Psychoanalysis

psychology initially defined as understanding of mental and emotional processes as they related to language, literature and culture psychoanalysis is study of these processes in individual people psychotherapy techniques for resolving mental and emotional problems and helping people realise their full potential

Language-in psychological terms primary symbolic system through which we categorise worlds within and around us Lacan - subject's entry into language -- R/I/S words how we distinguish I, me, mine, yours, student, teacher, grown-up, adult words means for expression and repression can say some things, ignore repress others (god save the queen) 'talking cure' word play, slips of the tongue... Phallus/castration

Literature - writing objct of psychological study and theraputic practice study poems, plays and see their 'inner' lives both psychological object (writer in text) psychological subject (reader or writer's relation to text) shift from writer to reader Not on Shakespeare's mind or mind of Hamlet more psychological problems realised in readers of these fictions literature a space in which reader and writer dream, play....

Dream work - manifest and latent content condensation, displacement, dramatization, and secondary elaboration sublimation

Culture - Civilisation as a whole result (or symptom) of human beings' struggles to control and redirect basic drives and desires (Lacan, too early or too late / pleasure is the problem) culture a sustained act of negative repression distorts our animal natures and alienates us from our bodies positively celebration of what it is to be human keeps us sane we can look at literature, art, clothes, buildings... conceal, constrict and contain or, expand, express and explore tied to our understanding of the animal or bodily functions cannot be divorced from arguments about culture, civilisation and humanity

“Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.” “Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures... There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensible to it.” ― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents