The Symptom Reading

The Symptom Reading                                                                          Trevor Pederson

Introduction  

In this book I’m going to offer a methodology that allows for the production of latent content or hidden meaning in the narratives found in films and books. This methodology is intended to fill the request of film critics for a deeper analysis:

[p]sychoanalytic readings purport to show the meaning behind the text that is concealed by its manifest content, but it is not clear that this is what psychoanalytic readings of Hollywood cinema achieve... [A]rguably, far from providing an objective code to unlock the real (hidden) meaning of the text, psychoanalytic criticism quite frequently describes what is going on at the surface of it... However, if this is the case, the psychoanalytic critic posing as theorist erroneously claims for himself the insight that rightly belongs to the text itself (Allen, 1999, p. 142)

Where Richard Allen says the insight belongs to the text itself, others are not so kind. If they don’t dispute the status of psychoanalysis as a coherent model of understanding, many dismiss the applications of it as boring. One sees a character attach a lot of importance to a non-human object and calls it a transitional object, one sees a woman seductively portrayed and calls it the masculine gaze, or one finds a triangle with two men and a woman and labels it oedipal. Others search for images or references to penises or feces, and still others do word-play with the names and places of the text, and one gets the impression that psychoanalysis is a silly game for the vulgar or overly erudite. 

Let me begin with a few disclaimers about the approach that I will introduce. First, the latent meaning the symptom reading produces is in no way exhaustive, nor does it claim exclusivity. Just as there are several ways to interpret or utilize dreams, a narrative can be interpreted in several ways. In the second chapter I briefly mention an alternate way to interpret The Piano (1993), in a genetic reading from the point of view of the protagonist’s daughter. Second, I’ve chosen to analyze films, but that does not mean the method only works with cinema. It can also be applied to literature or any medium that possesses a narrative. Third, I’ve tried to adopt a two (or more) part reading in which the layperson could perform the first part of the symptom reading. My confidence for this comes from the concept of literary doubling in literary theory. There is a history of appreciating that unsavory aspects of a protagonist may be represented in a double of the character. For example, a split personality such as Jekyll and Hyde doubles a character and has obviously been a subject for literary critics. In addition, a physically separate character in a text has been called the “avatar” of the protagonist, as Gilbert and Gubar (1979) call Bertha, the titular Madwoman in the Attic, who they see as representing Jane Eyre’s desires (p. 359).

Although the intuition of doubling has long been present in literary studies, the account I offer gives it both a metapsychological foundation and goes beyond a mere analytical study of the two characters, to a dialectical formulation. The dialectical formulation involves a further synthetic step, which resembles what Freud (1900) divined in his concept of a symptom (p.569-70). A symptom both allows the expression of an unconscious desire and, at the same time, only reveals this desire in hidden form. In one of Freud’s examples, a woman has hysterical vomiting in which the wish to have children is expressed by the association of the vomiting to the morning sickness of pregnancy but, manifestly, this desire is masked in the conscious mind. A symptom is also an expression of the need for punishment, in which castration anxiety is avoided by the impulses that are tied to anxiety-producing interactions being turned against the self. “Castration” in psychoanalysis is a general way of referring to anxiety situations at different psychosexual stages (i.e. phallic, anal, narcissistic, and auto-erotic stages) that may concern the loss or damage to genitalia but also death, fear of disapproval from authority figures, fear for life (i.e death), fear of abandonment, etc. (Freud, 1926a)[1]. In Freud’s example, the hysterical morning sickness also threatens the woman with the loss of her good looks and her figure. This aspect is important and concerns the economics of punishment that I will define and discuss in the second chapter.

The avatar, or what I call the symptom character(s), not only express the desires of the ego character(s), but also rationalize the expression of those desires in the relationship between the ego character and others in the ego plot. In the first film, The Lost Boys (1987), there is a symptom plot that involves Michael, David, and Star. They have a classic triangle in which Michael has fallen in love with Star only to find that she belongs to David (i.e. part of his gang). I argue that this is the expression of the feelings of Michael’s younger brother Sam and the latent triangle with his mother, Lucy, and her suitor, Max. Sam’s plot, the ego plot, is relatively separate from Michael’s symptom plot. The important synthetic step is to consider the ego plot as if the symptom plot didn’t exist or is excised from the narrative. When this occurs we look for the instances in which the symptom plot comes to bear upon the ego plot. Sam, for example, interrupts his mother’s dates with Max by telling her to come home because his brother has become a vampire and is attacking him. With the excision of the fantastic aspect of the movie (i.e. his older brother becoming a vampire) we are left with the story of a boy whose parents’ divorced, and who is inventing stories to ruin his mom’s dates. Why would a kid do this? The symptom reading proposes that Sam’s use of the excuse that his brother is becoming a vampire, in order to ruin the date, is both the expression of the same oedipal desires that his brother expresses explicitly and a rationalization of this very desire. Sam doesn’t want another man to become his father, he wants his mother to remain single so he can be “the man of the house”.    

This unity of expression and rationalization of the impulse creates a research methodology that is based upon psychoanalytic thought (Freud’s dialectical approach), but which non-analysts could apply. With the dialectical formulation we go beyond mere hermeneutics. The dialectical element enshrines that the impulse, triangle, or inter-relation that is explicit in the symptom character(s). Thus, as something that can become repressed, it therefore generates data about what can in fact be repressed.