WEEK FIVE: PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

This week we read a bunch of Frued, Jung, Lacan, Gombirch, and Bryson. You always hear about and, if you take a psychology class, you learn about Freud. I was exciting to finally read some of his work after always hearing about it. The fact is, you hear all these people saying all the old psychologists and psychiatrists wrote about it sex and it is true that there is a lot of sexual elements to these articles.

• Freud Symbolism in Dreams
• distortion in dreams due to censorship. If eliminated, dreams would still not be understandable
• become aware of reason for obscurity of dreams in gap technique
• silent elements. Associations of single elements in dreams
• translations for objects in dreams. Similar to modern dream interpretation books?
• constant translations could make a norm we hear and then integrate into our dreams from our own knowledge. So it could be viewed in an overview sense rather than the dreamers interpretation
• meaning symbols associated with set meanings despite the dreamer
• constant relation of dream element and translation is symbolic one. symbol of unconscious dream thought
• substitution of part for the whole
• allusion
• imagery
• symbolic
• Symbols allow the meaning of dreams to be understood without having to question the dreamer. If symbols commonly appear, personality and life conditions known, an interpretation could be make immediately
• appeals to vanity of interpreter and impresses dreamer. Not meant to trick and should not be proposed that symbol method replaced free association.
• During interpretation, the analyst must not know the events of previous day that stimulated the dream.
• Associations of persons analyzed are sources we gain our knowledge from of what is called mental situation
• Symbolism is not peculiar to dreams nor exclusively characteristic of them. Use of symbolism in dreams was not a discovery of psychoanalysis. Philosopher K.A. Scherner. Psychoanalysis confirmed the discovery through modifying it
• Symbolic relation is essentially comparison but subject to particular condition though we cannot say what they are. Not all objects in dreams can be symbolic
• Fascination that the dreamer is unaware of the symbolic relation but makes use of it
• Houses often representations of the human body, family, birth and death and nakedness
• houses are often interpreted as male if smooth and as a woman if rough
• parents are Kings and Queens to be exalted in dreams while children and siblings are vermin, little creatures
• Birth was referenced by water, falling into or climbing out, saving someone from it or being saved. Those fit into the relation of mother and child
• Dying is often represented by a journey or traveling
• Clothes and uniforms often stand for nakedness
• And of course the many sexual symbols
• Symbols for male genitals: Number 3. Penis represented by similar forms. Sticks, poles, trees, umbrellas. Also penetrating and injuring: weapons, fire-arms. Objects that contain water. Objects able to elongate. Rise in defiance of gravity. Balloons, zeppelins. Symbolize erections as the dreamer flies up
• Females are usually symbols enclosing a space or acting as a receptacle. Pits, hollows, caves, ships, cupboards, stoves, rooms. Snails and mussels. Church and chapel are symbols for women. Breasts represented by apples, peaches, fruit.
• Pubic Hair for both sexes: Woods and thickets, complicated landscape of a woman's genitals
• female organ also a jewel case for a place to put sweetmeats
• House supports
• Wood symbolizes woman and mother. German and Greek root words
• Death is a journey: ex. you tell small children a person has gone away instead of death
• Freud Phantasy-Making and Art
• Day dreaming is/similar to phantasy making
• relinquished pleasure in physical life to continue mental life. free from demands of reality in our phantasies
• in day dreams is imaginary happiness and return of gratification
• non-distorted precursor to a night dream
• unconscious is when we have night dreams and conscious for day dreams
• path from phantasy to reality is art. Turns away from reality and transfers interest and libido on creation of wishes in life of phantasy
• true artists can collaborate his day dreams so they lose the personal note to become enjoyable to others
• ability to mold material until it expresses the idea of his phantasy faithfully
• In phantasy: able to win the love of women, honor and power
• Freud Relation of Poet to Daydreaming
• akin to writing of imagination. Gives hope to one day become a writer
• writers distance themselves from each other. Non-writers think that everyone has the heart of a poet
• writer does the same things as a child at play. The writer and child create a world of phantasy that is taken seriously and lots invested within it while they also keep it separate from reality.
