Notes (written in 2011) on the first half of Nicholas Ray's
book Tragedy and Otherness: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Psychoanalysis ́
(Oxford, etc: Peter Lang, 2009).
Full text at SSRN:
Ibercampus (Aug. 26, 2021)
Posted: 1 Apr 2022
Date Written: August 26, 2011
Suggested Citation:
Garcia Landa, Jose Angel, Tragedy and the Oedipal Subject: Sophocles
and Freud (August 26, 2011). Ibercampus (Aug. 26, 2021), Available at
SSRN:
https://ssrn.com/abstract=3970734
Tragedy and the Oedipal Subject: Sophocles and Freud
Notes on the first half of Nicholas Ray's Tragedy and Otherness: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Psychoanalysis. Oxford (etc): Peter Lang, 2009. Tragedy
and psychoanalysis have always been at work within each other—with
major tragedies explicitly inspiring Sigmund Freud's work, and with
psychoanalysis waiting to be unravelled out of the conflict between next
of kin in the works of classical tragedians like Sophocles or
Shakespeare. Nicholas Ray works from within the field of psychoanalytic
criticism—a little askew, though, as the approach he favors is broadly
that of Jean Laplanche, and he casts a critical gaze on the Freudian
concepts and on Freud's account of the self. The Oedipus, notably, is
here an object of interrogation, rather than a psychical process which
is taken for granted. Ray stresses the complexity of the process by
which self relates to other in both tragedies and psychoanalysis, a
complexity which may be foreclosed by Freud's own formulations. Or by an
overly strict adherence to them.
One significant issue is Freud's early formulation, and then
abandonment, of the "seduction theory"—i.e., Freud came to believe that
neurotic symptoms did not originate in an actual traumatic childhood
episode, furthering instead the view that such traumatic episodes were
retroactively created fantasies. This was a crucial step for Freudian
psychoanalysis to take, all the more so from the point of view of
psychoanalytical poetics, since the psychic material came to be treated
as being analogous to fiction. These fantasies are grounded, according
to standard Freudianism, on a universal and deterministic process of
sexualization. The development of the Oedipal theory coincides with
Freud's use of Sophocles and then Shakespeare as illustrations. Ray's
book sets out to reexamine the relationship between the theory and the
texts, to reread the texts askew from the Freudian view, watching the
blind spots of Freud's reading, and to challenge Freud's totalizing and
deterministic view of sexuality and fantasy.
This is an interesting project in many senses, not just as a critical revaluation of Freudian criticism or a new examination of tragedies by Sophocles and Shakespeare—it also provides suggestive insights for a theory of retrospection and of retroactive effects—what Freud called Nachträglichkeit.
Ray's reexamination of psychoanalysis is indebted to Laplanche's
critique of the Oedipus: according to Laplanche, Freud's account of
psychosexual development is misleadingly endogenous and deterministic
and does not make sufficient allowance for otherness, for the
unexpectedness and contingency of the encounter with externality and the
other. Freud's Copernican revolution of the human subject was also
Copernican in a limited sense, that is, it didn't consider the
possibility that there might be no center whatsoever for the psyche.
In
Laplanche's poststructuralist version of psychoanalysis, the self is
radically de-centered, and this calls for a rewriting of the Oedipus. In
abandoning the theory of seduction, and the role it gave to exogenous
elements in the constitution of the self, Freud was conniving with the
subject's tendency to mask his heteronomy, his dependence on the
intervention of the other. Laplanche insists on the fundamental
otherness of the messages received by the infant: otherness in the sense
that they are fundamentally misunderstood, coming as they come from an
unassimilated adult world, and otherness because of their lack of
self-transparency to the adults, the senders, as unconscious elements
are involved in any message. Therefore Laplanche goes back to the
seduction hypothesis with a difference—any interaction between the child
and the adult world contains a potential for the element of retroactive
traumatism that Freud had identified in his early formulation of the
seduction hypothesis. And the subject, and his unconscious, are
structured around these unassimilated or insufficiently symbolised
elements—all of which is Laplanche's own version of the Lacanian tenet
that the unconscious is not so much within the subject as "between"
subjects.
These
psychoanalytic models would of course benefit from an integration with a
theory of social interaction, and of the social constitution of the
subject understood as as an interiorized system of relationships—which
was in part R. D. Laing's contribution—although I am not aware of any
sustained and satisfactory integration of psychoanalytic work with, say,
Goffman's symbolic interactionalism.
Riding on the back of Laplanche's theory of the role of alterity in the
constitution of the subject, the self-stated aim of the book is "to
endeavour to bear witness to the irreducible alterities which inhabit
the three tragedies examined, and the specific ways in which they can be
shown to resist the exigency of narcissistic closure to which Freud's
thought becomes more emphatically subject after the formal repudiation
of the seduction theory" (42). Ray defines, in passing, what a
Laplanchian hermeneutics of art might be: a nonprogrammatic encounter
with otherness, given that works of art or culture are a prime example
of enigmatic otherness, indeterminate messages only partly controlled by
the author, and which will produce undeterminable effects, unforeseen
by the artist. "In other words, the site of cultural production is a
reopening of the subject's originary relationship to the other" (44).
And Freud's own production of psychoanalysis was partly derived from his
encounter with the enigmatic alterity of Sophocles' and Shakespeare's
tragedies. These texts (Oedipus Tyrannus, Julius Caesar, Hamlet)
apparently narrate the protagonist's assumption of an identity, a
centring of autonomous subjectivity: "Oedipus the fifth-century
philosopher, Brutus the revolutionary libertarian, Hamlet the frustrated
figure of an ostensibly modern severance from paternal law" (50).
Ray
seeks to identify in the tragedies themselves an originary de-centering
at work, one which undermines the protagonist's status as an autonomous
subject. These are, moreover, tragedies about parricide, a subject
central to Freud's account of ritual and psychic life in Totem and
Taboo. Parricide as a move necessary for the coming-into-being of the
subject is ambivalent, and Ray further explores its intrinsic
ambivalence, already prominent in Freud's analysis, with an added
emphasis on the role of pre-existing and external otherness in the
constitution of the parricidal subject. That otherness is partly
accounted for by "the contingent ideologies of the subject's surrounding
culture" (53)—the trajectory of the subject is irreducible to an
intrinsic fate. As an analyst, Freud identifies with Oedipus, Brutus,
Hamlet—while Ray tries to dissociate himself from this identification
and underlines those elements of the text which problematize the
protagonist's autonomy, those "forces which threaten the self-presence
that Freud is led to assign to the primal, parricidal text" (55).
Ray's reading of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, and of Freud's
reading of the same, emphasizes the elements of enigmatic otherness in
the mythical story. This alterity is not adequately addressed by Freud,
who "remains blind to the troublingly enigmatic specificity of the
tragedy" (59). Oedipus, an optimistic rationalist, relies on his own
intellectual strength and minimizes the significance of the Sphinx's
challenge—Freud does likewise, calling it a "riddle", whereas the story
resonates with more troubling and enigmatic overtones. Ray notes, for
instance, that Freud's Interpretation of Dreams,
which first addresses the Oedipal theme, was written according to Freud
as "a portion of my own self-analysis, my reaction to my father's
death" (qtd. in Ray, 61).
There is also a story told by Ernest Jones about a curious premonitory scene,
in which Freud saw himself, like Oedipus, as a riddle solver,
apparently without realizing the unconscious irony of this
identification. Oedipus' answer to the Sphinx was an answer to a riddle,
but Ray notes that it should have been understood as an enigma, not a
riddle. An enigma may require an answer, but "any response will be
inadequate" (63)—and, moreover, the interpreter's relation to his answer
is an enigma in its own right.
Oedipus was associated to the fifth-century philosophers by Hegel and then by Jean-Joseph Goux (Oedipus, Philosopher),
as the emblem of the new humanist paradigm which saw man as the measure
of all things, a symbol of Western thought as a whole, actually. Goux
notes that, contrary to Nietzsche, Hegel did not realize the troubling
and ambivalent consequences that the tragic fate of Oedipus suggests for
philosophy. Freud's notion of the unconscious comes to symbolize, too,
the dark, pulsional, parrincestual nature of this move, and it is not by
chance that "Freud discovers the unconscious and the Oedipal drives at
the same time" (Goux, qtd. in Ray 75). Yet the reduction of fate to the
unconscious, Freud's own answer to the Oedipal riddle, only has the
effect "of displacing the riddle elsewhere, namely 'back' into the
primordial constitution of the subject" (Ray, 79). Freud's partial
blindness in reading the Oedipus story discloses for Ray "a great deal
more about Sophocles' play and, in turn, about psychoanalysis than Freud
was fully able to grasp" (83). The Freudian theory of the subject
minimizes the role of alterity in its constitution, reducing it to an
endogenously determined unfolding, "no more than the manifestation of an
initial centrifugal explosion" (86)—but Sophocles' play is about
Oedipus' failure to secure himself as a self-sufficient source and
origin of his own destiny.
Ray's
reading of Sophocles emphasizes the way in which Oedipus enacts a fate
which was not even his, but originally his father's; an interesting
intertextual allusion in the self-blinding scene, to Polyphemus'
blinding by "Nobody" in the Iliad,
emphasizes the way Oedipus believes to the last that he can control his
own actions—mistakenly. "Thus, against the tyrannus' continued Oedipean
assertions of his own autonomy, the fabric of Sophocles' text allows
neither Oedipus' self-blinding nor, in its connection with it, the
murder of Laius, to be dissociated from this prior scene of the
inscription by the father on the son's body" (99).
One should note the way in which Ray's own "killing of the father" is
similarly inscribed within the logic of psychoanalysis. Michel Foucault
argued (in "What Is an Author?") that Freud was a prime example (like
Foucault himself, one might add) of a novel mode of authorship: the authorship of discourse practices, i.e. new theoretical approaches to the analysis of human
phenomena, a peculiar type of discourse in which the disciples or
followers need to refer continually both to the phenomena under
discussion and to the foundational texts of the founding father. In this
sense, Ray's text is a prime example of Oedipal Freudianism, which
makes it all the more suggestive.
—oOo—
Also here:
