Aristotle argued that tragedy’s audience is treated to an experience of emotional stimulation rather than historical education. While in many respects unavoidably imitative, tragedy’s highest value and pleasure lie in its ability to occasion the excitement and catharsis of its audience’s fear and pity (Poetics, 1449b/25 and 1452b/30). Firmly planted in his culture, Aristotle was drawing on the Athenian understanding of tragedy as Dionysian. The domain of the god of wine and ecstasy ran the gamut from orgy to performance; intoxication was his means, purgation was his goal. The philosopher was also echoing the dictates of a Hippocratic culture that understood illness as excess in the humours and treatment as their purgation.
Freud will trail closely tragedy’s Athenian dynamic as he will come to identify pleasure’s basic principle in terms of an economic discharge of tension rather than a hedonistic consumption of object. Indeed, for Freud, the charge of the libidinal drive is bound to, intensified by, and subsequently cathected through its object much as, for Aristotle, an audience’s fearful and/or pitiful tremor is caught up in, heightened by, and subsequently released through the drama it witnesses on the stage.
An Acropolis, a La Scala, and a Hollywood are much less the stagings of truth and morality and much more the sites of Dionysian manipulation, transformation, and release. The unconscious too is such a site; we have come to know its productions under the headings of dreams, slips, and phantasies. Such productions point to the so-called truth of their subject only insofar as they illustrate the latter’s individual qualities as, if you will, writer, director, and producer. When presented with such stagings, the threads clinicans are most interested in picking up and following lead not to their historical or ethical worth (Are they true? Are they morally acceptable?) Rather, it is the unconscious processes and investments by which they have been produced and shaped that form the bulk of the analytic material.
I hold this observation to be perfectly in line with the classic Freudian appreciation and use of a dream’s imagery for instance, an imagery that is much less a representation or an account of a truth as it is the product of an unconscious mise en scène that is itself the focus and concern of the clinical inquiry.
Indeed, and once he thought he had established the universality of incest and parricide, once, in other words, he had identified what he considered to be the inevitable components of primary phantasy, Freud was much more invested in uncovering the particular ways in which an analysand weaves, structures, and negotiates the components than in their (dare one say it?) quotidian content. The sense of newness, discovery, and individuality that psychoanalysis brings its participants is hardly in their investment in what has become a joke of a myth (“Doctor, please tell me something I haven’t already heard, read, or been warned you would say!”) The sense of newness, discovery, and individuality lies in uncovering the dramatic style each analysand adopts in staging the myth, in his or her poetic scriptwriting and directorial techniques, in his or her idiosyncratic modes of excitement and catharsis, the grounds on which they are erected, and the purposes they are made to serve.
Of the myth and its tragic truth very little is left of analytic import, at least as the myth of origin whose repercussions are necessarily and exclusively tragic.
