around naked, can’t jerk off all day, don’t flick the bean at red lobster
intervention of the father/society, threat of CASTRATION

Yeah, the beat prod’ Kashpaint
Bitch tryna fuck with me, but I can’t ‘cause her ass stank
Walk up in the mall and I ball, bitch, I’m patchmade
Shot a nigga in the nuts, hell yeah, castrate

distance from the mother (first love object)
father as rival and ideal → ambivalence of love relations and attachments
love jealousy hatred

Oedipal complex as mythology

we have to develop freuds way of thinking, this pattern is not just something that he observed with children, he sees this in myths, oedipus

developmental stages have been confirmed by psychologcal research (Piaget), but the mythology is contested

anthropology: incest taboo as foundational culture
ultimate goal = leave the family and establish bonds with others

male child = default (castration, primacy of the phallus as marker of sexual difference)

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             ▐▘▜ ▐▘▐ ▐▘▐  ▐  ▐ ▝     ▐▘▐ ▐▘▐ ▝▖▞ ▝▖▞ 
 for women:  ▐ ▐ ▐▀▀ ▐ ▐  ▐   ▀▚     ▐▀▀ ▐ ▐  ▙▌  ▙▌ 
             ▐▙▛ ▝▙▞ ▐ ▐ ▗▟▄ ▝▄▞     ▝▙▞ ▐ ▐  ▐   ▜  
             ▐                                    ▞  
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critiques
scandal of infantile sexuality
For Freud: infantile sexuality has nothing to do with adult or genital sexuality, it has to do with experiencing pleasure through the body

The unconscious

basic idea: subject is determined by the unconscious and not conscious

• unconscious develops out of repression → nothing is every lost in the psyche
  im not in love with my fater - denial, negation
• forbidden libidinal impulses, trauma
• no direct access possible
  keep it all under control, we dont want it to return

Model of the psyche

ego (ich) is only a small part of the psyche that mediates between consciousness = perception-consciousness and the unconscious

Id (es) drive impulses and repressed content, it speaks through me, constant source of energy like a steam motor

preconscious = layer of memories and stored knowledge that can easily be retrieved

signs of the unconscious?
dreams, jokes, slips (the psychopathology of everyday life)
defence mechanisms such as denial, rationalization, intellectualization, displacement, projection, reaction formation, sublimation, regression, somatization
in therapy: transference, projection onto the therapist
in art: return of the repressed, sublimation

→ cultural expressions (art, literature) also depict the unconscious of an entire culture

culture in a sense depicts the unconsciouss of society

two drive theories

1. first drive theory: two basic human drives (analogy with animals)
   libido: sexual drive
   ego-drives: self-protection, but also investment of libido in the ego
   → self love (primary narcissism) is crucial for development, only secondary narcissism is regarded as pathological
   love urself <3

freuds theory comes from a therapeutical side, pov: the difference between a healthy subject and a pathological subject is a difference of degree, not a strong diving line, we all have neurotic and psychotic tendencies. but the difference is only when we are suffering from it and entering pathology

Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1921)
after wwii: confrontation with trauma (PTSD) in soldiers, discovery of repetition (both pleasureable and unpleasureable)
the soldiers keep living the traumatic events over and over again. anything that is unpleasant should be stored in the unconscious, but for the soldiers this wasnt the case.

1. second drive theory:
   eros sexual drives (plural) → energy that binds, drives us towards attachment towards ourselves and to others, forward moving

theres also something else, we see that sometimes we remain stuck, same images are repated over and over again, but even in psychoanalitic theory, patients keep repeating mistakes

theres something that holds them back
death drive (Thanatos): tendency to return inanimate state, to let go, reduction of all tension = death

problems with hypothesis of the death drive
cannot be observed directly, wanting to kill yourself is not a direct manifestation of the death drive.

it must be assumed on the basis of a number of observations.

letter exchange between einstein and freud, worth reading

coincides with a revision of human psyche in terms of ego, id, and superego
superego is the seat of consciousness, its our morality and the kind of ideal we want to reach. why we are our own worst enemies and our worst critics. why are we constanly torturing ourselves, impose norms on ourselves we dont impose on others? it is a very strong representation of the society in ourselves, very critical.

only the tip of the iceberg is conscious, all the rest is the unconsciousness.

ego drives the horse carriage with two horses, these horses want different things. one wants pleasure one goes toward morality

break

Freud’s Legacy

during and after his life: constant revision of theory
→ different models and schools
Carl J. Jung: mysticism, collective unconscious, archetypes
Berlin: socialist-inpsired psychoanalysis, war trauma, collective psychoanalysis for the working class
England: Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, D.W. Winnicott and W. Bion
→ focus on child analysis, object-relations
USA: Ego psychology → focus on reinforcing the ego

