![]() ![]() But Freud’s influence in the 20th and 21st centuries also extends far beyond his specific psychoanalytic theories. There is now much support for many of Freud’s hypotheses from modern neuro-science, and much stimulation of neuro-scientific research by ideas of psychoanalysis. It traces the path of poetic creation: the poet “imagines this midnight moment’s forest” where “Something else is alive”, then in the final act “The page is printed”.įreud at his desk. Ted Hughes’s poem ‘The Thought Fox’ is in some ways a description of how unconscious thoughts enter the mind to form the poem. Many poets and writers have attempted to get around the ‘tyranny of the intellect’: Surrealists such as Andre Breton attempted to express the workings of the unconscious through automatic writing and dream symbolism and novelists such as Virginia Woolf (who Freud knew) wrote stream of consciousness novels. This is what Freud was getting at when he said that poets and philosophers were the first discoverers of the unconscious. In poetry, the ‘tyranny of the intellect’ is held at bay. Perhaps this suggests why poetry is such an effective tool for engaging with the unconscious both as reader and writer, because a poem cannot be read in one way and given a definitive interpretation, but is open to many different readings. Housman wrote, in 1933, that “Meaning is of the intellect, poetry is not”, and went on to elaborate that “the intellect is not the fount of poetry… it may actually hinder its production”. He wrote both about authors and texts (Shakespeare, Ibsen, Dostoevsky, Greek theatre) and the very act of writing in his paper Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming, with a view to uncovering the unconscious desires and conflicts which lie within written texts themselves. Throughout his life, Freud was interested in literature. What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied” – Sigmund Freud, 1928 “The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. Freud said that the discovery of the unconscious means that we are no longer ‘masters in our own house’ – we literally do not really know who we are! Literature and the unconscious But, for Freud, they are always trying to express themselves – in dreams, in ‘Freudian slips’, in ideas coming unbidden into one’s head, in psychological symptoms. The unconscious is where the ideas associated with forbidden wishes and unacceptable thoughts get ‘put away’. It is as if we carry within us our own ‘subtext’ – everything we do has more than one meaning.įreud argued that the unconscious was created in childhood and consisted of urges, thoughts, feelings, memories, and experiences that have been ‘repressed’ from consciousness. We repeat patterns of self-destructive behaviour, or plague ourselves with irrational fears. Thoughts come into our head, but we don’t know where they come from. We laugh at a joke, but we don’t know why. What Freud introduced was the notion of a ‘dynamic unconscious’, a part of the mind that is hidden from our conscious awareness but which is continuously motivating our behaviour. ![]() Imagine walking down a flight of stairs while being conscious of every step! In fact, if we were conscious of everything we did, our lives would become impossible. Much of our behaviour is performed ‘unconsciously’. The heart of the house is the study and consulting room, where his antiquities collection and library were set up for him in much the same fashion as in Vienna, including the famous psychoanalytic couch. ![]() His daughter Anna Freud lived there until 1982. The Freud Museum is located in the house in which Freud spent the last year of his life after escaping Nazi-occupied Vienna in 1938. The Museum will select some of your poems to be included in the Festival winning poems will also be published on Young Poets Network and receive prizes from the Museum gift shop. This mini writing competition is be part of a Festival of the Unconscious to be held at The Freud Museum from June to September 2015, which celebrates the centenary of the publication of Freud’s seminal paper on the subject. We have teamed up again with the Freud Museum in London to get you writing about that most resonant and influential of subjects – the unconscious. A newspaper report about Freud’s arrival in Britain. Copyright Freud Museum London. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |