3. Symbolizing Unconscious Thought--Freud

 Introduction

Welcome to Section 3 of Anthropology of Symbols. In the previous section, we looked at Durkheim's theory that a certain kind of symbol, namely sacred symbols, reflect a society back unto itself. By revering the sacred symbol, we worship ourselves as a community. Durkheim is considered the founder of the Functionalist school in sociology and anthropology.

This week, we analyze Freud's theory as applied to symbols. Put one way, Freud argues that childhood traumas create unconscious thoughts that are censored from our conscious mind. One way these thoughts evade censorship is by disguising themselves as symbols. The unconscious mind can only speaks to us through symbols. Words, actions, pains etc. can be symbols.

The end of common sense

Along with Marx, Freud is probably the most important thinker in the past 200 years for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Both challenged the common sense idea. Most of us hold the common sense idea as children. We take reality for granted, assume that all humans share our common understanding of the world, and that this common understanding reflects the way the world is naturally structured. Freud and Marx argue that understandings of the world do not reflect the natural world, but express other structures. For Freud it is the deeper structures of the mind, and for Marx (not dealt with in this subject) it is the structure of society. But what do I mean by "Freud's deeper structures" of the mind? Let's delve into this!

The character of Tony Soprano was not impressed by Freud!

Oedipus Complex

We should start with the most infamous aspect of Freud's theory, the so-called 'Oedipus complex'. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud describes this ‘complex’ in relation to a drama penned by the ancient Greek playwright, Sophocles; a play called “Oedipus Rex”. In this play, Sophocles dramatised a Greek myth about a king named Oedipus. Oedipus ends up having sex with his mother and killing his father, without initially realising what he is doing. So here is Freud on the play "Oedipus Rex":

…Oedipus Rex is capable of moving a modern reader or playgoer… There must be a voice within us which is prepared to acknowledge the compelling power of fate in the Oedipus ….His fate moves us only because it might have been our own…It may be that we were all destined to direct our first sexual impulses toward our mothers, and our first impulses of hatred and violence toward our fathers…. King Oedipus, who slew his father Laius and wedded his mother Jocasta, is nothing more or less than a wish-fulfilment- the fulfilment of the wish of our childhood. But we, more fortunate than he…have since our childhood succeeded in withdrawing our sexual impulses from our mothers, and in forgetting our jealousy of our fathers … Like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of the desires that offend morality, the desires that nature has forced upon us… …the Oedipus legend had its source in dream-material of immemorial antiquity, the content of which was the painful disturbance of the child's relations to its parents …For many a man hath seen himself in dreams His mother's mate…The dream of having sexual intercourse with one's mother was as common then as it is today…it is the key to the tragedy and the complement to the dream of the death of the father. The Oedipus fable is the reaction of phantasy to these two typical dreams [‘sex with mother’ and ‘death of father’].

So, in case you didn't know, the supposed desire for sex with with mother and the death of the father is named after an ancient legend that was turned into a play, by Sophocles, and then into a 'complex' by Freud.

The Unconscious

The next important point in Freud's theory is that we are unconscious of these and other such desires. In The Unconscious and Consciousness--Reality , Freud begins by outlining the significance of the unconscious:

....the unconscious must be accepted as the general basis of the psychic life. The unconscious is the larger circle which includes within itself the smaller circle of the conscious; everything conscious has its preliminary step in the unconscious, whereas the unconscious may stop with this step and still claim full value as a psychic activity. Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.

Unconscious fantasy finds expression in the conscious mind through dreams and neurotic symptoms:

[The dream] is the work of certain unconscious phantasies which have probably given in to sexual emotions, and that these phantasies come to expression not only in dreams but also in hysterical phobias and in other symptoms.  

Freud applies these ideas to two case studies. This is the point where symbols emerge centrally in Freud's theory.

Symbols: The sexually repressed 'girl'

The first, the first a 'girl' whose sexual urges, Freud implies, are symbolised through her 'loose' clothing and body stiffness!

...was an intelligent and innocent-looking girl. Her attire was strange...she had one of her stockings hanging down and two of her waist buttons opened. She complained of pains in one of her legs, and exposed her leg unrequested. Her chief complaint, however, was in her own words as follows: She had a feeling in her body as if something was stuck into it which moved to and fro and made her tremble through and through. This sometimes made her whole body stiff. On hearing this, my colleague in consultation looked at me; the complaint was quite plain to him...As for the girl, she had no idea of the [sexual] import of her words or she would never have allowed them to pass her lips. Here the censor had been deceived so successfully that under the mask of an innocent complaint a [sexual] phantasy was admitted to consciousness which otherwise would have remained in the foreconscious.

This is a famous passage, because Freud was too much of 'proper' Viennese scholar to actually say explicitly what he meant. He merely implies that the 'girl', as he calls her, was imagining sexual intercourse ("something stuck into [her body]...moved to and fro...trembled...whole body stiff").

Symbols: The sexually repressed 'boy' 

 In the second case, Freud prompted a 14 year old boy's imagination. Freud writes:

I began the psychoanalytic treatment of a boy of fourteen years who was suffering from tic convulsif, hysterical vomiting, headache, etc., by assuring him that, after closing his eyes, he would see pictures or have ideas, which I requested him to communicate to me. He answered by describing pictures. The last impression he had received before coming to me was visually revived in his memory. He had played a game of checkers with his uncle, and now saw the checker-board before him. He commented on various positions that were favorable or unfavorable, on moves that were not safe to make. He then saw a dagger lying on the checker-board, an object belonging to his father, but transferred to the checker-board by his phantasy. Then a sickle was lying on the board; next a scythe was added; and, finally, he beheld the likeness of an old peasant mowing the grass in front of the boy’s distant parental home. A few days later I discovered the meaning of this series of pictures. Disagreeable family relations had made the boy nervous. It was the case of a strict and crabbed father who lived unhappily with his mother, and whose educational methods consisted in threats; of the separation of his father from his tender and delicate mother, and the remarrying of his father, who one day brought home a young woman as his new mamma. The illness of the fourteen-year-old boy broke out a few days later. It was the suppressed anger against his father that had composed these pictures into intelligible allusions. The material was furnished by a reminiscence from mythology. The sickle was the one with which Zeus castrated his father; the scythe and the likeness of the peasant represented Kronos, the violent old man who eats his children and upon whom Zeus wreaks vengeance in so unfilial a manner. The marriage of the father gave the boy an opportunity to return the reproaches and threats of his father—which had previously been made because the child played with his genitals (the checker-board; the prohibitive moves; the dagger with which a person may be killed). We have here long repressed memories and their unconscious remnants which, under the guise of senseless pictures have slipped into consciousness by devious paths left open to them. 

For our purposes, unconscious thoughts (especially fantasises) are symoblized in allusions, hysterical symptoms etc.  That is why they symbol is so crucial to Freud's theory. To properly understand all this you should read the original: The Unconscious and Consciousness--Reality.

Presentation

After reading Freud's theory, you might like to listen to my presentation on Freud's theory. It introduces Freud's idea that symbols are vehicles for unconscious thoughts.

Please feel free to use my notes.

Freud on Leonardo

Our first application of Freud's theory is to a painting by Leonardo da Vinci which we'll call St Anne.

St Anne

If you're not familiar with Christian belief, Jesus Christ's mother is Mary, and Mary's mother is Anne. From top-to-bottom this picture apparently depicts Anne, then Anne's daughter Mary; then Mary's son Jesus; then a lamb that Jesus is holding. So the painting, ostensibly, shows three generations, son, mother and grandmother. But Freud (and later Jung) have another interpretation. To start with this, let's get a bit of biographical background on Leonardo.

To get a quick background on Leonardo's life, watch a Mini Biography on Leonardo da Vinci then watch the following video on Leonardo da Vinci: "The Virgin and Child with St Anne". 

