In a context of examining self-image in a poetic text, (i.e. how writers present themselves to their readers) and based on the assumption that the unconscious accounts for the strategic maneuvering poets use in an anti-autobiographical mode of writing:
1) Are unconscious motives, desires and drives detectable in a literary work?
2) Is spontaneous poetry comparable to "slips of the tongue" that Freud talked about?
Interesting question. The answer to 1 is yes. By definition, the unconscious is not immediately available to the persons concerned but revealed by their own subsequent reflexivity, or to others who know their history.
The answer to 2 is also yes, as spontaneous poetry reflects similar dual processing of consciousness, spontaneous the final production after editing.
From the viewpoint of psychoanalytic literary theory, every literary text is a flow from the text unconscious to textual self-consciousness; this interpretative method may be especially important for rhetoric and political texts, where ‚new realities‘ are formed by writing and speech together.
Stephen David Edwards , thanks. Regarding question 2. I use "spontaneous poetry" in the sense of the unedited registered flow of emotions in the sense that William Wordsworth used.
I wonder if your "dual processing of consciousness" refers to edited rather than unedited poetry. Can the unconscious be studied based on the final poetic product regardless of the manuscript's editorial history performed by the poets themselves?
Stephen I. Ternyik thanks. I'll take this as yes for both questions.
Prejudices and biases that some authors seem not to be conscious of, and would not admit to, are often detectable in their writing. Moreover, the detection usually doesn't require a fancy psychoanalytic interpretation, just a close and discerning reading of the work.
Yes, easily detectable in literary texts and otherwise in fake news and fake social media texts (on daily basis;
For example, American gun violence incidents, when the killer is white American and he kills lots of Black Americans, then his name and identity is not mentioned in the news, and same goes with any incidence and terrorist activities that are done by some white and non Muslims; their name is never mentioned in the news, and the mild words used for such incidence to minimize the toxic effects of events ( otherwise, you all can understand, to enhance toxicity of some events, for some others, there are very different word strategies)
So, unconsciousness and consciousness everything is detectable in everything, texts, images, politics, economy, wars, films dramas, every where
Muthana Makki Mohammedali Yes to all 3 questions. Your field of inquiry is in an intersection of science and humanities as well as the arts, i.e. a tripoint of human skills.
The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.
Leonardo da Vinci
The sphere of the subconscious is manifested not only in belees-lettres, but also in the "exact" sciences. Everyone who is familiar with the history of physics and mathematics will agree with this. One of David Hilbert's associates said: "Brilliant mathematicians formulate theorems, and talented mathematicians prove them." It's just about the same thing.
I am certain that it is. Much our experience emanates from this region.
Rich
Alexey Orlovsky D. Hilbert had great 'scientific' problems with L .Brouwer, with respect to mathematics and intuition; this supports your point ! Some believe that astounding things happen as a result of clever created algorithms executed by the brain. Others believe that, due to the revelations of Kurt Gödel, no conceivable collection of algorithms can possibly manifest human self-aware consciousness. It is possible that the individual mind is part of something we can call an unconscious vs. conscious field; the field cannot comprehend itself (as per Gödel) but we, as components, can understand ourselves with relation to the field and communication, e.g. scientific collaboration as 'field work'.
Alexey Orlovsky , I agree that it is so in the history of the study of exact sciences rather than the sciences themselves. I can relate bias to biology, and to astronomy; remembering Galileo and the Church, but relating it to mathematics is quite intriguing!
Muthana Makki Mohammedali N is always more than a number.
https://or-zse.hu/hacofe/vol10/erdospal2015.htm
Human mathematical thought fits often very well to the meta-network of nature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences
It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the miracle that the human mind can string a thousand arguments together without getting itself into contradictions, or to the two miracles of laws of nature and of the human mind's capacity to divine them.
(Citation/Wigner/from link).
I do think it is necessary. It can emancipate your knowledge of the subject matter
What would happen to unconscious desires if we can't put them into a language? We could observe how the subconscious works in different areas such as works of art, locutions, in our jokes and even in our "lapsus calami" because we are human, but in literary creations -with rules or without rules- we continue to appreciate that both the proposed text and the reader always have their own unconscious and we can be skeptical or we can not be skeptical about the same text but we always try to detect and analyze the elements that in our opinion are "unconscious" within the style of the literary author, within what we call his idiolect. Dreams have their good role in each idiolect so that it is truly literary, which allows us to perceive its unconscious dimension, hidden but detectable in the intertext and we can capture it interacting between signifiant/signifié [signified/signifier] because the "textual unconscious" is always a prerogative. of the economy of the literary character; everything is part of the game, everything is part of the experiment and the images of the past continue to be inside and outside the literary text as if it were an experiment in search of analyzing and materializing those unconscious moments that we have captured.
Cf.
Article Countertransference: Our New Royal Road to the Unconscious?
Article The Unconscious Will: How the Pursuit of Goals Operates Outs...
Book The Dynamics of Literary Response
Inference is the tool. Psychanalytic critics would love to play the role of shrinks and crossexamine texts to reach to the layer of "the unconscious". Here, I agree with both Karl Pfeifer in his argument that much buried biases might be unearthed revealing writer's desires and drives and with Stephen I. Ternyik when he suggests that much of what psychoanalytic approaches aim at are the"new realities" texts yield.
Answer to question 1 - Yes. Language is full of implications, some are the writer's unconscious desires but most are cultural and linguistic.
I had asked for a reference for this comment of yours Dear Dr. @Larry Carlson but if you can't give it to me, don't worry, nothing happens! =
"Robert Lowell, for example, read what another critic had written about his poem, "Skunk Hour." He said that the critic had taken the reader on a journey by providing a coherent and consistent explanation of the imagery and symbolism in the poem. For Lowell, the critics words were a work of art in itself. However, Lowell added, the ideas the critic had stated had not occurred to him. Lowell was unsure whether or not the critic had somewhat divined what Lowell himself was unconsciously thinking when he wrote the poem, or else the critic's words were just a fabrication, albeit a plausible one. In short, the human mind is to complicated for anyone to come up with a mathematical formula for detecting what is being thought on a conscious or unconscious level, especially since the two, quite arguably, overlap and intermingle"
Your youtube is impressive! Indeed Dear Dr. Larry Carlson
, literary criticism is more of an art than a science or a discipline that's why cannot pigeonhole it.
Larry Carlson
, Juana Maria Arcelus-Ulibarrena and the other respected colleagues, such an enlightening exchange of ideas! Thank you very much.Larry: You are absolutely correct about the more crucial issue of proving that a certain literary composition comes from the unconscious. You mentioned recurrent symbolism. Perhaps literary criticism is more intuitive than, say, psychoanalysis or criminology and other domains that focus on meaning revelation (in the post-structural sense of the word). Yet, I'm still not quiet sure that literary criticism is not a kin to such sciences as it takes much from their methods. Literary criticism also stretches interpretation of the Sign to areas where exact scientists fear to tread unless they have evidences that they not yet have. This indecisiveness in a literary reading is a painstaking weakness, but it is also what unleashes the discipline from the confines of limited knowledge.
Thank you for your appreciation Dear Dr. Muthana Makki Mohammedali .