Sounding Interiors: Daydream, Imagination, and the Auscultation of Domestic Space

Here’s the link to my final paper in LS819-Domestic Spaces.

sounding-interiors

Further Reflections on Freud

The class noted that Freud was a very ideological writer: he had a clear theory or frame regarding culture and humanity.The question arose: what does psychoanalysis accomplish?

Exception was taken to Freud’s statement that the “…masses are lazy and unintelligent….” (P 8 Debate went back and forth between Freud’s view and considering whether people would do more work than necessary for subsistence if they weren’t coerced to do so. This brought to mind the question of what do we consider ‘work?’ My initial feeling was that people would eventually get bored of ‘relaxing’ and begin working on projects of some sort: building things, making music or other art, inventing tools and machines to make work easier etc. Many felt that that didn’t qualify as work: that I was describing leisure activities. This could be a possible functioning definition of work I suppose, although somehow it still smacks of something artificial. But, if we strictly define work as that which is required for subsistence then perhaps it’ll go. Cultures have in most (or even all?) cases developed art forms and other such ‘leisure’ activities, even when under the utmost duress regarding their subsistence and welfare. Perhaps there is something very fundamental to subsistence in so called leisure activities!? 

Freud states that civilization renounces or inhibits our instincts. For this to work (ie for us to go along with having our instincts inhibited) we need some form of compensation to ensure that we behave appropriately for the society.  In chapter II Freud rejects the essentially Marxist premise that civilization and the compensation it offers is based solely on the acquisition of wealth and its distribution. He suggests that compensation comes from “…the mental assets of civilization.” (P 12) Freud’s take on what those base instincts consist in is fairly pessimistic: incest, cannibalism and murder. This is why civilization is necessary: to inhibit these instincts in people. Civilization coerces people into repressing those base instincts. This process of coercion becomes gradually internalized to the super-ego. The super-ego is each individual’s ultimate editor and keeps the base instincts in check.  Freud does make a slight nod to Marx in recognizing the role of the distribution of wealth in civilization when he states “If, however, a culture has not got beyond a point at which the satisfaction of one portion of its participants depends upon the suppression of another, and perhaps larger, portion-and this is the case in all present-day cultures-it is understandable that the suppressed people should develop an intense hostility towards a culture whose existence they make possible by their work, but in whose wealth they have too small a share. In such conditions an internalization of the cultural prohibitions among the suppressed people is not to be expected. ” (P 15)

 

But, going back to what compensations are offered by civilization for us to willingly supress our more unsavoury base instincts. Freud says that at the simplest level, civilization offers us the security of collective living and the possibility of creativity. Creativity can be expressed or developed in the arena of religious ideas, ideals, artistic creations and morals: what Freud refers to as the “…psychical inventory of a civilization.” (P 17) The more we ‘buy in’ to the satisfactions offered by these areas the more robust our super-ego and therefore the more robust and secure the associated cultural unit. Freud distinguishes art as being fundamentally elitist as it “…remains inaccessible to the masses, who are engaged in exhausting work…” and considers religion as illusory. (P 17)