Now to focus on the painting to be analzed, watch this video on Leonardo da Vinci: "The Virgin and Child with St Anne". Please note that the analysis of the painting in the video is not anthropological. In fact most anthropologists would have problems with the artist as individual genius/hero analysis typical of treatments of Leonardo. However, I think it is useful for drawing attention to features of the painting itself.

St Anne & the castration complex

Read the attached  in preparation for the seminar assessment. In summary, Freud argues that St Anne is related to childhood fantasies. He explains that Leonardo:

was an illegitimate child.. His father was Ser Piero da Vinci…, his mother, a certain Caterina, probably a peasant girl, ..As the marriage of Ser Piero with [his wife] Donna Albiera remained childless the little Leonardo could be brought up in his father's house. [Leonardo describes a memory with the following words].
    "It seems that it had been destined before that I should occupy myself so thoroughly with the vulture, for it comes to my mind as a very early memory, when I was still in the cradle, a vulture came down to me, he opened my mouth with his tail and struck me a few times with his tail against my lips."
     The scene of the vulture is not a memory of Leonardo, but a fantasy which he formed later, and transferred into his childhood. The childhood memories of persons… are not produced until a later period when childhood is already past, they are then changed and disguised…so that. they cannot be strictly differentiated from fantasies…. The situation contained in the fantasy, that a vulture opened the mouth of the child and forcefully belabored it with its tail, corresponds to the idea of fellatio [what Australian teenagers call a ‘head job’; i.e. penis inserted into mouth].

Upside down vulture with tail brushing Christ's (Leonardo's) mouth?

      …We interpret the fantasy of being wet-nursed by the mother and find that the mother is replaced by a vulture. Where does this vulture originate and how does he come into this place?…we learn that the vulture was a symbol of motherhood because it was thought that this species of birds had only female vultures and no males…we know the real content of the fantasy. The replacement of the mother by the vulture indicates that the child missed the father and felt himself alone with his mother…. That Leonardo passed the first years of his life alone with his mother must have been a most decisive influence on the formation of his inner life.
     …why [is] this memory content was elaborated into a homosexual situation [?]. The mother who nursed the child, or rather from whom the child suckled was transformed into a vulture which stuck its tail into the child's mouth. We maintain that the "coda" (tail) of the vulture [signifies a ] penis.[But how could a child believe that his mother has a penis?]
     [Young boys tend to believe that] the male genital was found to be compatible with the representation of the mother…As he cannot divine that there is still another equally valuable type of genital formation he must grasp the assumption that all persons, also women, possess such a member as he. This preconception is so firm in the youthful investigator that it is not destroyed even by the first observation of the genitals in little girls. [He decides that every girl has a penis] but it is still very small and that it will grow later. [Or he comes up with another explanation; that the penis] also existed in the little girl but it was cut off and on its place there remained a wound. [As a result he begins to worry that his penis] will be taken away from him; [this is the castration complex].
     Before the child came under the domination of the castration complex, at the time when he still held the woman at her full value, he began to manifest an intensive desire [to see his mother’s genitals] which he believed to be a penis. With the cognition acquired only later that the woman has no penis, this longing often becomes transformed into its opposite and gives place to disgust, which in the years of puberty may become the cause of psychic impotence, of misogyny and of lasting homosexuality. …
     The vulture fantasy of Leonardo still absorbs our interest. In words which only too plainly recall a sexual act ("and has many times struck against my lips with his tail"), Leonardo emphasizes the intensity of the erotic relations between the mother and the child. A second memory content of the fantasy can readily be conjectured from the association of the activity of the mother (of the vulture) with the accentuation of the mouth zone. We can translate it as follows: My mother has pressed on my mouth innumerable passionate kisses. The fantasy is composed of the memories of being nursed and of being kissed by the mother.

Here is a less condensed version of the reading; I used to use it in class. So the idea is that in painting St Anne, Leonardo was unconsciously expressing a fantasy to be kissed by his mother, which in his infant imagination he equates with  the penis.

Now, I'd like you think about the following questions: How, according to Freud, does the painting express Leonardo’s fantasies? Why, according to Freud, does infantile boy believe his mother has a penis? Personally, how would you explain Leonardo’s vulture ‘memory’?

Before moving on, we should note that, from a Freudian perspective, the attraction of plays like Oedipus Rex or paintings like "St Anne" is not merely in providing an outlet for the neuroses of Sophocles or Michelangelo. From a Freudian perspective, these art works have proven popular because they speak to us, and particularly our unconscious mind, which can express conscious pleasure in these apparenlty innocent works of art. (In the language of aesthetics, this is called catharsis--which is kind of like the good feeling you get after crying in a movie!). For our purposes, Oedipus Rex and "St Anne", express personal unconscious traumas, according to Freud.

Freud and the 'primal horde'

 As we have looked at Freud in fairly standard contexts (interpreting neurosis and analysing cultural artefacts), it's now time to see what happens when the Freudian lens gets applied to anthropology. Freud himself made an attempt at this. He attempted to explain totemism. (Remember we looked at totemism while studying Durkheim. Also my notes on Boas might help you understand Totemism). As part of this, Freud also tried to explain clan exogamy (marrying out of your own clan) in a famous book. Totem and Taboo focuses mostly on Aboriginal (Indigenous) Australians. Freud uses the evidence to speculate on what he calls the 'primal horde'. The brothers in this horde banded together to murder their father. That monstrous act marked the beginning of totemism and the beginning of society as we know it. Here's how Freud describes the process, beginning with the primal horde:

There is only a violent, jealous father who keeps all the females for himself and drives away the growing sons.. One day the expelled brothers joined forces, slew and ate the father, and thus put an end to the father horde....This violent primal father had surely been the envied and feared model for each of the brothers. Now they accomplished their identification with him by devouring him and each acquired a part of his strength. The totem feast, which is perhaps mankind’s first celebration, would be the repetition and commemoration of this memorable, criminal act with which so many things began, social organization, moral restrictions and religion. In order to find these results acceptable, quite aside from our supposition, we need only assume that the group of brothers banded together were dominated by the same contradictory feelings towards the father which we can demonstrate as the content of ambivalence of the father complex in all our children and in neurotics. They hated the father who stood so powerfully in the way of their sexual demands and their desire for power, but they also loved and admired him. After they had satisfied their hate by his removal and had carried out their wish for identification with him, the suppressed tender impulses had to assert themselves. This took place in the form of remorse, a sense of guilt was formed which coincided here with the remorse generally felt. The dead now became stronger than the living had been, even as we observe it today in the destinies of men. What the fathers’ presence had formerly prevented they themselves now prohibited in the psychic situation of ‘subsequent obedience’, which we know so well from psychoanalysis. They undid their deed by declaring that the killing of the father substitute, the totem, was not allowed, and renounced the fruits of their deed by denying themselves the liberated women. Thus they created the two fundamental taboos of totemism out of the sense of guilt of the son, and for this very reason these had to correspond with the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex [to kill the father and take his wife]. [One taboo is not killing] the totem animal...the father had been removed and nothing in reality could make up for this. [The other taboo is] the incest prohibition, [if the brothers] wanted to live together, but to erect the incest prohibition [otherwise they would all be competing for the same women]. [In the totem,] the feelings of the sons found a natural and appropriate substitute for the father in the animal...The surrogate for the father was perhaps used in the attempt to assuage the burning sense of guilt, and to bring about a kind of reconciliation with the father. The totemic system was a kind of agreement with the father in which the latter granted everything that the child’s phantasy could expect from him, protection, care, and forbearance, in return for which the pledge was given to honour his life...The totem religion had issued from the sense of guilt of the sons as an attempt to palliate this feeling and to conciliate the injured father through subsequent obedience. All later religions prove to be attempts to solve the same problem, varying only in accordance with the stage of culture in which they are attempted and according to the paths which they take; they are all, however, reactions aiming at the same great event with which culture began and which ever since has not let mankind come to rest.

Freud and Durkheim were drawing on similar material; how and why is their analysis of totemism so different?

Application: Roheim's on Indigenous Australian belief and ritual 

Roheim is famous for applying Freud's theory as a way of understanding Aboriginal (Indigenous) myths and rituals. In his Eternal Ones of the Dream, he describes myths from the Dreamtime and rituals which enact them. Think of Njirana (and his penis) or the kangaroo as the father; Mingari woman as the mother, but what are the dogs? Here is a selection:

Myth of Njirana and Julana

…Njirana is the ancestral being and Julana his penis (ngambu). In the early part of their wanderings the penis is separated from Njirana and assumes a personality of its own. It travels underneath the sand and is always chasing women; at other times it assumes human proportions and frightens the Minmara group of women by throwing a bull-roarer.
    One incident that is told concerns a Mingari woman who travels from the west with a pack of dogs whom she keeps at bay. Meanwhile, from another direction, Njirana has come to the waterhole at Anmangu (Musgrave Ranges) and he settles down to sleep. He is thinking about women. After a while he hears the sound of the Mingari woman urinating at the waterhole. Immediately his penis (which is Julana) becomes erect, and entering the sand, it travels towards the waterhole. Arriving there, it enters the squatting Mingari as she finishes urinating. But they are disturbed by the pack of dogs who bite the penis, which retracts to Anmangu. Mingari stands up and sings, "Njirana penis, 4 dogs bite it, dogs go on." The dogs chase it, biting it again and again while Mingari follows. They all "finish up" at Anmangu and are metamorphosed into stone boulders. …
        Berndt also gives us the ritual equivalent of the part of the myth in which the dogs bite the penis of Njirana: "The chanting of some of the Mingari (woman) and dog cycle of songs begins, and all present bow their heads so they do not see the ceremonial ground. One man represents the Old Man Dog. He is marked with black and yellow ochres and lies full length in the middle of the ground supporting himself with his elbow. At the back of him a large ceremonial pole is stuck into the sand while other dog men lying down encircle him. When they are ready the chanters and novices look up. The dog men slowly raise themselves from their reclining postures and squat in a dog-like attitude around the Old Man Dog."
     "Explanation: The Mingari woman is not represented. She is having coitus with Julana, the penis of Njirana. The dog men, led by the Old Man Dog, are disturbed and follow the retracting penis, which they bite…Then one dog from the pack comes forward and grabs the Old Man Dog from the front. This symbolizes a dog biting the penis of Njirana as it chases it." (Op. cit., p. 46.)
     In the kangaroo fertility rite …we have exactly the same reclining and on-all-fours positions, culminating in the "tower" figure [maybe Roheim means like a pyramid?]…This very important ritual shows the Primal Horde significance of the rite and myth. The mythological Father and Penis person, the one who is having intercourse with the woman, is also the Old Man Dog, attacked by the other dogs. Moreover it proves what I have assumed above, that the original mythological element is the kangaroo mythology. The phallic figure of the dual heroes is identified with the Old Dog Man. However, in the myth I quoted above the one attacked by the dogs is a kangaroo.
     This myth is one of those, frequent in Australia, that might be labelled "woman was first"— i.e., the mother precedes the son. Incidentally, this version coincides with many clinical findings in which castration is attributed to the vagina, not to the father. Freud's explanation is that the little boy regards the little girl as a castrated male, and therefore, by analogy, he fears the same fate for himself. But there is also another explanation, namely, that castration anxiety is the successor to separation anxiety (Freud); i.e., separation from the mother.
      However, the moment the separation (i.e., circumcision) has taken place Njirana begins having intercourse with the women; and Ferenczi has pointed out that in coitus the male has the fantasy of returning into the womb, i.e., of recreating the dual unity [of child and mother].

