As I am presenting tomorrow, I will keep this as concise as possible. While reading Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle I kept wondering how this could be applied to a literary text – specifically, two of the literary texts I am working on for my thesis—Les Caves du Vatican and L’Immoraliste by Gide.
In these works, children are often depicted playing, but, crucially, it is the adult male protagonists who take on this gaming aesthetic – this pleasure principle – as the predominant principle in their life. I imagine that the general idea remains the same, whether it is a child who plays or an adult—but I could be missing something. Gide wrote both the l’Immoraliste. And Les Caves well before Freud published Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but I wonder if Gide too acknowledged the role of play as a coping mechanism to better deal with a traumatic or troubling experience. It is precisely the ability to assert one’s mastery via play that creates this sense of pleasure, despite the extreme displeasure that pushed the “patient” to adopt the play aesthetic in the first place. Freud explains this point: “For in the case we have been discussing, the child may after all only have been able to repeat his unpleasant experience in play because the repetition carried along with it a yield of another sort but none the less a direct one” (169). From what I understand, mastery is thus associated with pleasure. This idea finds a correlate in “artistic” play and “imitation” as one is master of the narrative and I suppose of the interpretation – however, Freud dismisses this aesthetic approach as it “presuppose[s] the existence and dominance of the pleasure principle” and shows no tendencies to go “beyond the pleasure principle” (169). At this point I have a few questions –
First off, what is an economic approach?
And does artistic play necessarily stop at this point? Because literature is a piece of art, is it necessary constrained to being uniquely pleasurable or enjoyable? Is it also a game in which the compulsion to repeat traumatisms is propagated ad infinitum? Or can it be considered a form of therapy itself and as such able to go beyond the pleasure principle? Can this text then be applied to literary works if Freud himself dismisses the artistic dimension of pleasure?
I am going to sleep on this, and come back to it in the morning
I think that mastery is a therapeutic function because it gives control to the person. The most stressful thing is the unpredictability of events, so mastering an event by repeatign it through recall gives the subject a sense of control.
ReplyDelete"what is an economic approach?"
ReplyDeleteAs I said on Doaa's blog, by "economic approach" Freud means essentially treating desire like money, as susceptible to a rational cost/benefit analysis. The assumption would be that people do unpleasurable things, for instance, because they reckon that it is in their long-term interest; it's a kind of investment, like putting money away now (suffering unpleasure) so that it is there later, during retirement or whatever.