ELEMENTS OF POETRY

POETRY: ELEMENTS


A publisher considering a MS wants to know three things: Has the author something important to say? Do people want to hear about it? Is the writing adequate to the task? Judging from submissions, it will surprise many poets to know that similar criteria apply to poetry. Yes, a poem may start with a vague tune in the head, and no doubt develops in some subterranean way of its own, but the final piece needs to be as tightly plotted as the best detective fiction. All must seem natural and inevitable. Level by level — content, argument, emotive expression, diction, imagery, rhythm — everything will hang together and be interrelated in one convincing whole.How is that achieved? By the application of an immense amount of effort, flair and experience. There is no single method of composition. Spencer used the medieval world of allegory to suggest and shape. Shakespeare followed the rules of Renaissance rhetoric. Racine modelled his plays on the Greek classics. Yeats wrote prose drafts. Pound employed mimicry and textural collages. And so on. Every writer of stature develops his own method, which works for him and fulfills the cultural expectations of the time. Time available and natural talent impose their own restrictions. How composition proceeds is largely determined by the content, and that content is not so much chosen by the poet as drawn from his deepest nature. Certain themes provoke and obsess writers, so that from juvenilia to masterwork the author can be seen working and reworking a restricted range of material. Often these relate to personal incidents, perhaps deep in childhood, but not completely so, and not so as to explain why response has taken this particular form, or invoked any response at all. How does this relate to the craft of writing? The one thing that all editors and publishers look for is individuality. They want something fresh, authentic and distinctive, which is nonetheless relevant, self-validating and convincing. Novelty by itself counts for nothing — the small presses are crowded with such stuff — but poems that build gradually into a landscape at once original and significant are greatly prized. The odd poem can always be created out of some lucky chance, but to produce good work consistently, that explores new territories and presents them vividly, calls on rare personal qualities, honesty not the least of them. Matters well outside the usual ambit of literature have to be researched, and everything fused in an uniquely personal and all-embracing vision.
Word Usage
Can poetry employ any sort of language? Are there overall principles to guide and justify word choice?
Lexicons are governed by social usage. The Elizabethans embroidered words with religious, courtly and pastoral associations. These trappings were gradually dropped, and the eighteenth century imposed a more correct and classical diction. The Romantics introduce a new inner world with cold, pale, grey, home, child, morning, memory, ear, feel, hold, sleep, turn, weep, etc. Later come moon, stir, water, body, shadow, house. The mid-nineteenth century popularized dead, red, rain, stone. Nineteen thirties poetry was packed with references to industrial buildings and social change.
Vocabularies not only reflect interests and fashions, but must be broadly understood in their contemporary setting. Pound's literary borrowings are very wide — from the ancient world, from classical Chinese, the Renaissance and early USA history — but for many the Cantos remain an unconvincing patchwork. William Carlos Williams stressed the sensory and the homely, but his shorter poems are often limited, verging on the banal. At the other end of the spectrum lies the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, where a Christian and guilt-saturated diction can be baffling to a readership lacking the scholarship, or indeed the interest, in the western intellectual tradition.
Words do not possess wholly transparent meanings, but in the more affective poetry their latent associations, multiple meanings, textural suggestions and rhythmic power are naturally given freer rein. But the touchstone is still the audience, even the audience of one. "Words too familiar, or too remote, defeat the purpose of a poet", said Johnson, and that observation remains true, as much for traditionalists writing inside a poetic tradition as for others trying to kindle poetry out of naked experience.
Metaphor
Metaphor commonly means saying one thing while intending another, making implicit comparisons between things linked by a common feature, perhaps even violating semantic rules. Scientists, logicians and lawyers prefer to stress the literal meaning of words, regarding metaphor as picturesque ornament. There is the obvious fact, however, that language is built of dead metaphors. As F.L. Lucas put it: Every expression that we employ, apart from those that are connected with the most rudimentary objects and actions, is a metaphor, though the original meaning is dulled by constant use. Consider the words of that very sentence: an expression is something squeezed out; to employ something is to wind it in (implicare ); to connect is to tie together (conectere); rudimentary comes from the root to root or sprout; an object is something thrown in the way; an action something driven or conducted; original means rising up like a spring or heavenly body; constant is standing firm. Metaphor itself is a metaphor, meaning the carrying across of a term or expression from its normal usage to another. {1} Metaphors are therefore active in understanding. We use metaphors to group areas of experience (my consciousness was raised), to orientate ourselves (life is a journey), to convey expression through the senses (his eyes were glued to the screen), to describe learning (it had a germ of truth in it), etc. Even ideas are commonly pictured as objects (the idea had been around for a while), as containers (I didn't get anything out of that) or as things to be transferred (he got the idea across). Metaphors have entailments that organize our experience, uniquely express that experience, and indeed create necessary realities. Lakoff and Johnson attacked commonly accepted theories of metaphor, which derive from a naive realism — that there is an objective world, independent of ourselves, to which words apply with fixed meanings. But the answer is not to swing to the opposite and embrace a wholly subjectivists view that the personal, interior world is the only reality. Metaphors are primarily matters of thought and action, only derivatively of language. {2} How do sentences in different languages have the same meaning? Rationalists assume that there is a universal base of shared semantic primitives (just as Chomsky's grammar once supposed there were syntactic universals) but fail to explain how this base came about. Empiricists argue for some body of shared experience that arises from contact with the real natural world, but can't explain why language takes the form it does. For writers and critics, metaphor is simply a trope — a literary device deriving from the schools of classical rhetoric and intending to put an argument clearly and persuasively. Boundaries are not sharp, but devices are commonly grouped as schemes and tropes. Schemes (which include alliteration, chiasmus, etc.) have more to do with expression. Tropes (which include metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche) are more powerful and deal with content. Metonymy entails using a name to stand for the larger whole: Whitehall intended otherwise. where Whitehall stands for the British civil service. Metonymy does not open new paths like metaphor, but shortens distance to intuition of things already known. Metaphor therefor involves a transfer of sense, and metonymy a transfer of reference. There are larger considerations. Kenneth Burke thought tropes were ready-made for rhetoricians because they describe the specific patterns of human behaviour that surface in art and social life. Hayden White sketched a theory of history which bridged the claims of art and science by defining the deep structures of historical thought in terms of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony. For Derrida, the inevitable clash of metaphors in all writing shows only too well that language may subvert or exceed an author's intended meaning. Paul de Man saw language as an endless chain of words, which cannot be closed off to a definitive meaning or reference. The literal and figurative meaning of a text is not easily separated, and the realities posited by language are largely those accepted by the dominant ideology as truthful representations of the world. Alan Gross argued that truth in science is a consensus of utterances rather than a fit with evidence. Knowledge does not exist independently of conceptual schemes, and therefore of linguistic formulation. Poetry that accomplishes fullness and authenticity is therefore knowledge of very real kind, though nonetheless rooted still in the beliefs, practices and intentions of language users.