In what ways does Roheim stick with orthodox Freudian analysis? In what ways does he differ?

If you're interested in the group of women in the story, they are usually identified as the 7 Sisters. I have written a short, unscholarly blog about the significance of this constellation.

Application: Morton & rites-of-passage in Central Australia

For the final application of Freud's idea, we turn to a discussion by La Trobe scholar, John Morton. In a book fully available online, he describes features of man-making rites-of-passage in Central Australia, which include circumcision. Part of these rites-of-passage are the Ingkura rituals:

 Ingkura rituals are characterised by dramatic acts in which young men aggressively dance around decorated actors demanding that those actors [representing the elders] ‘give ‘. Giving here refers to the secret knowledge [of the elders] that is revealed... The power of the elders, then, is the power of dissemination---the power to control the pathways along which restricted cultural knowledge will travel. Young men are keen to acquire this knowledge and to exhaust the stock that is in the minds of their seniors. This is the very process of making men. Mature males are made through the depletion of elders who at the climax of the Ingkura see the symbols of their power (tjurunga [NH: churinga?] dramatically appropriated or destroyed in a violent display of rebellion by the young men…[then follows another episode in the Ingkura ritual, a] scene of indescribable confusion when the young men run towards the women's camp in a mock raid they suddenly return to the ceremonial ground to remain quiet and still…. at the end of this ... the men fall on the sacred object [which represents something like the womb from which people are born] and obscure it in a collective action said to represent death. Finally they get up, turn their backs on the women and return to the ceremonial ground. ...they both flaunt and retain exclusive reproductive powers… The cycle of initiation only begins with the submission of juniors, it ends with the submission of elders to juniors, added each case submission is marked by symbolic castration [that is circumcision] and death. Circumcision is actually referred to as quotes ‘killing’, just as the final stage defeat of the old man on the ceremonial ground is preliminary to the recognition of their deaths and complete conversion into ancestral beings.Thus, to engage the classical terms of Freudian anthropology, a sequence which leads to the murder of the father begins with the murder of the son (159-160).

How would Freud interpret elements of his 'primal horde' theory here? In this book, Morton then goes on to a fascinating discussion based on acknowledging "Aborigines have their own version of Freud's theories (164).

Evaluation: The Great Hair Debate

Freudian theory was put to the test in the Great Hair Debate; for more on this please check out Hair Symbolism: Speical Topic 1.

Extension: Psychoanalysis and Functionalism

In this subject, I try to push you to move from just being able to remember and recognize theories, to being able to apply, evaluate, and combine theory. Here is an example of how two theories, psychoanalysis and functionalism can be combined. The psychoanalytical theory pioneered by Freud is clearly evident in the approach Roheim and others. And so influential was Freud, that many functionalists were also deeply influenced. Generally the arguments held that certain phenomena (rituals, stories, symbols, etc.) functioned to provide both individuals and society with psychological equilibrium. Put coarsely, without these phenomena, we'd all be crazy. If you're interested, please take a look at my summary of Kluckhohn's analysis of witchcraft among the Navaho.

Just for fun...

Freud didn't only inspire scholars; his work profoundly impacted the arts. Just one example is the early science fiction space horror flick, The Forbidden Planet (1956). I first came across this movie studying Fine Arts as an undergrad. Profound and silly, it stands as one of the greatest science fiction movies. The Forbidden Planet basically describes Freud's Id (but only in the last minutes); you can see elements of the converse of the Oedipus complex; the Elektra complex; and even the primal horde. Very little to do with anthropology, but your unconscious desire for a bit of distraction (if not titillation) will be fulfilled!

Summary of Week 3--Freud

OK I've given you far more reading than I intended. This was supposed to be a very brief introduction to how Freud's theory applies to the anthropology of symbols. To summarize, please just listen to this presentation:

So, in summary, there is an unconscious mind which expresses itself through symbols; the unconscious mind gives the symbols meanings the conscious mind is unaware of. The take home message? Symbols communicate unconscious thoughts.