• Tangible objects and capable things of representations are called Plays while people who present them are Players
• things in real life produce no pleasure so poets are needed
• as people grow, they cease to play and give up the pleasure of doing so
• cannot give up pleasure so they trade it for something else. Give up real objects to indulge in phantasy
• Adults become ashamed of their day dreams and conceal them because they are a continuation of play. An adult knows that they shouldn't play or day dream and instead make their way in the world. So they hide their day dreams
• unsatisfied people make phantasies. Impelling wishes either erotic or to exalt the person making them. Wishes could employ events in present to plan a future based on the pattern of the past
• Jung On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry
• investigation required between psychology and art
• art is a psychological activity. so it can be approached from a psychological angle. Art comes from psychic motives
• only the process of art that is the creation process not its essential nature is psychology. Question of art not by psychologists but side of aesthetics
• similar to religion. it art and religion cannot be explained they become mere subdivisions of psychology
• artistic creation can only be attempted to be explained
• neuroses as work of art through professional bias? never occur to layman's eyes
• poet influenced by his father, mother, sexual repression relationships
• scientific treatment of art reveal personal threads that artist intentionally or not put into work
• Freud thinks maybe reach back into childhood as part of influence of creation
• psychopathia sexualis
• "every artist is a narcissist"
• reductive method of  Freud is medical one
• investigate morbid psychic phenomena. Getting around consciousness to reach psychic background or unconscious
• responds that repressed contents must have negative traits-infantile sexual, obscene, criminal- so unacceptable to conscious
• strips work of art from shimmery robes and exposes nakedness and drabness of Homo sapiens
• conscious contents give us a clue to unconscious background are incorrectly called symbols by Freud. Not true symbols, since his theory just have role of signs or symbols of subliminal process 
• Freud's technique of interpretation is obviously one-sided and therefore erroneous, displays bias
• to truly psychologically analyze art, must ride itself of medical procedure
• escaped from limitations of personal and soared beyond the personal concerns of creator
• meaning and individuality of work of art inhere within it and not it its extrinsic capacities according to own laws and shaping itself to fulfillment of own creative purpose
• prose as well as poetry spring wholly from authors intention to produce particular result. exercises keenest judgement and choose words with complete freedom. material completely under his control. expresses what he wants and nothing else.
• such as Athena from Zeus's head
• sometimes poet thinks he knows exactly what he is saying but actually tells more
• primordial image, archetype is a figure, a demon human or process, that constantly recurs in the course of history and appears when creative fantasy is freely expressed
• Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function
• small child can recognize reflection in mirror by themselves or with mother holding the,
• Ideal-I: root-stock of secondary identifications
• Truth and Stereotype
• "temperament" or "personality" or artist, their selective preferences, may be one of the reasons for transformation and interpretation of the same image
• also including the style of the period and the artist
• natural adjustment in "mental state" which we perform automatically looking at old illustrations
• stylized. we know the trees didn't truly look like that but we understand they are trees
• style rules even when an artist is trying to reproduce nature faithfully. artist can only render what his tool  and medium allow. technique restricts freedom of choice
• George Inness and Lackawanna Valley. Paint 5 tracks when there was only 1. Hid with a puff of smoke which wasnt there. Lied in the advertisement rather than painting what he saw. 
• Ex: Bayeux tapestry told of Battle of Hastings but was not what it actually looked like
• sometimes qualities of actual subject but liberties taken
• not a process of abstraction, a tendency to simplify. represents the first approximate category rather than tighten to fit the form it is to reproduce
• danger to confuse how figure is drawn with the way it is seen
• reproduce simplest figures constitutes process itself by no means psychologically simple. essentially constructive or reconstructive character, subjects employed, reproduction was mediated pre-eminently through agency of verbal and geometrical formulae
• medieval art student- problem of tradition through copy (hieroglyphic to cat)
• misinterpretation of the draftsman
• the familiar will always remain likely starting point for rendering the unfamiliar: existing presentation will always exert its spell over artist even while he tries to record the truth
• Leonardo himself has  been known to have made mistakes in his anatomical drawings
• View of Derwentwater by Mr. Chiang Yee. Seeing English scenery through "Chinese eyes"
• painting is an activity and the artist will therefore tend to see what he paints rather than to paint what he sees.
• no neutral naturalism. the artist, no less than the writer, needs a vocabulary before he can embark on a "copy" of reality
• phrase the "language of art" is more than a loose metaphor. between spoken words which are conventional signs and painting which uses "natural" signs to "imitate" reality
• Home to the layman, how much of what we call "seeing" is conditioned by habits and expectations
• rests on confusion of pictures, words, and statements
• if art is conceptual, can not be true or false, like pictures, can only be useful for the formation of descriptions
• language does not give name to pre-existing things or concepts so much as it articulates the world of our experience