Rhetoric
Rhetoric was formerly an indispensable aid to writing poetry, and some of its approaches are still helpful. Taxis, or the structure of argument, shows how lines and phrases work on our affective understanding. Its structure, the overall shape of a successful appeal to an audience, is usually simple. Attract the attention by producing something of immediate personal interest. Develop an argument with a few more instances — but not too many, and keep them relevant. Lead to agreement with personal assurances, guarantees, claims on authority. Conclude by complimenting the audience on their humanity and common sense. Equally obvious and necessary is finding the appropriate words, tone and gestures: lexis. All writing must make some appeal, but poetry goes much further. We expect to be deeply moved, and in ways not experienced before. By new correlations to accepted themes, by freshly conceived notions, unrecognized but believable experiences, a wider range of sympathies, an greater acuteness of perception, we expect a world to be more precisely shaped and peopled with emotion. And that is very difficult. The Romantics drew on the past, and on untamed landscapes. The Symbolists exploited the music and associations of words. The Futurists used strident novelty, shaking readers out of their accustomed responses. The Modernists fashioned individual, somewhat self-referential worlds. The Postmodernists rely on vivid, populist images. Rhetoric organizes language to evoke emotion, persuade by argument, or to distract. Of course the last — distraction, entertainment — can be very complicated but even the direct emotional appeal is no simple matter. Unconstrained outpouring is not art. At the very least, we want to know that the emotion is appropriate, that our feelings are nor being wantonly played upon. We need, in short, to be persuaded that we should feel deeply about something. The wellsprings of individual emotions have to be tapped, and these, as any tabloid editor knows, are very obvious. Love in all its forms, the pain of death and separation, the joy of friendship and in the good things of life, the pride of home, family, status and country, loyalty, courage in adversity, simple modesty, service and kindliness — these and dozen others make the world go round. How are these emotions tapped? Not by direct appeal. Not even by showing rather than telling. The reader is a fastidious creature and dislikes being buttonholed. The emotions have to grow out of the situation described, and that situation must be credible.Rather than clothe a sentiment with illustration, therefore, or tag a moral onto a story, the emotion must arise out of the very portrayal of the scene, event, reflection, etc. Poets may in this seem at a disadvantage. With their greater compass of time, scenes and characters, the playwright or novelist has no need to hit the target squarely with the first shot. But in compensation the poet is allowed greater resources of language. Nothing very much in the arts is a raw slice of life. Dialogue in plays and novels seems natural, but is very far from a transcription of a live performance, which indeed a radio listener detects immediately. Even in the most realistic novel the dialogue is contrived, and has to be — to move the plot along, display the speaker's character and motivations, keep the reader wanting more. And if doesn't appear contrived, which it certainly must not, it is because the dialogue very subtly uses various understandings and conventions; it becomes an art that hides art. Rhetoric was such an art, and was often enjoyed in this way. A sophisticated audience saw through the devices, but nonetheless applauded the display of such skills. Nor was this such an admission of defeat, even for poetry. New Criticism focused on the literary devices employed. Postmodernism denies that anything exists beyond such devices, poetry being a self-conscious and superior form of entertainment. And in such entertainment the illustration — exemplum in rhetoric — sometimes became more important than the argument. The correlate was seen as vivid and engrossing in its own right, which enabled the speaker or writer to smuggle in matter that had little to do with his theme. Instead of the argument proceeding step by step, with each step illustrated, the illustrations themselves linked to develop subsidiary themes, or distracted from weaknesses in the central argument. Something similar is used in television adverts: we enjoy the visual display without believing or even remembering the message. Poetry employing this technique became very oblique, if not somewhat rambling, but produced surprising effects. We remember Milton's extended similes that add grandeur to Paradise Lost, and Byron's irrepressible digressions in Don Juan. If the images have no connection with the theme, then of course they are simply decoration (which a less austere age was quite happy to accept) but even here they had to contribute to the larger effect.
Metre
Metre is a contentious subject, and studies based on mechanical, musical, organic and linguistic analogies have shown how little is currently understood. Nonetheless, as defined as some pattern of phonological stress, pitch and/or length, rhythm is practically an inescapable element of poetry. Cultural conventions and literary history select their varying requirements from the individual features of a language, but rhythm also arises naturally from the simple exercise of breathing and the desire for shape and regularity in human affairs. Metre is a systematic regularity in rhythm. In western literature there are two great metrical systems — the quantitative (introduced by the Greeks) and the accentual (which appears in Latin of the third century AD) — but metre of some sort is found in all poetry, east and west. Metrical skill comes from practice rather than any slavish following of rules, and rules indeed vary with the literary tradition and what poets are attempting to achieve. The ear is not the only judge. Swinburne and Chesterton appeal to the auditory imagination, but look bombastic on the page. The late blank verse of Shakespeare needs a trained actor to bring out its rough-hewn splendour, and the rhythmic subtleties of Geoffrey Hill are apt to vanish on public performance. New metres are difficult to create. Much more common is the importation and adaptation of metre from a foreign language, which is a good reason for reading beyond translations. Conventional English verse is usually (and confusedly) described in a terminology deriving from classical prosody — i.e. as iambic, trochaic, dactylic and anapaestic. For contemporary practice it may be better to consider metre under two headings: whether the syllables or the stresses are being counted, and whether these counts are fixed or variable. Accentual verse has fixed counts of stress but variable syllables. Syllabic verse has fixed counts of syllables regardless of stresses. Accentual-syllabic is conventional metre with both stress and syllables fixed. Free verse has no restrictions on either. How readers recognize and respond to metre is unclear, but any particular metre seems to be a norm, a pattern intuited behind permissible examples. The examples are often irregular, and indeed the common iambic pentameter seems only to be exact in some 25% of cases overall. Accentual verse is found in popular verse, ballads, nursery rhymes, songs and doggerel. Syllabic verse as exemplified by the French alexandrine is not strictly metrical, and twentieth century attempts to write a pure syllabic verse in English have not caught on. Accentual-syllabic was developed by Chaucer from Italian models, and became the staple for English poetry from Elizabethan times till comparatively recently. Contemporary free verse originated in France around the middle of the nineteenth century, was championed (briefly) by the founders of Modernism, and has ramified into various forms, some of them indistinguishable from prose. Traditional verse is overshadowed by the achievements of the past. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope and Wordsworth set standards difficult to emulate, and poets are nowadays hardly encouraged to try. Many of the better magazines, where the fledgling poet must start his publishing career, will not take traditional poetry, and those with more generous requirements may still lack readers or editors capable of telling the good from the merely facile. Nonetheless, strict verse enjoys periodic revivals, and has been a feature of several twentieth century schools — the Georgians, Neo-Romantics, the Movement poets and the New Formalists. Free verse is very confused field, not properly understood or linguistically mapped. Adoption may be more about pamphleteering and cultural aspects than poetic ends. Some of the speech rhythms claimed as "superior to metre" are not rhythms at all but an enviable dexterity in idiomatic expression. Some are loose assemblages of rhythmic expression to no constant base, and some an endearing tribute to their author's performance skills.Why use the device? Because metre creates and organizes content, giving emphasis to words or elements that would otherwise escape attention: the tighter the metre, the more expressive can be small departures from the norm. Metre gives dignity and memorability, conveying tempo, mood, the subtle shifts in evidence, passion and persuasion beyond what is possible in prose. In the hands of great master like Shakespeare, metre provides grace, energy, elevation, expressiveness and a convincing approximation to everyday speech. But metre is not diametrically opposed to free verse. Many contemporary poets write both, or served an apprenticeship in strict forms before creating something closer to their needs. Nonetheless, in the absence of this ability to highlight and compound meaning, free verse is often driven to expand in other directions. It prizes a convincing exactness of idiomatic expression: the line seems exactly right in the circumstances: appropriate, authentic and sincere. It operates closely with syntax. It adopts a challenging layout on the page where line and syntax are rearranged to evade or exploit the usual expectations.
