Erin Teachman 1 Reading the Unconscious and Writing the “Personology”: Some Allegories of Psychoanalysis Introduction Freud is well known, not only for his preference for the symbol, but also the extremely important role symbols and symbolism plays in dream analysis, in the critique of culture, and in pathology in general. As a result, the presence of other figural tropes in his work is often overlooked, in particular that of allegory. However, upon closer examination of several elements of psychoanalytic theory, particularly the elements that are found in The Ego and the Id, allegory seems to play a central role in psychoanalysis, particularly in the Freudian picture of the mind. The present paper is an attempt to demonstrate the close connection between allegory and psychoanalysis and to demonstrate just how relevant allegory is in approaching psychoanalysis, by explaining the deep affinity between allegory and Freud’s critique of the philosophical psychological concept of the subject. In fact, Freud is at his most allegorical when he is most strongly criticizing or critically engaging with, the philosophic notion of the subject, which is one of the major themes of The Ego and the Id. There are two major traditions of allegory, allegorical interpretation, also know as allegoresis, and allegorical composition, the more well know grammatical/rhetorical figure. I will demonstrate in this paper that Freud’s work belongs to both traditions. I will begin the analysis by examining the features of psychoanalytic analysis (that is the therapeutic work) most prominent in The Ego and the Id, through consideration of the goals and means of a psychoanalytic analysis and establishing the connection between analysis and allegorical interpretation. I will then examine the psychoanalytic picture of the mind and ways in which the unconscious means, in order to demonstrate some of the ways in which Freud composes Erin Teachman 2 allegories with psychoanalysis. This will be accomplished through an analysis of the “personology” of the id, the ego, and the super-ego and its resemblance to personification allegory and the affinity between obliquity of allegorical expression and the conscious expressions of the unconscious desires respectively. Finally, in an attempt to show the usefulness of this approach, I will turn my attention to Freud’s critique of the idea of the unity of consciousness and a meaning giving subject and how this relates to allegory, and Freud’s extensive use of it. Allegorical Interpretation In order to understand allegorical interpretation, it is necessary to look at the ancient practices, terms, and definitions of it, since it is not (openly) practiced by critics or theorists today. This is essentially a result of the desire to understand what a text means. This is something that gets in the way of understanding allegory, because this is not how the ancients attempted to understand a text. The ancients are less interested in what a text means than in what a text teaches (Figuration 154). The ancients then, when interpreting a text, come to the text how that text can be read, so that it can be construed as true for them (Hermeneutics 83). The more important meaning, the philosophic meaning, that is the teaching of a text, is not the literal or surface meaning of the text, but the hyponoia (also spelled huponoia), the under-sense. This may seem to be more complicated than is necessary, but the reason for this is that the texts that were so interpreted, particularly the Bible (or the Greek translation of it, the Septuagint), and Homer, which were not at all easy for ancient interpreters to read. They were considered to be “scandalous” texts, that is to say the texts that were offensive to reason. The “ancient and abiding rule of allegory“ then is that “if a text is scandalous with respect to reason, we must rewrite it or, Erin Teachman 3 much to the same point, find a way of reading it that removes the scandal” (Hermeneutics 230- 31). This is where hyponoia comes in. Bruns defines hyponoia as the “deeper, higher, or additional thought” that is “in that portion [of the text] that is dark or contrary to reason there is something more for the mind, namely, philosophy, divine wisdom, the truth” (Figuration 149). This decision to see the truth on under-side of what is said is a guiding principle of Freud’s psychoanalytic work. Psychoanalysis insists that something lies behind (under if you will) every action, every personal characteristic, every symptom and every dream. It is the essence of the psychoanalytic understanding of the unconscious. For every conscious thought that we have, for every conscious motivation for our actions, there is another deeper, and truer, thought-process, a deeper motivation. These true motivations lie within the unconscious. Ricoeur notes this feature of Freudian psychoanalysis and it is the reason why Ricoeur calls psychoanalysis a version of the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” This hermeneutics is one that seeks to cast aside the veil, to demonstrate the deeper truths of human existence. For Ricoeur, Freud establishes a “new