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/lit/ - Literature

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1942073 No.1942073 [Reply] [Original]

I've read a bit of Bloom on Freud and Shakespeare and he seems to say that Freud is really just Shakespeare. My question(s) to /lit/ is, do you guys agree? Does Shakespeare ever evade Freudian analysis, does he offer us more? What do you guys think of Freud? Are there any good theorists out there who try to critique Freud and succeed? What do you like about Freud and if you don't like him, why not?

>> No.1942076

I dislike it when a talentless writer butchers the message of two great thinkers in order to profit from their names and prestige. Critics should be executed.

>> No.1942082

>>1942076
>Critics should be executed.

So should tripfags.

>> No.1942087

>>1942076
If you could elaborate as to why you disagree instead of just dropping one hostile, polemical sentence I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

>> No.1942088

>>1942082
Fair enough, but you don't know me.

>> No.1942089

>>1942076

>has read hamlet and freud's wiki page at a stretch
>pretends to be outraged about "great thinkers" he hasn't or has barely read

>> No.1942091

>>1942089
Hm, that's funny--where did you get such personal information about me?

>> No.1942093

Everything in this thread is a waste of time, but I'll bite a bit. Bloom isn't idiotic enough to have said quite what you said he said, a quote would be appreciated here. Either way, Freud and Shakespeare are incomparable. One was a brilliant essayist, the other a playwright. Shakespeare did not practice psychoanalysis or examine the psychological effects of sexual repression. You can apply it to his works after the fact and maybe get your Baccalaureate thesis approved, but it's not really a good way to spend your time.

Freud's influence in the 21st (and 20th) century is also much bigger than Shakespeare's, even in literature.

>> No.1942098

This idea of influence is a fiction propagated by readers who would play at writing, like Bloom. Have any of you tried to read that junk-pile "The Flight to Lucifer"? It's sad, it really is.

>> No.1942099

I'm skeptical about the argument for a lot of reasons, but mostly because the term "Freudian" has grown to be so vague and variably interpreted that just about anything in Western lit can be twisted and shifted and shaken until things start coming up Freud.

And then you get into the fact that a lot of Freud's ideas about psychology are clearly influenced, if not wholly informed, by aspects of the European literary tradition (rules of three, dichotomies, and some other stuff), which would obviously be recurrent in Shakespeare's body of work.

I think it's more likely that Freud, being a man of some means and education, was more influenced by Shakespeare's (and by extension, European art history's) ideas than that Shakespeare was influenced by contemporary ideas about psychology, and I apologize for the structure of that sentence, but I'm a little tired right now.

>> No.1942111

>>1942073
Shakespeare is Freudian in the sense that Oedipus fucked his mom that one time.

>> No.1942112

>>1942099
>>1942093
Well, I'm not that well-read in either, but it seems like a lot of how sexuality is presented in Shakespeare is similar to that of Freud, and Bloom is arguing that Freud is really just taking his ideas from Freud. I guess I should read more to see if Freud "misreads" Shakespeare at some point. But I think the big things are the idea of sexuality and desire being tied to your past. Hamlet is the one play that always comes up. I think it's hard to distance yourself from a Freudian reading of plays like Hamlet and Sophocles' plays.

>> No.1942120

OP again, I don't want this to come off as a homework thread, but I don't post here often so I apologize if I'm throwing a lot of questions at once, but are there any works which try to evade Freud? I've heard Joyce tried to do this Ulysses but I haven't read that one yet.

>> No.1942126

>>1942112
Yeah, but at the same time, what kind of psychological theory would argue that our lifestyles and experiences, even and especially those rooted deeply in the past, have no effect on our boners?

A lot of what Freud did was construct theories that reflected the Western literary and social tradition anyway, so it makes sense that you could filter Shakespeare, or really any author who helped define that tradition, through the work of Freud and find some complementarity.