Imagery
Imagery is the content of thought where attention is directed to sensory qualities: mental images, figures of speech and embodiments of non-discursive truth.Given that language is so largely constructed of dead metaphors, some residue of original use must remain behind the most commonplace words. Yet readers very much differ in their ability to visualize such metaphors, and not all metaphors are primarily visual. How do poets bring such qualities to life? And how far should they go, since many of Shakespeare's lines become ludicrous if their mixed metaphors are realized too completely?A first point to make is that both the use and concept of imagery has shifted with changing cultural outlooks. The medieval view of art was rooted in morality, and its descriptions of the world never forget that the things depicted served God's purpose: the smallest thing reached into a larger world beyond. Renaissance writers studied the classical authors more widely and employed figures — rhetorical figures, including simile, allegory and metaphor — whose purpose was to clarify, enforce and decorate a preexisting meaning. Imagery was often elaborate, but not generally constitutive of meaning. The growth of a homogeneous reading public in the 18th century, with more settled opinions, brought a polite and plain diction into general use. Images became mental representations of sensory experience, a storehouse of devices by which the original scenes of nature, society, commerce, etc. could be recreated. With Romantic transcendentalism, when the world reappeared as the garment of God, and the abstract and general resided in the concrete and particular, poetry came to embody the sacred, and images to be symbols of an indwelling (though not necessarily Christian) deity. In Modernism and Postmodernism, the interest has focused on the images themselves, which are an inescapable part of language, and therefore of a poet's meaning.These are very broad generalities. There are traces of Medieval allegory in most Renaissance writers. Shakespeare's later works may be partly written in the hermetic tradition. The best eighteenth century writers do not simply open the props cupboard but use conventional imagery to make penetrating comments. Byron may be a Romantic poet but he is not a spiritualist like Blake. By the eclectic late twentieth century, matters had become very complicated indeed.Imagery can vary. Psychologists identify seven kinds of mental images — those of sight, sound, taste, smell, touch, bodily awareness and muscular tension. All are available to poets, and all are used by poets, though not to the same extent. Browning uses tactile imagery while Shelley's imagery emphasizes movement. Nor is imagery per se important — its extent or type — but the purposes it serves. Metaphor, simile, allegory, personification, metonymy (attribute for all) and synecdoche (part for whole) each compare one thing with another and involve both in different ways. Often the things compared are both images, but one of them may also be a feeling or concept. The effect differs, therefore, and word choice is further dictated by literary fashion and a poet's obsessions. Donne's metaphysical images show a startling reach from subject to analogue, but such conceits were prized at the time, and Donne was a tortured and exceptionally learned writer. Literary works can indeed be attributed to authors in disputed cases by computer analysis (cluster analysis) of imagery, and occasionally something made of the poet's state of mind.Imagery can be used to eternalize thought, to create mood and atmosphere, and to give continuity by recurring leitmotifs. Light and dark are prevalent in Romeo and Juliet, for example, and the aimlessness of modern life evoked by fragmented images in The Waste Land. In longer poems, moreover, the recurring imagery need not simply reappear but can operate in contrast with other images to develop plot or increase the dramatic effect. Writers tend to make certain words or images typically their own, particularly when hard-won, so that individual poems become inseparably part of the larger corpus by which they are recognized and understood. And since authors inevitably share something of their contemporary's concerns, those concerns and attendant images will illustrate and shape their own writing. Such concerns are important. Overworked editors of poetry magazines discern immediately from the attendant imagery whether a poem submitted will enhance the brand image of the publication, and pass the poem on or out accordingly.
References
1. FL Lucas's Style (1958).2. G. Lakoff and M. Johnson's Metaphors We Live By (1980).
Internet Sources
1. Poetry In Review. Herbert Leibowitz. http://www.parnassuspoetry.com/editors.htm. Some general comments on poetry by the editor of Parnassus.2. What is Poetry? Vivion Smith. Jun. 2001. http://depts.gallaudet.edu/Englishworks/literature/poetry.html. Good outline of types and facets of poetry.3. Understanding and Explicating Poetry. Mark Canada. Aug. 1999. http://www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/markport/best/study/poetry.htm. Helpful first steps.4. How to Write Poetry. Grant Shuyler. Jul. 2003. http://home.ca.inter.net/%7Egrantsky/howwritepoetry.html. Sane advice, with recommended books.5. ProTeacher. 2003. http://www.proteacher.com/070034.shtml. Lessons for children that deal with main aspects of poetry.6. Elements of Poetry: A Brief Introduction. Paul P. Reuben. Jun. 2003. http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/append/AXF.HTML. Perspectives in American Literature: A Research and Reference Guide. 7. Poetry. Pradosh Kumar Mohapatra. http://members.tripod.com/mopy/poetry-def.htm. Unattributed encyclopedia entry.8. Introduction to Poetry. Eric Rabkin. 2002. http://www-personal.umich.edu/%7Eesrabkin/240w97Syl.htm. Syllabus for Class 240 002: lists main points and standard reference works.9. Poetry and the Politics of Self-Expression. Barney F. McClelland. 2003. http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=21. Argues for (some) poetry craft. 10. Lyric Poetry and Subjectivity. Amittai F. Aviram. Aug. 2001. http://www.cla.sc.edu/engl/faculty/avirama/papers/lyric.html. A closely argued case for lyric poetry.11. On "Poetry". Donald Hall. http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/moore/poetry.htm. Articles by Hall and others on the evolution of Marianne Moore's poem Observations. 12. Reading a Poem as a Verbal Contraption. Bernard Turner. 2003. http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/ellturne/en2101poerhet.htm. Course notes for EN 2101E(BT).13. The language of poetry and advertising: an interdisciplinary teaching project at Hamburg University. Martin Klepper and Ingrid Piller. 2000. http://webdoc.sub.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/artic20/piller/5_2000.html. Report on a successful teaching project.14. T. S. Eliot and the Poem Itself. Denis Donoghue. 2000. http://www.partisanreview.org/archive/2000/1/donoghue.html. Examination of the essence of poetry.15. American Poetry Since 1945: The Anti-Tradition. http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/oal/lit7.htm. A useful survey.16. A Roots in Our Throats: A Case for Using Etymology. Natasha Sajé. May 2003. http://awpwriter.org/magazine/writers/nsaje.htm. Word choice and etymology: an AWP article.
This article is taken from:
http://www.textetc.com/elements.html

This article presents Freud's theory of Psychoanalysis.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

Table of Contents (Clicking on the links below will take you to those parts of this article)
1. Life 2. Backdrop to his Thought 3. The Theory of the Unconscious 4. Infantile Sexuality 5. Neuroses and The Structure of the Mind 6. Psychoanalysis as a Therapy a. The Claim to Scientific Status b. The Coherence of the Theory c. Freud's Discovery d. The Efficacy of Psychoanalytic Therapy

Sigmund Freud, physiologist, medical doctor, psychologist and father of psychoanalysis, is generally recognised as one of the most influential and authoritative thinkers of the twentieth century. Working initially in close collaboration with Joseph Breuer, Freud elaborated the theory that the mind is a complex energy-system, the structural investigation of which is proper province of psychology. He articulated and refined the concepts of the unconscious, of infantile sexuality, of repression, and proposed a tri-partite account of the mind's structure, all as part of a radically new conceptual and therapeutic frame of reference for the understanding of human psychological development and the treatment of abnormal mental conditions. Notwithstanding the multiple manifestations of psychoanalysis as it exists today, it can in almost all fundamental respects be traced directly back to Freud's original work. Further, Freud's innovative treatment of human actions, dreams, and indeed of cultural artefacts as invariably possessing implicit symbolic significance has proven to be extraordinarily fecund, and has had massive implications for a wide variety of fields, including anthropology, semiotics, and artistic creativity and appreciation in addition to psychology. However, Freud's most important and frequently re-iterated claim, that with psychoanalysis he had invented a new science of the mind, remains the subject of much critical debate and controversy.
