Week 5 Flashcards
(20 cards)
What does melancholia involve
- Melancholia involves turning an externally directed ‘cathexis’ into an internally directed one.
- When the ego invests in itself as an object, this is narcissism.
- So: the discussion concerning melancholia does interface with our discussion re: narcissism or ego-love from last time
Freud starts “Mourning and Melancholia” by comparing and contrasting ‘mourning’ and ‘melancholia’
He treats them as if they’re distinct, at first, but, as he proceeds (and in other texts as well, like
“The Ego and the Id”) the distinction gets blurry: it’s not clear they are discrete phenomena—
they seem to bleed together…
Mourning vs melancholia (melancholia)
-sadness
-loss of interest in the external world
-catalyzed by loss, but not the same kind of loss mourning is catalyzed by: the object slights or disappoints you (something causes you to become disillusioned by the object) and THIS
causes its loss. Note that in “The Ego and the Id” Freud indirectly suggests that social norms can cause you to lose the object: the object or your love of the object results in the transgression of some norm or set of norms, so you lose it for that
reason…
-the loss in this case is not a conscious one: you don’t actually know that you’ve lost the object
-the melancholic seems to have a lot of self- contempt, and is very comfortable talking about all of their own faults ad nauseam (that is, they
have no shame)—Freud suggests that this is because everything they say about themselves is actually about the object!
-melancholia seems to involve stagnation (or a form of conservativism): it’s a way of refusing to work through the loss of the object, or of clinging/conserving to it
Mourning vs melancholia (mourning)
-sadness
-loss of interest in the external world
-catalyzed by loss of a person (they have passed away)—this indicates that the loss is a conscious one: we know exactly what it is we’ve lost
-involves confronting the fact of the person’s absence (in this way, it involves negotiating the ‘reality principle’)
-no self-hatred
-sadness
-loss of interest in the external world
-catalyzed by loss, but not the same kind of loss mourning is catalyzed by: the object slights or disappoints you (something causes you to become disillusioned by the object) and THIS
causes its loss. Note that in “The Ego and the Id” Freud indirectly suggests that social norms can cause you to lose the object: the object or your
-mourning seems to end (you work through your loss and reconcile yourself to it)
How do mourning and melancholia seem to bleed together?
-They have similar symptoms (though self-hatred without shame is unique to melancholia)
-They both take an incredible amount of time and energy to navigate
-Freud initially makes it sound like mourning is a process of working through loss that is eventually completed, whereas melancholia is a form of refusing to work through loss (a process that is not completed, in other words). In “The Ego and the Id,” though, he suggests that we may
never give up any object without melancholically clinging to it: we can only let go of something if we at the same time have a way of holding on to it through melancholy. Towards the end of “Mourning and Melancholia,” he also seems to suggest that we work through melancholia much like we work through mourning (which would imply that melancholia is a process that is eventually completed)
How does melancholia work
-The Id is the component of the psyche that invests in the object
-The ego (also the super ego may be involved) becomes disappointed in the object (without necessarily being conscious of this)
-It rejects/gives up the object (loses it) as a result, but also can’t seem to fully let go of it
-The idea of the object (the thing we were invested in in the first place was actually the idea of the object) is taken into the psyche (it is ‘incorporated’: the psyche takes it in like a body takes in food). Freud says the object is ‘erected’ (like some kind of building would be ‘erected’) in the
psyche…In this sense, it is preserved there
*Note: it doesn’t seem as if Freud was distinguishing between ‘incorporation’ and ‘introjection’: The terms are being used as synonyms…The psychoanalysts Abraham and Torok, in The Shell and the Kernel, do work with a distinction between ‘incorporation’ and ‘introjection’ that Butler makes use of while reading Freud to perform their own intervention in Gender Trouble
The ego in melancholia
-The ego identifies with the object that has been taken in and takes on its features, or characteristics, or traits…(This is a form of narcissistic identification, but a complicated one…)
-We see this theme developed in “The Ego and the Id”
-Freud’s claims about the relation between the ego and the object, after the latter has been taken into the psyche, are strange and at times contradictory:
-The object and the ego in some sense become one
-At one point, Freud explains the melancholy person’s self-hatred by suggesting that the super-ego is attacking the ego precisely because it has now become the object that was a cause of disappointment
-But the ego and the object (Freud at other times suggest) remain distinct…He suggests at another point in the essay that the hatred that would have been directed at the
object (the source of disappointment) is directed at the ego instead, and that this is precisely what allows the person to HOLD on to the object (which is not the ego)
the ID and melancholia
-At another point, Freud suggest the Id is the one attacking the ego by means of the super-ego (the Id has a weird way of being able to ‘communicate’ with the super-ego)
because the ego is the one who forced the Id to give up its object (and the Id had no desire to)…The attack is a form of revenge. This version of the story again makes it seem like the ‘ego’ and the ‘object’ come apart/are not exactly the same thing after the object has been incorporated: it must exist somewhere else in the psyche, rather than overlap with the ego
the super ego and melancholia
-In general, Freud accounts for the melancholic’s shameless self-contempt by pointing to the super-ego: the super-ego begins attacking the ego when melancholia sets in…
-Its attack is so vicious that it can drive the ego to suicide…
-Melancholia, Freud tells us elsewhere, is actually a ‘playground’ for the death drives.
