Psychoanalysis study questions (by Florence Boos and me)
Freud begins his essay on „the uncanny” with a long philological analysis of the German word unheimlich. Read it carefully, referring to the diagram on the other page. The point of the analysis is that at the end of the day heimlich and unheimlich are the same. How does Freud achieve this conclusion?
How does Freud define the "umheimlich"? (930) What two sets of meanings are associated with it?
What are some examples of the "uncanny" which Freud adduces? (935) What literary example does he give?
What seems especially horrific to Freud about the loss of eyesight? (938, substitute for castration) How does he interpret the tale? (938)
What are some of the meanings and forms of doubling? Can you think of plots which operate in this way?
What is the relationship of doubling and death?
What are the origins of the figure of the double? (941)
What are some instances of the horrific or frightening aspects of doubling? (942-3)
What is a feature of the mental life of obsessional neurotics?
What does Freud make of the phenomenon of the dread of the evil eye? (943)
Why do we experience the uncanny when encountering doubles, coincidental repetitions, or, to use Freud's example, when we lose our way in a strange city and return to the same point?
What does he associate with a sense of the omnipotence of thoughts? (944) What is the relation of the uncanny to animism?
Why does the uncanny recur? (944) What are some instances of the return of the uncanny?
Why do we fear the return of the dead?
Under what circumstances may a living person be perceived as uncanny? (945)
What are some other instances of the uncanny? (946)
What effect does the uncanny have on our perception of reality? (946-7)
To what does Freud ascribe the fact that a disproportionate number of incidents of the uncanny occur in literary texts? How do such incidents affect us differently when they occur in literature? (950-51)
Not every supernatural scene in literature is uncanny. What makes some texts uncanny while others, ostensibly very similar, produce comical effect?
Which types of literature seem most receptive to a Freudian analysis?
Jacques Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious” (by Florence Boos)
What are some implications of Lacan's claim that the unconscious is strucured like a language? (1290)
Why may the subject be said to be subordinate to language, rather than to control it? (1291)
What according to Lacan is the most important feature of culture? (1291)
What does he credit with the formulation of modern linguistics? (1292)
What does the formula S/s represent for him? What is the relationship between the signifier and signified? (1293)
What is his view of contemporary logical positivism, and on what grounds? (1293)
What points does he intend to make with the diagram of the men's and women's room as a figure of the relationship between S and s? (1294)
What is the point of the story about the two children who argue over whether the train has stopped at one restroom or the other? (1294)
What is meant by a “signifying chain”? (1295)
What does it mean to say that “the signifier, by its very nature, always anticipates meaning by unforlding its dimension before it”? (1296)
What features of language supplement its linear organization? (1296-97)
What points does Lacan make about the usages associated with the word “tree”? (1297-98) Why is it important that language can signify something other than what it says? (1298)
What is metonomy, as he defines it? (1298) Metaphor? (1299) What are the psychological functions of metaphor and metonymy, in his view? Does he give examples? (1299-1300)
What are his equations intended to represent? (1299) What do you make of them? (1299-1300)
Why does he believe Freud has contributed to a discussion of identity? (1301)
Why must he change the notion of “I think therefore I am” to “Where I think, there I am,” and then to “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think”? (1300-1302)
What final reflections does Lacan offer on the possibility of finding a key to one's unconscious processes?
What is meant by his final claim that Freud discovered the axis of the signified and signifier? („if what Freud discovered isn't that, it isn't anything,” 1302)