1. Life
Freud was born in Frieberg, Moravia in 1856, but when he was four years old his family moved to Vienna, where Freud was to live and work until the last year of his life. In 1937 the Nazis annexed Austria, and Freud, who was Jewish, was allowed to leave for England. For these reasons, it was above all with the city of Vienna that Freud's name was destined to be deeply associated for posterity, founding as he did what was to become known as the 'first Viennese school' of psychoanalysis, from which, it is fair to say, psychoanalysis as a movement and all subsequent developments in this field flowed. The scope of Freud's interests, and of his professional training, was very broad - he always considered himself first and foremost a scientist, endeavouring to extend the compass of human knowledge, and to this end (rather than to the practice of medicine) he enrolled at the medical school at the University of Vienna in 1873. He concentrated initially on biology, doing research in physiology for six years under the great German scientist Ernst Brücke, who was director of the Physiology Laboratory at the University, thereafter specialising in neurology. He received his medical degree in 1881, and having become engaged to be married in 1882, he rather reluctantly took up more secure and financially rewarding work as a doctor at Vienna General Hospital. Shortly after his marriage in 1886 - which was extremely happy, and gave Freud six children, the youngest of whom, Anna, was herself to become a distinguished psychoanalyst - Freud set up a private practice in the treatment of psychological disorders, which gave him much of the clinical material on which he based his theories and his pioneering techniques.In 1885-86 Freud spent the greater part of a year in Paris, where he was deeply impressed by the work of the French neurologist Jean Charcot, who was at that time using hypnotism to treat hysteria and other abnormal mental conditions. When he returned to Vienna, Freud experimented with hypnosis, but found that its beneficial effects did not last. At this point he decided to adopt instead a method suggested by the work of an older Viennese colleague and friend, Josef Breuer, who had discovered that when he encouraged a hysterical patient to talk uninhibitedly about the earliest occurrences of the symptoms, the latter sometimes gradually abated. Working with Breuer, Freud formulated and developed the idea that many neuroses (phobias, hysterical paralyses and pains, some forms of paranoia, etc.) had their origins in deeply traumatic experiences which had occurred in the past life of the patient but which were now forgotten, hidden from consciousness; the treatment was to enable the patient to recall the experience to consciousness, to confront it in a deep way both intellectually and emotionally, and in thus discharging it, to remove the underlying psychological causes of the neurotic symptoms. This technique, and the theory from which it is derived, was given its classical expression in Studies in Hysteria, jointly published by Freud and Breuer in 1895.Shortly thereafter, however, Breuer, found that he could not agree with what he regarded as the excessive emphasis which Freud placed upon the sexual origins and content of neuroses, and the two parted company, with Freud continuing to work alone to develop and refine the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. In 1900, after a protracted period of self-analysis, he published The Interpretation of Dreams, which is generally regarded as his greatest work, and this was followed in 1901 by The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and in 1905 by Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Freud's psychoanalytic theory was initially not well received - when its existence was acknowledged at all it was usually by people who were, as Breuer had foreseen, scandalised by the emphasis placed on sexuality by Freud - and it was not until 1908, when the first International Psychoanalytical Congress was held at Salzburg, that Freud's importance began to be generally recognised. This was greatly facilitated in 1909, when he was invited to give a course of lectures in the United States, which were to form the basis of his 1916 book Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. From this point on Freud's reputation and fame grew enormously, and he continued to write prolifically until his death, producing in all more than twenty volumes of theoretical works and clinical studies. He was also not adverse to critically revising his views, or to making fundamental alterations to his most basic principles when he considered that the scientific evidence demanded it - this was most clearly evidenced by his advancement of a completely new tripartite (id, ego, and super-ego) model of the mind in his 1923 work The Ego and the Id. He was initially greatly heartened by attracting followers of the intellectual calibre of Adler and Jung, and was correspondingly disappointed personally when they both went on to found rival schools of psychoanalysis - thus giving rise to the first two of many schisms in the movement - but he knew that such disagreement over basic principles had been part of the early development of every new science. After a life of remarkable vigour and creative productivity, he died of cancer while exiled in England in 1939.
Back to Table of Contents
2. Backdrop to his Thought
Although a highly original thinker, Freud was also deeply influenced by a number diverse factors which overlapped and interconnected with each other to shape the development of his thought. As indicated above, both Charcot and Breuer had a direct and immediate impact upon him, but some of the other factors, though no less important than these, were of a rather different nature. First of all, Freud himself was very much a Freudian - his father had two sons by a previous marriage, Emmanuel and Philip, and the young Freud often played with Philip's son John, who was his own age. Freud's own self-analysis - which forms the core of his masterpiece The Interpretation of Dreams - originated in the emotional crisis which he suffered on the death of his father, and the series of dreams to which this gave rise. This analysis revealed to him that the love and admiration which he had felt for his father were mixed with very contrasting feelings of shame and hate (such a mixed attitude he termed 'ambivalence'). Particularly revealing was his discovery that he had often fantasised as a youth that his half-brother Philip (who was of an age with his mother) was really his father, and certain other signs convinced him of the deep underlying meaning of this fantasy - that he had wished his real father dead, because he was his rival for his mother's affections. This was to become the personal (though by no means exclusive) basis for his theory of the Oedipus complex.Secondly, and at a more general level, account must be taken of the contemporary scientific climate in which Freud lived and worked. In most respects, the towering scientific figure of nineteenth century science was Charles Darwin, who had published his revolutionary Origin of Species when Freud was four years old. The evolutionary doctrine radically altered the prevailing conception of man - whereas before man had been seen as a being different in nature to the members of the animal kingdom by virtue of his possession of an immortal soul, he was now seen as being part of the natural order, different from non-human animals only in degree of structural complexity. This made it possible and plausible, for the first time, to treat man as an object of scientific investigation, and to conceive of the vast and varied range of human behaviour, and the motivational causes from which it springs, as being amenable in principle to scientific explanation. Much of the creative work done in a whole variety of diverse scientific fields over the next century was to be inspired by, and derive sustenance from, this new world-view, which Freud, with his enormous esteem for science, accepted implicitly.An even more important influence on Freud, however, came from the field of physics. The second 50 years of the nineteenth century saw monumental advances in contemporary physics, which were largely initiated by the formulation of the principle of the conservation of energy by Helmholz. This principle states, in effect, that the total amount of energy in any given physical system is always constant, that energy quanta can be changed but not annihilated, and consequently that when energy is moved from one part of the system it must reappear in another part. The progressive application of this principle led to the monumental discoveries in the fields of thermodynamics, electromagneticism, and nuclear physics which, with their associated technologies, have so comprehensively transformed the contemporary world. As we have seen, when he first came to the University of Vienna Freud worked under the direction of Ernst Brücke, who in 1874 published a book setting out the view that all living organisms, including the human one, are essentially energy-systems to which, no less than to inanimate objects, the principle of the conservation of energy applies. Freud, who had great admiration and respect for Brücke, quickly adopted this new 'dynamic physiology' with enthusiasm. From there it was but a short conceptual step - but one which Freud was the first to take, and on which his claim to fame is largely grounded - to the view that there is such a thing as 'psychic energy', that the human personality is also an energy-system, and that it is the function of psychology to investigate the modifications, transmissions, and conversions of 'psychic energy' within the personality which shape and determine it. This latter conception is the very cornerstone of Freud's psychoanalytic theory.