>> No.1942132

Bloom spent 20 years trying to write a book on Freud called "Transference and Authority." At some point, that book turned into "Shakespeare: The invention of the Human".

What happened in the interim? The wholesale discrediting of Freud. Largely thanks to the "recovered memory" movement of the late 80s / early 90s.

The question here is whether Freud actually has any value. I encourage you to read Fred Crews. Freud makes pretense to scientific authenticity when in fact his overall ideas seem more like cocaine psychosis overlaid with Jewish self-loathing. (See Farrell, Freud's Paranoid Quest, and Sander Gilman passim.)

What Freud's ideas are NOT is what Freud pretended they were....science.

>> No.1942135

>are there any works which try to evade Freud?

Anything by Vladimir Nabokov.

Nabokov called Freud "The Viennese Wizard" and said he saw no value (intellectual or medical) in "the application of ancient Greek myths to one's private parts".

>> No.1942138

>>1942126
Yeah, I understand that. I don't want to sound like I'm resenting Freud, because I do like a lot of his ideas, even if they are a synthesis rather than a creation, but are there any theorists or literary works which complicate and problematize Freud? My problem is that it seems like there's a lot of over-determination in psychoanalysis, in particularly the interpretation of dreams. It's so easy to read something into these things and while it may seem fitting, I think it's all a bit too reductive and simplistic.

>> No.1942147

>>1942138

Well, anyone who writes on psychoanalysis after Freud is generally a Freudian revisionist of some form or another.

I'd suggest reading Adam Phillips. He's a serious and sensitive reader of Freud, but is hardly an idolator.

>> No.1942148

>>1942132
The ''recovered memory'' movement was a misapplication of Freud in much the same way that lobotomies were a misapplication of neurobiology..Freud's ideas have not been discredited..in fact they are still being used in therapeutic settings..You suggest that someone read a detractor's opinion to arrive at the truth--but this is absurd...it's like saying "if you want to know whether gay marriage is right or wrong, read this pamphlet published by the westboro baptist church'' (of course i'm making an absurd example, but it illustrates my point) Freud's ideas are not discredited by any means because of how they are still being used not only in their original therapeutic application, but also because they are the foundation of structuralism-which is of course a very important tendency in critical theory. Psychoanalysis was largely abandoned due to the wider use of psychoactive drugs in behavioral therapy--a far more efficient and profitable way of doing business..

>> No.1942151

>>1942148

Dude, even Harold Bloom believes psychoanalysis has no therapeutic or medical value whatsoever----he describes Freudian analysis as "shamanism".

>> No.1942154

>>1942132
>>1942132
Thanks for the recommendations, will look into them.

I'd agree that Freud is not science and I'd go further and say that I doubt psychoanalysis is really beneficial. I prefer to see and read Freud as literature and "the talking cure" is like the introspection you feel when you read a good book and see something of yourself in it. I think Freudian psychoanalysis has more benefit when one person tries to read Freud honestly. But then, why not just read Hamlet or Sophocles, or Dostoevsky?

>> No.1942155

>>1942138
Well, I think there are a lot of authors who put out stories that kind of defy a lot of what Freud argued. In a general sense, I'd say post-modern lit as a whole involved denying the sort of symbolism and determinism that Freudians were arguing.

Authors like Kurt Vonnegut, who embraced complexity in characters, allowing their impulses, motivations, and actions to be ambiguous, put out lit that really does say, "No, people aren't so easily reduced down to their base components."

But at this point, I'm getting into more personal opinions about lit and psyche, and I don't want to shit up what seems to have been a pretty good thread.

>> No.1942158

>>1942151
He may think that, but he is a book critic and not a therapist..there are many therapists working in the field today who believe that Freud's theories still have therapeutic value.

>> No.1942159

>I think Freudian psychoanalysis has more benefit when one person tries to read Freud honestly.