How does Freud’s account of melancholia lend itself to a theory of character-formation?
-This story is developed in “The Ego and the Id”
-We already said that the ego, once it has ‘incorporated’ the object, identifies with it and takes on its characteristics…
-In “The Ego and the Id,” Freud tells us that the ego is actually a ‘precipitate’ of all of its abandoned objects (the history of its losses is visible in its character—its traits are just those of
the objects it has lost/given up…
*Actually, he’s complicated on this point: he tells us that SOME people are able to resist the character-forming effects of some of the object-losses they endure later in life, but
he speaks as if the early object-losses people endure will shape any person’s identity regardless..
-The Oedipus Complex is part of this story:
-We know Freud suggests the marks produced on the psyche by its earliest/formative experiences (like its experience navigating the Oedipus Complex) can never be fully
erased…
-The simple version of Oedipus Complex people tend to be familiar with is just a ‘schema,’ Freud tells us
The girl child -> (the arrow is a cathexis) her father The boy child -> (the arrow is a cathexis) his mother
In this instance, the energy investment is sexual/romantic: the father and the mother are love objects for the children…
The boy child will experience the father as a threat/rival for the
mother’s love
The girl child will experience the mother as a threat/rival for the
father’s love
The girl must give up the father as a loved object and the boy child must
give up the mother
What happens next is more complex than anything we would guess, having just read “Mourning and Melancholia”…
If the girl gives up her father through a melancholic process…shouldn’t
she become masculine/take on his traits? If the boy gives up the mother
through a melancholic process, shouldn’t he become feminine/take on her traits?
Judith Butler, in the late 20th century, gets interested in the complexity
of Freud’s account here, and does their own reading of the text to
produce a novel theory of gender formation…More on this reading to
come!
Freud suggests: there are different possible outcomes for both the boy and the girl
-The boy (a) could give up the mother/identify with her and become feminine. More often, though, he says, the boy (b) responds to the Oedipal situation (and the fact that he cannot take his mother as a love object) by displacing his attachment to the mother (taking another woman
as the object of his love) while increasing his identification with his father (by becoming masculine and taking on whatever other qualities his father might have…)
-The girl could (a) give up the father/identify with him and become masculine…Or (b) could displace her attachment to the father (taking another man as the object of her love) and increase her identification with her mother and become feminine…
-Which outcome occurs, Freud suggests, depends on the ratio of masculinity to femininity in the
child…Or on the ratio that maintains between what he calls their ‘dispositions’…
-Butler gets interested in Freud’s recourse to the idea of these ‘dispositions’; they try to think critically about where these dispositions came from in the first place (they are also the result of social prohibitions, but prohibitions unacknowledged by Freud himself) and what Freud’s narrative about
these dispositions actually conceals (it conceals social prohibitions which produce gender and naturalizes gender—in the form of these ‘dispositions’ Freud is talking about—in the process)
Everyone, according to Freud, as we just said, is constitutionally bisexual and is masculine and feminine.
If a girl child is more constitutionally masculine, then she will navigate the Oedipus Complex by taking on
the father’s traits/becoming masculine…If the boy is more constitutionally feminine, then he will give up the mother and take on her traits/become feminine…and you get the idea…
-The story Freud’s telling about the relationship between melancholia and character-formation isn’t
entirely consistent with his account of melancholia in “Mourning and Melancholia”…
-What are we to make of the gap between the accounts in each text?
Butler’s reading of Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” alongside “The Ego and the Id” in
Gender Trouble
-Butler’s trying to think about what happens in a culture where the norms prohibit homosexuality
-How does this culture SHAPE subjects within it so that they experience themselves as naturally/essentially heterosexual and as gendered in specific ways as a result
Butler emphasizes the fact that often gendered features are the features
Freud is talking about when he’s making these suggestions (think about his discussion in “The Ego and the Id”
In “The Ego and the Id” he’s telling a strange story about how selves become gendered because of the way that they navigate the Oedipus complex
Both children are bisexual (in the sense that they have a mix of masculine and feminine dispositions)…
How the Oedipus complex plays out depends on the ratio of these
dispositions…
Let’s just focus on the girl child (you can construct the parallel case of the boy child for yourself)
The girl child might give up the father and become more masculine if she has more masculinity in her?