Back to Table of Contents
3. The Theory of the Unconscious
Freud's theory of the unconscious, then, is highly deterministic, a fact which, given the nature of nineteenth century science, should not be surprising. Freud was arguably the first thinker to apply deterministic principles systematically to the sphere of the mental, and to hold that the broad spectrum of human behaviour is explicable only in terms of the (usually hidden) mental processes or states which determine it. Thus, instead of treating the behaviour of the neurotic as being causally inexplicable - which had been the prevailing approach for centuries - Freud insisted, on the contrary, on treating it as behaviour for which is meaningful to seek an explanation by searching for causes in terms of the mental states of the individual concerned. Hence the significance which he attributed to slips of the tongue or pen, obsessive behaviour, and dreams - all, he held, are determined by hidden causes in the person's mind, and so they reveal in covert form what would otherwise not be known at all. This suggests the view that freedom of the will is, if not completely an illusion, certainly more tightly circumscribed than is commonly believed, for it follows from this that whenever we make a choice we are governed by hidden mental processes of which we are unaware and over which we have no control.The postulate that there are such things as unconscious mental states at all is a direct function of Freud's determinism, his reasoning here being simply that the principle of causality requires that such mental states should exist, for it is evident that there is frequently nothing in the conscious mind which can be said to cause neurotic or other behaviour. An 'unconscious' mental process or event, for Freud, is not one which merely happens to be out of consciousness at a given time, but is rather one which cannot, except through protracted psychoanalysis, be brought to the forefront of consciousness. The postulation of such unconscious mental states entails, of course, that the mind is not, and cannot be, identified with consciousness or that which can be an object of consciousness - to employ a much-used analogy, it is rather structurally akin to an iceberg, the bulk of it lying below the surface, exerting a dynamic and determining influence upon the part which is amenable to direct inspection, the conscious mind.Deeply associated with this view of the mind is Freud's account of the instincts or drives. The instincts, for Freud, are the principal motivating forces in the mental realm, and as such they 'energise' the mind in all of its functions. There are, he held, an indefinitely large number of such instincts, but these can be reduced to a small number of basic ones, which he grouped into two broad generic categories, Eros (the life instinct), which covers all the self-preserving and erotic instincts, and Thanatos (the death instinct), which covers all the instincts towards aggression, self-destruction, and cruelty. Thus it is a mistake to interpret Freud as asserting that all human actions spring from motivations which are sexual in their origin, since those which derive from Thanatos are not sexually motivated - indeed, Thanatos is the irrational urge to destroy the source of all sexual energy in the annihilation of the self. Having said that, it is undeniably true that Freud gave sexual drives an importance and centrality in human life, human actions, and human behaviour which was new (and to many, shocking), arguing as he does both that the sexual drives exist and can be discerned in children from birth (the theory of infantile sexuality), and that sexual energy (libido) is the single most important motivating force in adult life. However, even here a crucial qualification has to be added - Freud effectively redefined the term 'sexuality' here to make it cover any form of pleasure which is or can be derived from the body. Thus his theory of the instincts or drives is essentially that the human being is energised or driven from birth by the desire to acquire and enhance bodily pleasure.
Back to Table of Contents
4. Infantile Sexuality
Freud's theory of infantile sexuality must be seen as an integral part of a broader developmental theory of human personality. This had its origins in, and was a generalisation of, Breuer's earlier discovery that traumatic childhood events could have devastating negative effects upon the adult individual, and took the form of the general thesis that early childhood sexual experiences were the crucial factors in the determination of the adult personality. From his account of the instincts or drives it followed that from the moment of birth the infant is driven in his actions by the desire for bodily/sexual pleasure, where this is seen by Freud in almost mechanical terms as the desire to release mental energy. Initially, infants gain such release, and derive such pleasure, through the act of sucking, and Freud accordingly terms this the 'oral' stage of development. This is followed by a stage in which the locus of pleasure or energy release is the anus, particularly in the act of defecation, and this is accordingly termed the 'anal' stage. Then the young child develops an interest in its sexual organs as a site of pleasure (the 'phallic' stage), and develops a deep sexual attraction for the parent of the opposite sex, and a hatred of the parent of the same sex (the 'Oedipus complex'). This, however, gives rise to (socially derived) feelings of guilt in the child, who recognises that it can never supplant the stronger parent. In the case of a male, it also puts the child at risk, which he perceives - if he persists in pursuing the sexual attraction for his mother, he may be harmed by the father; specifically, he comes to fear that he may be castrated. This is termed 'castration anxiety'. Both the attraction for the mother and the hatred are usually repressed, and the child usually resolves the conflict of the Oedipus complex by coming to identify with the parent of the same sex. This happens at the age of five, whereupon the child enters a 'latency' period, in which sexual motivations become much less pronounced. This lasts until puberty, when mature genital development begins, and the pleasure drive refocuses around the genital area.This, Freud believed, is the sequence or progression implicit in normal human development, and it is to be observed that at the infant level the instinctual attempts to satisfy the pleasure drive are frequently checked by parental control and social coercion. The developmental process, then, is for the child essentially a movement through a series of conflicts, the successful resolution of which is crucial to adult mental health. Many mental illnesses, particularly hysteria, Freud held, can be traced back to unresolved conflicts experienced at this stage, or to events which otherwise disrupt the normal pattern of infantile development. For example, homosexuality is seen by some Freudians as resulting from a failure to resolve the conflicts of the Oedipus complex, particularly a failure to identify with the parent of the same sex; the obsessive concern with washing and personal hygiene which characterises the behaviour of some neurotics is seen as resulting from unresolved conflicts/repressions occurring at the anal stage.
Back to Table of Contents
5. Neuroses and The Structure of the Mind
Freud's account of the unconscious, and the psychoanalytic therapy associated with it, is best illustrated by his famous tripartite model of the structure of the mind or personality (although, as we have seen, he did not formulate this until 1923), which has many points of similarity with the account of the mind offered by Plato over 2,000 years earlier. The theory is termed 'tripartite' simply because, again like Plato, Freud distinguished three structural elements within the mind, which he called id, ego, and super-ego. The id is that part of the mind in which are situated the instinctual sexual drives which require satisfaction; the super-ego is that part which contains the 'conscience', viz. socially-acquired control mechanisms (usually imparted in the first instance by the parents) which have been internalised; while the ego is the conscious self created by the dynamic tensions and interactions between the id and the super-ego, which has the task of reconciling their conflicting demands with the requirements of external reality. It is in this sense that the mind is to be understood as a dynamic energy-system. All objects of consciousness reside in the ego, the contents of the id belong permanently to the unconscious mind, while the super-ego is an unconscious screening-mechanism which seeks to limit the blind pleasure-seeking drives of the id by the imposition of restrictive rules. There is some debate as to how literally Freud intended this model to be taken (he appears to have taken it extremely literally himself), but it is important to note that what is being offered here is indeed a theoretical model, rather than a description of an observable object, which functions as a frame of reference to explain the link between early childhood experience and the mature adult (normal or dysfunctional) personality.Freud also followed Plato in his account of the nature of mental health or psychological well-being, which he saw as the establishment of a harmonious relationship between the three elements which constitute the mind. If the external world offers no scope for the satisfaction of the id's pleasure drives, or, more commonly, if the satisfaction of some or all of these drives would indeed transgress the moral sanctions laid down by the super-ego, then an inner conflict occurs in the mind between its constituent parts or elements - failure to resolve this can lead to later neurosis. A key concept introduced here by Freud is that the mind possesses a number of 'defence mechanisms' to attempt to prevent conflicts from becoming too acute, such as repression (pushing conflicts back into the unconscious), sublimation (channelling the sexual drives into the achievement socially acceptable goals, in art, science, poetry, etc.), fixation (the failure to progress beyond one of the developmental stages), and regression (a return to the behaviour characteristic of one of the stages).Of these, repression is the most important, and Freud's account of this is as follows: when a person experiences an instinctual impulse to behave in a manner which the super-ego deems to be reprehensible (e.g. a strong erotic impulse on the part of the child towards the parent of the opposite sex), then it is possible for the mind push it away, to repress it into the unconscious. Repression is thus one of the central defence mechanisms by which the ego seeks to avoid internal conflict and pain, and to reconcile reality with the demands of both id and super-ego. As such it is completely normal and an integral part of the developmental process through which every child must pass on the way to adulthood. However, the repressed instinctual drive, as an energy-form, is not and cannot be destroyed when it is repressed - it continues to exist intact in the unconscious, from where it exerts a determining force upon the conscious mind, and can give rise to the dysfunctional behaviour characteristic of neuroses. This is one reason why dreams and slips of the tongue possess such a strong symbolic significance for Freud, and why their analysis became such a key part of his treatment - they represent instances in which the vigilance of the super-ego is relaxed, and when the repressed drives are accordingly able to present themselves to the conscious mind in a transmuted form. The difference between 'normal' repression and the kind of repression which results in neurotic illness is one of degree, not of kind - the compulsive behaviour of the neurotic is itself a behavioural manifestation of an instinctual drive repressed in childhood. Such behavioural symptoms are highly irrational (and may even be perceived as such by the neurotic), but are completely beyond the control of the subject, because they are driven by the now unconscious repressed impulse. Freud positioned the key repressions, for both the normal individual and the neurotic, in the first five years of childhood, and, of course, held them to be essentially sexual in nature - as we have seen, repressions which disrupt the process of infantile sexual development in particular, he held, lead to a strong tendency to later neurosis in adult life. The task of psychoanalysis as a therapy is to find the repressions which are causing the neurotic symptoms by delving into the unconscious mind of the subject, and by bringing them to the forefront of consciousness, to allow the ego to confront them directly and thus to discharge them.