Well, you're pointing out one of the big problems with psychoanalysis. I know people nowadays aren't inclined to take Wilhelm Reich seriously, but this was the first critique he made of Freudian psychoanalysis, with his idea of "character armor".

Reich noticed that Freud's patients (or his own patients) had all clearly read enough of Freud that they started deliberately "performing" their dreams, etc., to make them more Freudian. In other words, as soon as it was clear what Freud's own ideas were, the patients started acting them out deliberately.

This points to the other big problem with Freudianism----the changing nature of mental health symptoms over time. Where are the Freudian hysterics nowadays? Why don't young women suddenly go into paralytic fits the way they did at Charcot's clinic? Is it possible that what intervened was not Freudian theory but women's suffrage?

>> No.1942162

>>1942158
Well, this is more anecdotal than you might like, but my older sister studied psychology and was, for a time, a therapist, and she made it very clear that most of Freud's ideas are not taken too seriously by professional psychologists today.

Even the psychoanalysts nowadays don't hold too strictly to the particulars of his work.

It's kind of like Hippocrates and medicine; there are aspects of Hippocrates that are important to doctors around the world, but that doesn't mean health is based on humours.

>> No.1942163

>>1942158
I think Bloom would argue that reading is the best therapy. He calls reading the act of "self-overhearing" and it's what Shakespeare did best with his characters. It's a pretty clever way of thinking about Freud and Shakespeare and reading in general. I think he places too much emphasis on rivalries too much, but that's another thread altogether.

>> No.1942180

>>1942162
I totally agree--Freud is not being followed by apostles anymore--his ideas are more diffuse and general than particular..I only bring this up because there is a very popular idea that Freud's ideas were discredited--when really, therapy just really moved on, like I said, to different approaches mostly drugs and CBT--I also think it's a mistake to assume that the most current approaches are necessarily the best (there's this fallacy about the idea of progress) I think if drugs hadn't become a quick and easy answer for psychological problems, psychoanalysis would have developed on its own lines into a therapy which to me would be more substantial than what we have today--but honestly, this idea of mine is based on experience as a patient, not a doctor.

>> No.1942190

>>1942159
I really like this point. I think Cronenberg's gonna play with it in his upcoming film A Dangerous Method about Freud and Jung, but that's just judging by the trailers.

I guess this is kind of like the point I was trying to make (I think) about over-determination of Freud. I think it's really easy to summarize your life and say "Oh, well when I was young my mother this and that...it now makes perfect sense."

>> No.1942200

>>1942180
Fair enough. I'm kinda with you, kinda not on the drugs issue. On the one hand, I generally prefer to avoid long-term chemical medication if it can be avoided. On the other hand, it's helped a lot of people lead fulfilling lives that they might not have had otherwise. Sometimes, therapy is enough, sometimes it isn't.

Suffice it to say, psychology isn't done evolving yet, and I'm comfortable saying that our treatments now are better than they were back then, and will probably get even better in the future.

>> No.1942244

>>1942154
>But then, why not just read Hamlet or Sophocles, or Dostoevsky?

Because there's barely any relationship between these guys and Freud. Freud wrote some brilliant essays. The majority of his work was not "well you obviously want to have sex with your mother" (this is, in fact, none of his work). Freud was a philosopher and should be treated as such. Fiction writers touch the same ideas sometimes, but express them differently. Regardless, would you not read Ulysses because you've already read the Odyssey? Why hurt yourself?

Hamlet is more valuable than being reduced to some subconscious desire; that interpretation of the play is downright stupid.

Sophocles' plays actually have nothing to do with what Freud was talking about. The only reason it's called the "Oedipal complex" is because Oedipus bagged his mom, but Oedipus actually didn't know that it was his mom; it's not a play about suppressed desire, it's about suppressed knowledge.

Dostoevsky, where would I even begin?

>> No.1942260

>>1942244
All around great post.

>> No.1942295

>>1942099
I'll help you out.
Freudian = Making an assload of hypothesis and never testing them.