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Freud’s MemoryThe Foreign Bodies of Psychoanalysis

Freud’s Memory: The Foreign Bodies of Psychoanalysis [The British novelist Richard Hughes was influenced by Freud. Psychoanalytic ideas are woven into The Fox in the Attic (1961), which is preoccupied with the German experience of World War I. Hughes has passages that are extraordinarily interesting post-psychoanalytic accounts of psychological theory — and ones, incidentally, that resonate with Rilke’s concerns (with birds and interiority, for example) in the Duino Elegies: Primitive man is conscious that the true boundary of his self is no tight little stockade round one lonely perceiving ‘I’, detached wholly from its setting: he knows there is always overspill of self into penumbral regions — the perceiver’s footing in the perceived. He accepts as naturally as the birds and beasts do his union with a part of his environment, and scarcely distinguishes that from his central ‘I’ at all. But he knows also that his self is not infinitely extensible either: on the contrary, his very identity with one part of his environment opposed him to the rest of it, the very friendliness of ‘this’ implies a balancing measure of hostility in — and towards — ‘all that’. Yet the whole tale of civilized man’s long and toilsome progress from the taboos of Eden to the psychiatrist’s clinic could be read as a tale of his efforts, in the name of emergent Reason, to confine his concept of self wholly within Descartes’ incontestable cogitating ‘I’; or, alternatively, recoiling rebuffed off that adamantine pinpoint, to extend ‘self’ outwards infinitely — to pretend to awareness of everyone as universal ‘we’, leaving no ‘they’ anywhere at all.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Freud’s MemoryThe Foreign Bodies of Psychoanalysis

Part of the Language, Discourse, Society Book Series
White, Rob
Freud’s Memory — Sep 29, 2015
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Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan UK
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2008
ISBN
978-1-349-28089-6
Pages
120 –145
DOI
10.1057/9780230227569_6
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[The British novelist Richard Hughes was influenced by Freud. Psychoanalytic ideas are woven into The Fox in the Attic (1961), which is preoccupied with the German experience of World War I. Hughes has passages that are extraordinarily interesting post-psychoanalytic accounts of psychological theory — and ones, incidentally, that resonate with Rilke’s concerns (with birds and interiority, for example) in the Duino Elegies: Primitive man is conscious that the true boundary of his self is no tight little stockade round one lonely perceiving ‘I’, detached wholly from its setting: he knows there is always overspill of self into penumbral regions — the perceiver’s footing in the perceived. He accepts as naturally as the birds and beasts do his union with a part of his environment, and scarcely distinguishes that from his central ‘I’ at all. But he knows also that his self is not infinitely extensible either: on the contrary, his very identity with one part of his environment opposed him to the rest of it, the very friendliness of ‘this’ implies a balancing measure of hostility in — and towards — ‘all that’. Yet the whole tale of civilized man’s long and toilsome progress from the taboos of Eden to the psychiatrist’s clinic could be read as a tale of his efforts, in the name of emergent Reason, to confine his concept of self wholly within Descartes’ incontestable cogitating ‘I’; or, alternatively, recoiling rebuffed off that adamantine pinpoint, to extend ‘self’ outwards infinitely — to pretend to awareness of everyone as universal ‘we’, leaving no ‘they’ anywhere at all.]

Published: Sep 29, 2015

Keywords: Foreign Body; Scarlet Fever; Figurative Language; Penumbral Region; Pleasure Principle

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