Back to Table of Contents
6. Psychoanalysis as a Therapy
Freud's account of the sexual genesis and nature of neuroses led him naturally to develop a clinical treatment for treating such disorders. This has become so influential today that when people speak of 'psychoanalysis' they frequently refer exclusively to the clinical treatment; however, the term properly designates both the clinical treatment and the theory which underlies it. The aim of the method may be stated simply in general terms - to re-establish a harmonious relationship between the three elements which constitute the mind by excavating and resolving unconscious repressed conflicts. The actual method of treatment pioneered by Freud grew out of Breuer's earlier discovery, mentioned above, that when a hysterical patient was encouraged to talk freely about the earliest occurrences of her symptoms and fantasies, the symptoms began to abate, and were eliminated entirely she was induced to remember the initial trauma which occasioned them. Turning away from his early attempts to explore the unconscious through hypnosis, Freud further developed this 'talking cure', acting on the assumption that the repressed conflicts were buried in the deepest recesses of the unconscious mind. Accordingly, he got his patients to relax in a position in which they were deprived of strong sensory stimulation, even of keen awareness of the presence of the analyst (hence the famous use of the couch, with the analyst virtually silent and out of sight), and then encouraged them to speak freely and uninhibitedly, preferably without forethought, in the belief that he could thereby discern the unconscious forces lying behind what was said. This is the method of 'free-association', the rationale for which is similar to that involved in the analysis of dreams - in both cases the super-ego is to some degree disarmed, its efficiency as a screening mechanism is moderated, and material is allowed to filter through to the conscious ego which would otherwise be completely repressed. The process is necessarily a difficult and protracted one, and it is therefore one of the primary tasks of the analyst to help the patient to recognise, and to overcome, his own natural resistances, which may exhibit themselves as hostility towards the analyst. However, Freud always took the occurrence of resistance as a sign that he was on the right track in his assessment of the underlying unconscious causes of the patient's condition. The patient's dreams are of particular interest, for reasons which we have already partly seen. Taking it that the super-ego functioned less effectively in sleep, as in free association, Freud made a distinction between the manifest content of a dream (what the dream appeared to be about on the surface) and its latent content (the unconscious, repressed desires or wishes which are its real object). The correct interpretation of the patient's dreams, slips of tongue, free-associations, and responses to carefully selected questions leads the analyst to a point where he can locate the unconscious repressions producing the neurotic symptoms, invariably in terms of the patient's passage through the sexual developmental process, the manner in which the conflicts implicit in this process were handled, and the libidinal content of his family relationships. To effect a cure, he must facilitate the patient himself to become conscious of unresolved conflicts buried in the deep recesses of the unconscious mind, and to confront and engage with them directly.In this sense, then, the object of psychoanalytic treatment may be said to be a form of self-understanding - once this is acquired, it is largely up to the patient, in consultation with the analyst, to determine how he shall handle this newly-acquired understanding of the unconscious forces which motivate him. One possibility, mentioned above, is the channelling of the sexual energy into the achievement of social, artistic or scientific goals - this is sublimation, which Freud saw as the motivating force behind most great cultural achievements. Another would be the conscious, rational control of the formerly repressed drives - this is suppression. Yet another would be the decision that it is the super-ego, and the social constraints which inform it, which are at fault, in which case the patient may decide in the end to satisfy the instinctual drives. But in all cases the cure is effected essentially by a kind of catharsis or purgation - a release of the pent-up psychic energy, the constriction of which was the basic cause of the neurotic illness.
Critical Evaluation of Freud
It should be evident from the foregoing why psychoanalysis in general, and Freud in particular, have exerted such a strong influence upon the popular imagination in the Western World over the past 90 years or so, and why both the theory and practice of psychoanalysis should remain the object of a great deal of controversy. In fact, the controversy which exists in relation to Freud is more heated and multi-faceted than that relating to virtually any other recent thinker (a possible exception being Darwin), with criticisms ranging from the contention that Freud's theory was generated by logical confusions arising out of his alleged long-standing addiction to cocaine (Cf. Thornton, E.M. Freud and Cocaine: The Freudian Fallacy) to the view that he made an important, but grim, empirical discovery, which he knowingly suppressed in favour of the theory of the unconscious, knowing that the latter would be more acceptable socially (Cf. Masson, J. The Assault on Truth).It should be emphasised here that Freud's genius is not (generally) in doubt, but the precise nature of his achievement is still the source of much debate. The supporters and followers of Freud (and Jung and Adler) are noted for the zeal and enthusiasm with which they espouse the doctrines of the master, to the point where many of the detractors of the movement see it as a kind of secular religion, requiring as it does an initiation process in which the aspiring psychoanalyst must himself first be analysed. In this way, it is often alleged, the unquestioning acceptance of a set of ideological principles becomes a necessary precondition for acceptance into the movement - as with most religious groupings. In reply, the exponents and supporters of psychoanalysis frequently analyse the motivations of their critics in terms of the very theory which those critics reject. And so the debate goes on.Here we will confine ourselves to: (a) the evaluation of Freud's claim that his theory is a scientific one, (b) the question of the theory's coherence, (c) the dispute concerning what, if anything, Freud really discovered, and (d) the question of the efficacy of psychoanalysis as a treatment for neurotic illnesses.
Back to Table of Contents
a. The Claim to Scientific Status
This is a crucially important issue, since Freud not alone saw himself first and foremost as a pioneering scientist, but repeatedly asserted that the significance of psychoanalysis is that it is a new science, incorporating a new scientific method of dealing with the mind and with mental illness. And there can be no doubt but that this has been the chief attraction of the theory for most of its advocates since then - on the face of it, it has the appearance of being, not just a scientific theory, but an enormously strong scientific theory, with the capacity to accommodate, and explain, every possible form of human behaviour. However, it is precisely this latter which, for many commentators, undermines its claim to scientific status. On the question of what makes a theory a genuinely scientific one, Karl Popper's criterion of demarcation, as it is called, has now gained very general acceptance: viz. that every genuine scientific theory must be testable, and therefore falsifiable, at least in principle - in other words, if a theory is incompatible with possible observations it is scientific; conversely, a theory which is compatible with all possible observations is unscientific (Cf. Popper, K. The Logic of Scientific Discovery). Thus the principle of the conservation of energy, which influenced Freud so greatly, is a scientific one, because it is falsifiable - the discovery of a physical system in which the total amount of energy was not constant would conclusively show it to be false. And it is argued that nothing of the kind is possible with respect to Freud's theory - if, in relation to it, the question is asked: 'What does this theory imply which, if false, would show the whole theory to be false?', the answer is 'nothing', the theory is compatible with every possible state of affairs - it cannot be falsified by anything, since it purports to explain everything. Hence it is concluded that the theory is not scientific, and while this does not, as some critics claim, rob it of all value, it certainly diminishes its intellectual status, as that was and is projected by its strongest advocates, including Freud himself.
Back to Table of Contents
b. The Coherence of the Theory
A related (but perhaps more serious) point is that the coherence of the theory is, at the very least, questionable. What is attractive about the theory, even to the layman, is that it seems to offer us long sought-after, and much needed, causal explanations for conditions which have been a source of a great deal of human misery. The thesis that neuroses are caused by unconscious conflicts buried deep in the unconscious mind in the form of repressed libidinal energy would appear to offer us, at last, an insight in the causal mechanism underlying these abnormal psychological conditions as they are expressed in human behaviour, and further show us how they are related to the psychology of the 'normal' person. However, even this is questionable, and is a matter of much dispute. In general, when it is said that an event X causes another event Y to happen, both X and Y are, and must be, independently identifiable. It is true that this is not always a simple process, as in science causes are sometimes unobservable (sub-atomic particles, radio and electromagnetic waves, molecular structures, etc.), but in these latter cases there are clear 'correspondence rules' connecting the unobservable causes with observable phenomena. The difficulty with Freud's theory is that it offers us entities (repressed unconscious conflicts, for example) which are said to be the unobservable causes of certain forms of behaviour, but there are no correspondence rules for these alleged causes - they cannot be identified except by reference to the behaviour which they are said to cause (i.e. the analyst does not demonstratively assert: 'This is the unconscious cause, and that is its behavioural effect'; he asserts: 'This is the behaviour, therefore its unconscious cause must exist'). And this does raise serious doubts as to whether Freud's theory offers us genuine causal explanations at all.
Back to Table of Contents
c. Freud's Discovery?
At a less theoretical, but no less critical level, it has been alleged that Freud did make a genuine discovery, which he was initially prepared to reveal to the world, but the response which he encountered was so ferociously hostile that he masked his findings, and offered his theory of the unconscious in its place (Cf. Masson, J. The Assault on Truth). What he discovered, it has been suggested, was the extreme prevalence of child sexual abuse, particularly of young girls (the vast majority of hysterics are women), even in respectable nineteenth century Vienna. He did in fact offer an early 'seduction theory' of neuroses, which met with fierce animosity, and which he quickly withdrew, and replaced with theory of the unconscious. As one contemporary Freudian commentator explains it, Freud's change of mind on this issue came about as follows:
Questions concerning the traumas suffered by his patients seemed to reveal [to Freud] that Viennese girls were extraordinarily often seduced in very early childhood by older male relatives; doubt about the actual occurrence of these seductions was soon replaced by certainty that it was descriptions about childhood fantasy that were being offered. (MacIntyre).
In this way, it is suggested, the theory of the Oedipus complex was generated.This statement begs a number of questions, not least, what does the expression 'extraordinarily often' mean in this context? By what standard is this being judged? The answer can only be: by the standard of what we generally believe - or would like to believe - to be the case. But the contention of some of Freud's critics here is that his patients were not recalling childhood fantasies, but traumatic events in their childhood which were all too real, and that he had stumbled upon, and knowingly suppressed, the fact that the level of child sexual abuse in society is much higher than is generally believed or acknowledged. If this contention is true - and it must at least be contemplated seriously - then this is undoubtedly the most serious criticism that Freud and his followers have to face.Further, this particular point has taken on an added, and even more controversial significance in recent years with the willingness of some contemporary Freudians to combine the theory of repression with an acceptance of the wide-spread social prevalence of child sexual abuse. The result has been that, in the United States and Britain in particular, many thousands of people have emerged from analysis with 'recovered memories' of alleged childhood sexual abuse by their parents, memories which, it is suggested, were hitherto repressed. On this basis, parents have been accused and repudiated, and whole families divided or destroyed. Unsurprisingly, this in turn has given rise to a systematic backlash, in which organisations of accused parents, seeing themselves as the true victims of what they term 'False Memory Syndrome', have denounced all such memory-claims as falsidical, the direct product of a belief in what they see as the myth of repression. (Cf. Pendergast, M. Victims of Memory). In this way, the concept of repression, which Freud himself termed 'the foundation stone upon which the structure of psychoanalysis rests', has come in for more widespread critical scrutiny than ever before. Here, the fact that, unlike some of his contemporary followers, Freud did not himself ever countenance the extension of the concept of repression to cover actual child sexual abuse, and the fact that we are not necessarily forced to choose between the views that all 'recovered memories' are either veridical or falsidical, are, perhaps understandably, frequently lost sight of in the extreme heat generated by this debate.
Back to Table of Contents

Back to Table of Contents
d. The Efficacy of Psychoanalytic Therapy
It does not follow that, if Freud's theory is unscientific, or even false, it cannot provide us with a basis for the beneficial treatment of neurotic illness, because the relationship between a theory's truth or falsity and its utility-value is far from being an isomorphic one. (The theory upon which the use of leeches to bleed patients in eighteenth century medicine was based was quite spurious, but patients did sometimes actually benefit from the treatment!). And of course even a true theory might be badly applied, leading to negative consequences. One of the problems here is that it is difficult to specify what counts as a cure for a neurotic illness, as distinct, say, from a mere alleviation of the symptoms. In general, however, the efficiency of a given method of treatment is usually clinically measured by means of a 'control group' - the proportion of patients suffering from a given disorder who are cured by treatment X is measured by comparison with those cured by other treatments, or by no treatment at all. Such clinical tests as have been conducted indicate that the proportion of patients who have benefited from psychoanalytic treatment does not diverge significantly from the proportion who recover spontaneously or as a result of other forms of intervention in the control groups used. So the question of the therapeutic effectiveness of psychoanalysis remains an open and controversial one.
Back to Table of Contents
7. Suggestions for Further Reading
WORKS BY FREUD:The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Ed. J. Strachey with Anna Freud), 24 vols . London: 1953-1964.WORKS ON FREUD:Bettlelheim, B. Freud and Man's Soul. Knopf, 1982.Cavell, M. The Psychoanalytic Mind: From Freud to Philosophy. Harvard University Press, 1993.Chessick, R.D. Freud Teaches Psychotherapy. Hackett Publishing Company, 1980.Cioffi, F. (ed.) Freud: Modern Judgements. Macmillan, 1973.Dilman, I. Freud and the Mind. Blackwell, 1984.Edelson, M. Hypothesis and Evidence in Psychoanalysis. University of Chicago Press, 1984.Fancher, R. Psychoanalytic Psychology: The Development of Freud's Thought. Norton, 1973.Farrell, B.A. The Standing of Psychoanalysis. Oxford University Press, 1981.Freeman, L. The Story of Anna O. - The Woman who led Freud to Psychoanalysis. Paragon House, 1990.Frosh, S. The Politics of Psychoanalysis: An Introduction to Freudian and Post-Freudian Theory. Yale University Press, 1987.Grünbaum, A. The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique. University of California Press, 1984.Hook, S. (ed.) Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method, and Philosophy. New York University Press, 1959.Jones, E. Sigmund Freud: Life and Work (3 vols), Basic Books, 1953-1957.Klein, G.S. Psychoanalytic Theory: An Exploration of Essentials. International Universities Press, 1976.MacIntyre, A.C. The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958.Freud. Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 3 (ed. P. Edwards). Collier Macmillan, 1967. Mackay, N. Motivation and Explanation: An Essay on Freud's Philosophy of Science. International Universities Press, 1989.Masson, J. The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory. Faber & Faber, 1984.Popper, K. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Hutchinson, 1959.Pendergast, M. Victims of Memory. HarperCollins, 1997.Reiser, M. Mind, Brain, Body: Towards a Convergence of Psychoanalysis and Neurobiology. Basic Books, 1984.Ricoeur, P. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation (trans. D. Savage). Yale University Press, 1970.Schafer, R. A New Language for Psychoanalysis. Yale University Press, 1976.Sherwood, M. The Logic of Explanation in Psychoanalysis. Academic Press, 1969.Stewart, W. Psychoanalysis: The First Ten Years, 1888-1898. Macmillan, 1969.Sulloway, F. Freud, Biologist of the Mind. Basic Books, 1979.Thornton, E.M. Freud and Cocaine: The Freudian Fallacy. Blond & Briggs, 1983.Wallace, E.R. Freud and Anthropology: A History and Reappraisal. International Universities Press, 1983.Whyte, L.L. The Unconscious Before Freud. Basic Books, 1960.Wollheim, R. Freud. Fontana, 1971.-------- (ed.) Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays. Anchor, 1974.-------- & Hopkins, J. (eds.) Philosophical Essays on Freud. Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Other Internet Resources
Vienna, Austria: Information about Sigmund Freud.