But more often, says Freud, she’ll give up the father and not take up his features but become more feminine (identify with the mother who was the former rival)…
Butler steps in here and perhaps illuminates the oddness in a
fruitful way
If the child is masculine and feminine, then, his thought is, the masculine side of the child will be attracted to the mother, and the feminine side of the child will be attracted to the father…
*Butler also critiques the very existence of natural feminine and masculine dispositions: there’s no actual way to distinguish them from gendered features that are the
result of loss occasioned by social prohibition (the taboo against homosexuality…
Both the mother and the father have to be given up as objects of
attraction, then…
But it seems as if the possibility of a homosexual attraction has already been foreclosed within Freud’s framework…
The taboo against homosexuality is operating (even though Freud
isn’t recognizing this):
The girl child, if melancholia were operating, would become feminine to the extent that the mother exists for her as a love object and has to be given up (because of the taboo against homosexuality)…
She would take on her traits after melancholically incorporating
her and after melancholically incorporating the very possibility of
a homosexual attachment…
When the girl gives up her mother, both the object of her cathexis and its aim (its homosexual aim) have to be
given up (at least in a culture with a heterosexist bias)!
The same thing doesn’t happen if she’s giving up the father: she gives up the object but not the aim of her
cathexis (its heterosexual aim is permissible in the culture): she directs her desire away from her father and towards other men.
Butler’s theory of ‘gender melancholia’
In a culture in which heterosexuality is privileged and there are taboos/prohibitions surrounding homosexuality:
Girls will become feminine to the extent that they are required to
give up same-sex attractions and attachments…
The loss of the possibility of these attachments is not even experienced (remember that for Freud melancholic loss is unconscious) because the norms ensure the eradication of the possibility of homosexual attachments even before the subject is constituted…
Subjects just experience themselves as ‘naturally’ heterosexual, or
‘naturally’ attracted to members of the opposite sex…
E.g.,: talk that runs something like this: ‘I’ve never loved a woman,
and could never love a woman’
Abraham and Torok
- Psychoanalysts
- Butler is drawing on their work in the selection we looked at…
- These thinkers, when interpreting Freud’s theory of melancholia, distinguish between ‘introjection’ and ‘incorporation’
- Think back to Freud’s conception of melancholia! A way of refusing to really lose the object you’ve in some way lost: a way of retaining it within the psyche/clinging to it
Introjection:
A way of navigating a loss: results in actual changes to the psyche.
The loss is verbalized
Incorporation:
- Involves the fantasy of bringing the lost object into the psyche.
- The psyche doesn’t actually transform/doesn’t actually fruitfully navigate loss as a result of incorporation…There is no sense in which the loss is verbalized…These
thinkers seem to suggest that incorporation occurs when introjection can’t because the object one would speak about is taboo and cannot be spoken about.
Butler pushes their thinking a bit: Butler suggests that the category
‘incorporation’ is most relevant for their (Butler’s) thinking regarding
gender…Since the losses instituted by heterosexist norms cannot be verbalized, something else happens: A literalizing fantasy:
Literalizing fantasy
The characteristics of the object are literally inscribed on the body: they
become the body’s facticity: its pleasures and more…(The features of the body that we think of as ‘just natural’ are actually socially-produced—or ‘socially constructed’—on this account)
“The loss of homosexuality is refused and the love sustained or encrypted
in the parts of the body itself, literalized in the ostensible anatomical facticity of sex” (97)
“…‘becoming’ a gender is a laborious process of becoming naturalized,
which requires a differentiation of bodily pleasures and parts on the basis of gendered meanings. Pleasures are said to reside in the penis, the vagina, and the breasts or to emanate from them, but such descriptions correspond to a body which has already been constructed or naturalized as gender-specific. In other words, some parts of the body become conceivable foci of pleasure precisely because they correspond to a normative ideal of a gender-specific body. Pleasures are in some sense
determined by the melancholic structure of gender whereby some organs are deadened to pleasure, and others brought to life. Which pleasures shall live and which shall die is often a matter of which serve the legitimating practices of identity formation that take place within the
matrix of gender norms” (96)
The body doesn’t ground desire! Fantasy does!
The forms of power which catalyze melancholic incorporation ‘sweep
away their footprints’ (as Butler puts this: ‘the genealogy’ that made
bodies what they are is “fully forgotten and repressed” [97])
