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Laughter

Of Revisions and Caricatures

April 19, 2008
Dreams, Freud, Klein, Lacan, Laughter, MetaTherapeutics, Secondary Revision, Speaking Desire

        Freud argued in Totem and Taboo that the efects of secondary revision are not exclusive to the dream-work; they are in fact evidenced in any realm of thought that requires unity and intelligibility as markers of its systematic aspirations. Freud writes:

The secondary revision of the product of the dream-work is an admirable example of the nature and pretensions of a system. There is an intellectual function in us which demands unity, connection and intelligibility from any material, whether of perception or thought, that comes within its grasp; and if, as a result of special circumstances, it is unable to establish a true connection, it does not hesitate to fabricate a false one… [A] system is best characterized by the fact that at least two reasons can be discovered for each of its products: a reason based upon the premises of the system (a reason, then, which may be delusional) and a concealed reason, which we must judge to be the truly operative and the real one (Freud, 1953, 95).

        Unwittingly, Freud may very well have been predicting and facilitating the course of the criticism the intellectual function of his own apparatus was soon to suffer. Indeed, his appraisal of a system’s need for unity and intelligibility applies equally to metapsychology as it does to the structures of which it speaks. The psychoanalyst’s view stands here in stark opposition to Ockham’s razor as the principle of theoretical parsimony that has dominated much of the West’s scientific inquiry and the aesthetic standards of its formulations from the early Renaissance onwards. Interestingly enough, psychoanalysis too has often found itself loath to resist such a principle. No matter its internal struggles and divisions, the discipline has invariably sought to extract from the richness of its subject matter as basic and as universal a set of dynamics and categories as it possibly could. For Freud, it was the unconscious as a process that negotiates the pleasures and pressures of the libido; for Klein, envy and gratitude provided the major keys to the psyche’s workings and possible transformations; for Lacan, registers and mathemes were the code words by which the practice of the cure may be assessed and validated; and the list goes on.

        Whether axiomatic or real, explicit or concealed, I would like to suggest that one of the main motivating factors, or “reasons” as Freud wishes them to be, behind such a pursuit of systematic unity and simplicity is the discipline’s long-standing thirst for recognition as a member in our modern day version of the Greek Pantheon: Science. The price for such recognition cannot be overestimated. Much like the dramatic storm around which it has organized its practice and much like the blind hero around whom it has mounted its own clinical and intellectual storm, psychoanalysis has remained largely blind to the material and psychological paucity of its understanding of the psyche and, by extension, of sexuality, as tragically Oedipal and nothing but.

        For the most part, the psychoanalytic profession persists in its refusal to acknowledge that for it to do justice to the panoply of human passions it must recognize itself, as both a method and a community, as subject to them. Instead, it often discourses on sexuality in the most un-seductive of styles and on desire in the most un-desirous. Humour it virtually ignores; humility it has yet to discover; auto-irony it finds intolerable. Sadly, it stands alone as did Antigone, tragic in her certitude but no less comedic in her zeal.

        This, fortunately, is not the fate to which psychoanalysis must be doomed. While the abundance of its caricatures in the popular mind is a symptom of hostility and defensiveness, it is also a sign of the discipline’s own intensely disavowed and split off comedic power. As I see it, the collective and clinical task at this point is to reintegrate that power, not as aim but as tool.

Antigone

April 8, 2008
Anouilh, Antigone, Laughter, Oedipus, Repetition, Sophocles

        The generally held view, the one that psychoanalysis has recapitulated but not yet fully explored, is that the kernel of the Sophoclean script treats of a three-sided violation: Oedipus was doomed as much for his attempt at defying the Delphic oracle as he was for his parricide and incest. The latter were of a common quality to the classical Athenian mind, at least in the context of a mytho-theology that was replete with incidences of what we nowadays might consider as even more obscene and absurd passions and events. This did not make the king’s treatment of his parents any the less heinous, but it did render it in paler colours in comparison to his even more sinister and intolerable defiance as a mere mortal. His refusal to submit to the dictates of the higher deities, his though well intentioned but not any the less desperate and misguided wish for the fallibility of their oracles, which is to say his willed ignorance of these oracles’ influence and authority, and, in the process, his attempt to arrogate as his own their powers and privileges, his, in other words, refusal to recognise and abide by his station as a flawed and powerless human in an otherwise rigidly organized cast system is what ultimately cost him his royal privilege.

        Two aspects of the example of Antigone are instructive on this point: the first is political the second psychological. Her father’s daughter, Antigone thought that she too could circumvent the laws of the state in favour of a heavenly commandment to which she declared herself subject. To her mind, she also became that commandment’s enforcer, protector, and agent. Initially its tool, she subtly but steadily transformed herself into its master; subject to it, she became its subject. Anarchist, resistance fighter, or proto-feminist she may have for her modern readers become, for most of her Athenian audiences she, like her father, would have probably remained the blasphemous pretender to a seat at the Olympian high table; her hubris would have been a trigger for her audience’s indignation, dismissal, and pity. Quite likely, her death would have been seen as the product of a misplaced and disgraceful sense of allegiance rather than a lofty sacrifice since, and to the mind of her contemporaries, suicide was cowardly self-indulgent and she was but a woman, irrational and unenviable. On the other hand, Creon’s final torment at his loss of honour and family may very well have been the play’s climactic moment and the worthiest of its audience’s compassion and sympathy. On this score, and while his restaging may have served specific political purposes at the time of the Nazi occupation of France, Anouilh did not escape the trap of casting the intransigent and overly self-assured as resistor when she could have been equally cast as fascist.

        The other aspect to Antigone’s scenario worth noting here is that, sadly, her psychological structure has completely eluded much of the current analysis of the Theban trilogy. Let us pause for a moment and consider the following: Antigone is the product of incest; her father was a murderer and her mother had committed suicide; her two brothers failed at containing their sibling rivalries and eventually killed one another; and much of her adult life was spent ministering to a man toward whom she must have felt some hint of revulsion. Would it be too much of a stretch to suggest that, as one might say these days, she had “baggage?!” Would it be even remotely possible that, as someone who had lived in the midst of and been shaped by so much unmitigated hostility and destruction, she could only come to act on her envy toward Creon as the one relative who was not manifestly implicated by the oracles and their damned and damning prophecies? She is carried away by her rage at her (grand-) uncle; she will trigger a chain of events that will leave him weak, sexless, and childless. She will effectively castrate him. True to her name, Antigone is portrayed as not only the one without progeny, but also as the woman who will arrogate for herself the manly power to bring an entire family’s lineage to its end. She will effectively embody that vision of femininity men have reviled and women have fought against.

        Il seems to me that Antigone is more deserving of recognition than she is of either the ruthless dismissal she must have suffered at the hands of her Athenian audiences or the abstract elaborations on psyche and community she has come to endure from her modern readers. If these latter are on the right track then it would be quite the comic feat of justice if, two and a half millennia from now, their psychologies and politics were to be filtered through whatever traces will have survived of Beaches or Days of Our Lives.

Oedipus — A Directorial Note

March 22, 2008
Aristotle, Dreams, Freud, Laughter, Oedipus, Productions, Sophocles, Speaking Desire

        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.

Oedipus — Zoom out

March 17, 2008
Antigone, Aristotle, Laughter, Oedipus, Sophocles

        As much as the Oedipus with whom we are most familiar is the one fixed by Sophocles, the character’s life extends far beyond the tragedy with which it has become marked. Homer (The Iliad, Book IV and The Odyssey, Book XI), Aeschylus (Seven Against Thebes), and Euripides (The Phoenician Women) had already treated of man and destiny. Since, Seneca, Corneille, Hofmannsthal, Péladan, Gide, Eliot, Cocteau, Stravinsky, el-Hakim, and Pasolini are but a few of the signatures borne by the reworkings of story and theme. As the reiterations multiply, no matter the era, genre, or medium, what we have come to identify and value the most are their distinct variations in recasting dramatically, politically, and psychologically the fate with which we all have been presumably doomed. Whether tragic, banal, satirical, joyous, or prudent, the story’s components remain more or less the same. What differs, what gives them their qualities as tragic, banal, satirical, or what not, are the ways in which they are woven, the distances and juxtapositions they inhabit, the relations they endure and produce, and, in turn, the relations they provoke for their audiences to endure and produce.

        Lest we assume that it is only we that are familiar with the plot and its details, that it is only we for whom form has come to eclipse content, let us not forget that the tragedy’s first audience was well acquainted with the myth and its major detours, partly through its cultural surround, which included the above mentioned pre-Sophoclean sources, and partly through Sophocles himself. Antigone, as the last installment of the three Theban tragedies and the thematic conclusion to the accursed family’s travails, was the first to be conceived and executed (in 441 B.C.E.). By the time Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus were produced (in approximately 426 B.C.E. and 405 B.C.E. respectively), the Athenian theatregoers were already well apprised of history and fate. To borrow from Aristotle his Poetics terminology, Antigone’s dénouement, her change in fortune, was possible only in light of her complication, i.e., in light of her family’s story in its entirety up until the point at which the play that bears her name begins to unfold; Antigone’s complication became the source and raw material upon which Sophocles could draw for his two remaining plays’ dénouement. And if, in spite of all of this, some theatergoers were still unaware of the plot and its outcome, they would have most likely treated the performance as much a detective mystery as a tragedy.

Oedipus — Take Two

March 14, 2008
Antigone, Dreams, Laughter, Oedipus, Sophocles

        Look out for the noble and upright king who, because of his pierced ankles, has to hobble his way across the stage. Make sure not to miss our hero’s hyperboles for everything about his words and deeds is in line with the basic structure of humour as exaggerated non-sense. Note the sympathy you feel for him as he heaps his misdeeds and confusions one upon the other, à la Lucy Ricardo, desperate for the clear-minded and practical interventions of a Creon, his Ricky. (Might there be a psychoanalytic import to the implicit homosocial contract between king and brother-in-law here?) Keep track of our hero’s familial lines as they progressively blur beyond recognition: his children are his siblings; his brother-in-law is his uncle; his daughter will soon plan to marry the man who is both his nephew and cousin; many of Jerry Springer’s most outlandish of scenarios could only dream of such twists and complications. Last but not least, do not overlook Jocasta, Antigone, and Euridyce’s final suicidal gestures, sacrificial and redemptive only from the point of view of a modernity that has been thoroughly Christianized; to their original, almost exclusively male, audiences, they remained pitiable and laughable.

        Was the classical Athenian theatregoer any more resistant to the temptations of laughter and hooting than the modern day viewer of television talk shows and situation comedies? Was he any blinder to the absurdly comedic, was he any more aesthetically refined, any more sensitive, any nobler, any less moralistic, any less adolescent? Hardly. Are we then disavowing our own insensitivity and adolescence and setting ourselves up as the nobler ones by recasting the Athenian drama and distilling it down to what we have conveniently declared as its purest and loftiest? To me, that would be more likely.

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