relationship . . . between the patent and the latent; this new relation would correspond to the one that consciousness had instituted between appearances and the reality of things” (33). This is a very valuable description of the activity of psychoanalysis, despite the fact that Ricoeur’s hermeneutics is a “science of exegetical rules” (26) that is not really reconcilable with the ancient practice of hermeneutics. However, the notion that Freud’s psychoanalysis is mediating between “the patent and the latent” is precisely the notion that demonstrates his connection with hyponoia and allegorical interpretation. Psychoanalysis then can be understood as a set of rules for the allegorical reading of any kind of “any set of signs that may be taken as a text to decipher; dreams, neurotic symptoms, Erin Teachman 4 ritual, myth, work of art” (Ricoeur 26) etc. One complaint about psychoanalysis is that in the long run, it really only produces one kind of interpretation. It has made up its mind how to read a text before it has already begun. But this very notion of having a strategy already in place for the reading of texts is also a point of contact with allegorical interpretation. Todorov, in his chapter on Freudian symbolics in The Theory of Symbols, links Origen’s (allegorical) interpretive strategy with that of Freudian psychoanalysis, noting that “the finalist character” of Freudian interpretation is to that of patristic exegesis. It is a “foreknowledge of the meaning to be discovered” within the text (Todorov 254). This is colored by Todorov’s disdain for such interpretations and he feels that it is a weakness in Freudian symbolics. The reason for his disdain is clear, since allegorical interpretation, as has already been shown, does not share the same concern for meaning that Todorov and others do. Underneath that disdain, there is also a misunderstanding of the work of allegorical interpretation. It is not that there is a “foreknowledge of the meaning to be discovered” in the sense that it has already been decided. Part of the concept of hyponoia is the idea of recognition. Bruns points that both Philo (the allegorical interpreter of the Bible (the Hebrew Bible)) and Aristotle both divide what is written into what is strange and what is familiar “where the one [the strange] is often understood to conceal the other [the familiar]” (Figuration 149). Hyponoia then contains an element of recognition, so that it does indeed appear that one has already decided what the meaning will be, but in reality the interpreter is simply discovering what is already familiar to them, which is what Bruns calls “a memory-based epistemology” (Figuration 151). This would seem to indicate then that it is possible to consider psychoanalysis as looking for what is familiar, a scientific understanding of the nature of the mind and human behavior for example, in what is strange, the so far inexplicable pathologies of humans. That is Erin Teachman 5 psychoanalysis involves an entire outlook on such texts, which is very similar to exegetes such as Philo and Origen. Their interpretive outlooks are naturally different, but the structure is the same. Bruns notes that “allegory is not a method of interpretation, it is not any sort of formal approach to the text. It is a form of mental or spiritual life, or a way of practicing philosophical contemplation” (Figuration 151). This is rather alien to modern observers who view way sof reading as technical, textual approaches. As a result, allegorical interpretation seems to have a pre-determined meaning in mind, when in reality it is not so clear-cut. One could better say that the terms of the interpretation and the world-view have already been decided and this will completely color how the text is read, rather than having read it, so to speak, already. The idea of familiarity brings up another aspect of allegorical interpretation that has a bearing on psychoanalysis. The goal of allegorists such as Origen and Philo is to discover the familiar in the strangeness of what Bruns calls an “alien text” (Hermeneutics 217). For Bruns an allegorist “is someone who deals with alien discourses by re-contextualizing them within his or her own conceptual scheme” (Hermeneutics 15). Or, to put it another way “it is a way of reinscribing the alien text within one’s own hermeneutic circle” (Hermeneutics 217). This again is a very good description of the work of psychoanalysis. For psychoanalysis tells us that the unconscious is an “alien text” that must be recontextualized into the psychoanalytic hermeneutic circle in order to be understood consciously. This relates directly to mediating work of analysis that Freud lays out in The Ego and the Id. According to Freud, the only way for an unconscious thought to become conscious is to become associated with a word-presentation, which must first be heard before it is available to the conscious. For Freud all conscious knowledge is the result of perception. The goal of psychoanalysis is to make the repressed thoughts conscious again and thus to allow the patient’s ego to have control over the id (and to escape the criticism or the