Fascination

creativity and freedom of thinking: very fascinating body of writing
case studies, cultural critique, analysis of culture
direct influence of surrealism, modernism and hollywood cinema (hitchcock)

Controversy
freuds thinking has survived but continues to draw criticisim
analysis is long and limited to only people who have the time and money
cognitive and behavorial psychology
feminism

Jacques Lacan: the unconscious, language and ideology

French psychoanalyst
return to freud through structuralism (de saussure) and mathematics

huge influence on poststructuralism and gender theory

A new set of concepts

1. the mirror stage
   development stage in all children around age of 1
   recognition in mirror: aha-erlebnis
   important to remember: connection to ones name and I: first distinction between self and other.

unity and alienation
Identification with a (self)image.
before that children has no coherent self-image, they are governed by impulses, pleasure principle, they dont see them as a whole.
linked to a name → given by someone else, the Other (society)

alienation
image is not who we are: it is only partial (we cant see our back)
our self-image is located outside of us, its a representation, theres a distance between yourself and it
our name does not express who we are, it is a signifier

2. desires and the divided subject

alienation creates a sense of lack
something is always missing, we long for a sense of unity, of being whole or one with ourself
this desire is projected onto objects (things, people, experiences…) in the hope of filling the lack and finding an identity

the subject (S) as a signifier

$S_1$ → S → $S_2$ → S …

meaning arises as difference in relation to other signifiers,

The aim of psychoanalysis is not to let the analysant find their identity or ego, rather it is to make them understand that final meaning always escapes us.

• Consciousness is always unhappy consciousness
  we are governed by the unconsciousness and a large part of our psyche are not accessible through consciousness, what we can do is occasionally make cuts, interrupt this chain and look back. when we look back we suddenly get an insight.

we can only get some sense of self-understaindg by temporarilty halting the chain of desire, by making a cut and retro-actively make sense of ourselves

but the thing “in itself” the object a, always escapes

the subject is fundamentally a divided (castrated) subject
S barre

S

3. Three dimensions of subjectivity
   Three orders
   The Real
   The Imaginary
   The Symbolic

Imaginary order
= order of the image, of the relationship, the other as a mirror of ourselves. we relate to ourselves as an image, our sense of identity is connected to our name and to an image we have. we need this but we have to realise its never the entire truth.

• mirror stage
• we relate to ourselves and others as images of subject and object
• immediacy but also risk of getting caught in dual relation, misrecognition of the other.
  • we can presume things about what we see but we don’t know. it can lead to misunderstandings.
• mediation of symbolic order is necessary and occurs from the beginning
  • in the mirror stage its very crucial that somebody is holding the baby and pointing out that “its u”
  • when we are born we are given a name, meaning we enter society

Symbolic Order
= the larger system, the Other

• abstract laws and regulatons: language and society.
• the social order “hails” us as subjects: addresses us but also positions us.
  • currently as a student we have unwritten agreements on how we should behave in class, we all agree and stick to this.
    → importance of Lacan for Marxist theories (Althusser)

The subject as BORROMEAN KNOT rsi (Heresy)

• Borromean knot = entanglement of the three orders
• continuous movement
• object A is what continually escapes and keeps desire in motion.

Legacy of Lacan

structural understanding of the subject: very abstract → structuralism, use of mathematical models
update of Freudian theory (shift from neurosis to psychosis)
precursos to gender theory: identity is not an essence but a process of identification governed by the Symbolic order

controversy, strange person, complicated inaccessable texts.

Case Study: from the uncanny to the uncanny valley

a post-Freudioan late 20th century concept

“The Uncanny” (1919) = smaller essay by freud.

What is the uncanny?
mild form of anxiety
sense of not being at home, un-Heimlich (not being at home) Heimlich: means at home being familiar, secretive, hidden. un-Heimlich: “unfamiliar”
a form of “derealization”, alienation

uncanny is the uncomfrotable sensation

• deja vu
• getting lost
• strange coincidences
• meeting your double

Psychoanalytic explanation
Return of the repressed,

• unconscious primary fears
  • castration anxiety, death drive

unexpected re-confirmation of archaic beliefs

• superstitions, animism

The uncanny in literature
Important example in the text is “The Sandman by E.T.A Hoffman""
- about a young student who falls in love with an automaton Olympia
- childhood trauma related to figure of Sandman

affect or effect?
in art, things that would be uncanny in reality are not always uncanny (fairy tales)
in art we can enjoy the uncanny
in art the uncanny can be manipulated as an aesthetic effect