guilt Erin Teachman 6 associated with such criticism) by understanding its processes and motivations. Analysis achieves this goal by providing the word-presentations, which can make unconscious thoughts conscious (or more precisely pre-conscious, that is available to the Cs.) (Freud 10-11). In more allegorical terms, the goal of psychoanalysis is to provide the person under analysis a new horizon of expectation, a new hermeneutic circle, for the understanding of the alien text of the unconscious. Thus the development of psychoanalytic concepts and ideas is to create a complete set of rules that allow for this understanding. This is much more specific than allegorical interpretation as a whole, which is not bound to see only one meaning, or only one type of meaning in a given text. Psychoanalysis should be understood as a specific instance of one type of allegorical interpretation. Another way of saying this in allegorical terms is again provided by a link to the word hermeneia, to interpret (hence hermeneutics). Bruns makes very clear that for Philo and other ancients, including Aristotle, felt that speech was a form of interpretation, that the act of speaking was the act of interpreting one’s own thoughts. For the ancients “to interpret what is written is to speak for it” (Figuartion 151). This finds its parallel in the psychoanalytic notion of the talking cure, but the act of interpretation (which for most of the ancients meant allegorical interpretation) is the psychoanalytic act of reading the text (of whatever type, dream, symptom, etc.) and to speak for it by giving the patient the words to deal with it. It has been shown then that the goals and methods of psychoanalysis accord very well with the goals and methods of allegorical interpretation developed by the ancients. Todorov has even noted, somewhat disparagingly, the similarity between biblical exegesis and psychoanalysis, something that Ricoeur develops in a much more explicit and positive way in his own work (cf. Freud and Philosophy). The correspondences include the notion of hyponoia, the Erin Teachman 7 idea of getting to the under-sense, or philosophic meaning, of a text, which for the ancients is to discover the discernible truths in a text and for Freud is to discover the unconscious truths. Another correspondence is the idea of transcribing an alien text into a new hermeneutic circle, which for the ancients was to make alien texts understandable to their cultural milieu by reading them figurally and for Freud was the development of the technique of psychoanalysis to read the behaviors, symptoms, dreams, and culture of human beings figurally, with an aim toward examining their roots in the unconscious. The ancients accomplished this by interpreting the text and demonstrating the hidden truths, while psychoanalysis accomplishes this by speaking for the text, for the person, in order to demonstrate the unconscious truths. In all of this it can be seen that psychoanalysis does not stand for all of the abilities and practices of allegorical interpretation, it is rather a specific kind and instance of allegorical interpretation. Allegorical Composition The practice of allegorical composition is much better received and is more thoroughly understood than that of allegorical interpretation, indeed some of the most well known and highly regarded pieces of literature in the Western tradition and clearly and openly allegorical, including Dante’s Divine Comedy, Lorris and de Meun’s Roman de la Rose, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The term allegoria, which was probably first used for allegorical interpretation and not as a rhetorical term, has had a long a varied use. The exact definition of allegory as a rhetorical trope has been fairly consistent over the years. Despite the occasional variation allegory has been consistently defined as saying other than what is meant (interpretation then is meaning other than what is said - cf. Jon Whitman 263ff.) and it is essentially a “a grammatical or rhetorical technique” (Whitman 4). Whitman goes on to say that Erin Teachman 8 “in its most striking form it personifies abstract concepts and fashions a narrative around them” (4). Whitman clarifies the concept of personification further by adding that personification is “giving a consciously fictional personality to an abstraction” (271). It is important then that the personality has no basis in fact, or belief, to be considered literary personification. This would seem to bar the ego, the id, and the super-ego from consideration since Freud himself considered them to be actual structures of the mind. However, it is not necessary to believe, along with Freud, in an actual structural existence of the “personology.” What is it issue here is not, whether Freud’s work is intentionally allegorical and whether or not he actually believed in these structures, but whether it is possible to see what is allegorical in psychoanalysis. There is no doubt though, that the less one believes in psychoanalysis, the more allegorical it will appear. Personification allegory is also the most well known form of allegory, which in many respects constitutes its own genre. The representatives of this genre include the great personification allegories of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance: Roman de la Rose, The Divine Comedy, Piers Plowman, and Pilgrim’s Progress, and a number of major personification allegories of the Middle Ages proper, works such as Prudentius’ Psychomachia, Silvestrius’ Cosmographia, and Boethius’ Consolations. For Whitman, allegory is the “pre-eminent way of speaking obliquely” (267). The obliquity of allegory is probably its dominant rhetorical feature. This feature is shared by the Freudian concept of the unconscious and of the repressed (This is an important distinction to make; while the repressed is all in the unconscious, not all of what is unconscious is repressed (Freud 8)). The unconscious, by which the system Ucs is meant, cannot mean directly to the outside world, nor to the conscious, which can only perceive it through word-presentations (see the discussion of word-presentations above). It cannot be emphasized enough how crucial the Erin Teachman 9 indirect relationship between the unconscious and reality, and the unconscious and the ego (in the form of the ego’s repressing of unconscious desires/motivations, which in The Ego and the Id becomes the relationship between the ego and the id). Freud emphasizes in The Ego and the Id how important the notion of the unconscious is to psychoanalysis. “The division of the psychical into what is conscious and what is unconscious is the fundamental premiss[sic] of psychoanalysis; and it alone makes it possible for psychoanalysis to understand the pathological processes in mental life” (Freud 3). The purpose of The Ego and the Id is to explain more fully the relationship between what is conscious and what is unconscious. The path that psychoanalysis took to an understanding of this relationship is through the theory of repression, which introduces a dynamic view of the unconscious, which believes that is there is something actively keeping some knowledge from becoming conscious; the force of the repressive on the repressed (Freud 4-5). In many respects this repression does not work, because the unconscious thoughts and feelings find expression in other more indirect ways. One way that they find their expression according to Freud is through the action of the pleasure principle. When the path to discharge of sexual energy is blocked, a person experiences displeasure (Freud 12). There are numerous other examples of this throughout psychoanalysis. All symptoms, dreams, personal characteristics (which are after all just “normal” symptoms) are indirect expressions of either the repressed or other parts of Ucs. This has already been seen in the light of psychoanalysis as allegorical interpretation, but that is of course to assume that there is a certain amount of truth to psychoanalysis. If one does not accept the idea that psychoanalysis is reliable or as ultimately true in a fundamental sense, then psychoanalysis can be seen a set of rules for the creation of allegorical texts that attempts to Erin Teachman 10 tell the tale of the inner conflicts of the mind (the representation of which is the oldest source of allegorical composition, the psychomachia). Another way of demonstrating the connection between allegorical oblique meaning and psychoanalysis is not through the unconscious, but in the narratives Freud creates that elaborate the unconscious events of the mind. Perhaps an example of this is in order. An example that occurs frequently in The Ego and the Id is the tale (if you will) of identification. According to Freud, the ego assumes the characteristics of an object that for whatever reason that cannot be maintained as a love-object, since the replacement of the object through identification is many times the only way the id will give an object up (19). The ego’s solution to identify with the object so that it can be more acceptable to the id as a love-object. The ego then offers itself to the id, saying “Look, you can love me too - I am so like the object.” This tale is a rhetorical figure in two senses. Clearly, Freud is attempting to make the idea intelligible and presentable, hence the reason for putting words into the ego’s mouth. However, it is not necessary to take that rhetorical gambit literally in order to see that the narrative of identification itself is also allegorical. This narrative can either be understood as an allegorical text whose referent is reality, and the ego and the id as the fictional figures created to explain or explicate it. It is also possible to this narrative as the allegorical interpretation of the text of reality, where the ego’s identification with the love- object, indeed the ego’s existence is held to be true. The allegorical nature of the tale is of course unchanged by whether it is perceived as composition or as interpretation. The important feature of this tale is the interaction of two abstract concepts in a way that resembles human behavior. Personification is pre-eminently the assumption or creation of human characteristics for the abstractions (Whitman 272ff.).