From the Freud Archives: The latest information on the Rescheduled Freud Show, direct from the Library of Congress
The Sigmund Freud Museum
Freud as Collector
Freud Pilot Project at the Center for Electronic Text in the Humanities.
Sigmund Freud and the Freud Archives
Marc Fonda's Freud Page

Back to Table of Contents

Literature article: The discourse of Whiteness

This artikel is taken from the Journal of American Popular Culture. This may help students of Literature for their study.

The Discourse of Whiteness: Chinese-American History, Pearl S. Buck, and The Good Earth

Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900 - present), Spring 2002, Volume 1, Issue 1

http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/spring_2002/spencer.htmStephen SpencerWilmington College

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison charges that "silence and evasion have historically ruled literary discourse" concerning race (9). Twentieth century literary discourse, rooted in linguistic and textual criticism, according to Henry Louis Gates, "rendered implicit" the idea of race (47). Gates suggests that as literary critics identified the "master" texts of the western tradition, race was overshadowed by discussions of form, structure, and language. Building on the work of Morrison and Gates, many critics have taken on the task of analyzing the implicit nature of race, and more recently, the discourse of whiteness in literature.
Even though whiteness, like all racial categories, is not an objective, self-evident entity, it is privileged in a system in which whiteness is constructed as the standard or norm against which all other racial categories are measured. Despite the subjectivity of racial categorization, non-whites are, as Derrick Bell argues, "marked with the caste of color in a society still determinedly white" (75). Thus, being white is to be non-raced, normal, or neutral, and discussions of race have traditionally applied only to those who are perceived as other than white. Toni Morrison has called scholars to the task of creating a critical reading practice that foregrounds the construction and representation of whiteness in fiction and allows readers to recognize literature's complicity with the discourse of white supremacy. The reading of whiteness into texts that are not explicitly about race is essential if we are to challenge whiteness as racial norm. Pearl S. Buck's novel, The Good Earth, provides an example of a popular text that, while not overtly concerned with racial construction, contains a subtle discourse that must be read critically from the perspective that Morrison suggests. An examination of the position of Chinese immigrants in the United States in the novel's initial publication and Buck's own racial politics provide crucial elements in an analysis of the subtle racial discourse in The Good Earth.
The Good Earth's immediate and continuing popularity is undeniable. It was the best selling American novel of 1931 and 1932, won the Pulitzer Prize and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has sold millions of copies in the United States and around the world. Released in 1937, the Hollywood version was a popular and critical success, and Luise Ranier, a white actress, won an Academy Award for her portrayal of O-lan, a Chinese woman. Why was a novel about Chinese people so popular at a time when isolationism and entrenched racism dominated American culture? As I have argued in another essay about the literary history and popular appeal of The Good Earth, the novel certainly reflects the values of middle-class and working-class Americans in the decade it was first published (Spencer). It reflects their valuing of the land and nostalgia for rural life in a time of expanding industrialism and urbanization. The novel's representation of these values, however, does not explain why a novel about non-white people would meet such popular success with white audiences. The reasons for the novel's popularity and supposed universal appeal may be found in an examination of the position that Chinese immigrants had attained in American culture by the time of the novel's publication.
Historically, racism was directed more overtly toward Chinese immigrants than any other immigrant group in the United States. In 1852, soon after the first Chinese immigrants arrived, the California legislature passed a tax law requiring all foreign miners who refused to become citizens to pay three dollars a month. All Chinese miners were forced to pay the tax because a 1790 federal law had reserved naturalized citizenship for "white" people. Anti-Chinese violence and mass demonstrations against Chinese labor eventually prompted Congress to enact the first Exclusion Act against the Chinese in 1882. Subsequent legislation in 1888 and 1892 excluded almost all Chinese and was defended on the grounds that the Chinese simply could not assimilate into American culture.
Although other immigrant groups faced discrimination, many of these groups would eventually assimilate into American society. For example, in the latter decades of the 1800s, Irish workers were exploited as laborers and were positioned to compete with both Chinese and black labor. Historian David Roediger traces the process by which Irish workers defined themselves as white in order to obtain certain privileges as white that they could not obtain as Irish. In attacking blacks and Chinese, politically weak and under-represented groups, Irish workers secured their position and identified with dominant white culture.
The desire of immigrants to be classified as whites intensified as more immigrants from Eastern Europe arrived in greater numbers, and as second and third generations of immigrants assimilated into American culture. The descendants of the first generation of Irish immigrants, for example, were better educated and enjoyed better occupational mobility than their parents. President Abbot Lawrence of Harvard University exemplifies the readiness of dominant culture to accept the Irish as American on the basis of their whiteness. The theory of "universal political equality," Lawrence said, "should not be applied to 'tribal Indians,' 'Chinese,' or 'negroes,' but only to whites who can assimilate rapidly" (qtd. in Takaki 163). The Chinese were among the groups of people in America who were denied the opportunity to assimilate.
Post-WWI American society continued to promote assimilation, becoming increasingly patriotic and isolationist. The influx of Italians, Jews, Poles, Serbians, Hungarians, and Greeks initially met with the same racist response that the Irish and Chinese had already experienced. Whites perceived these immigrants as a threat to the purity of the Teutonic races of northern and western Europe. To show their desire to assimilate into the dominant culture, immigrant organizations and the press made it clear they did not sympathize with revolutionaries, violence, or radicalism. In mass meetings, immigrants pledged their allegiance to American institutions, and foreign-born Congressmen and senators were usually conservative (Takaki 296). Instead of blaming urban problems on economic and class factors, politicians and labor leaders found a scapegoat in non-white groups like the Chinese, who, they believed, would never be able to assimilate into dominant white culture.
Many immigrant groups eventually grew to levels that politicians could not ignore. The use of new terms, such as "Nordics" or the "American Race," used by Theodore Roosevelt in his campaigns, described a new American race that would include many European immigrant groups in ways "Anglo-Saxon" had not. Chinese immigrants, however, whose numbers had been severely limited by strict immigration laws, simply never reached a critical mass that would allow them to garner political power in the ways other immigrant groups, such as the Irish, could. After the initial immigration of Chinese in the late 1800's, as a group they would not pose a severe threat to white labor, especially in the North and East, as would blacks in the North and South and Mexican immigrants in the West. Most Chinese immigrants were men who had migrated to the "gold mountain" of America in hopes of making money and returning to China as wealthy men or bringing their wives and families eventually to America. However, the severe immigration laws almost completely stopped further immigration, trapping many Chinese men alone and poor in the United States. Racism and anti-miscegenation laws made the prospects of marrying a white woman slim. By 1900, violence against Chinese workers had pushed them out of manufacturing, agriculture, and railroad jobs. As a result, many Chinese were forced to become self-employed. The laundry-business provided a ready profession because it was relatively cheap to start up, and it was a menial task no one else was willing to do. Although most of the Chinese living in the United States were men who would have never engaged in what was considered a woman's task in China, these men were left few other options.
By the time of The Good Earth's publication the Chinese were no longer perceived as a threat to white labor and were even poised to become objects of sympathy when the United States was drawn into the war between China and Japan in the 1930's. In 1931, Japan attacked Manchuria and an uneasy peace between China and Japan followed, lasting until 1937 when war broke out between the two countries. The U.S. ship, the Panay, was attacked by the Japanese in 1937, and the incident was dramatized in newsreels and Life magazine. The great majority of Americans knew about China and the Chinese people only through international dramas, such as the Boxer Rebellion, or through American Chinatowns that would become exotic tourist attractions in the first decades of the twentieth century. At the turn of the century, when the population of the U.S. surpassed seventy million, the total number of Chinese was fewer than 400,000, and those were clustered in large cities on the east and west coasts. Chinatowns became known as places of mystery and unspeakable vice. Stories of opium dens, prostitution, and secret societies fascinated the American mind. To most Americans in the thirties, difference was still a sign of deviance, and western cultural practices were considered to be the norm.
Buck, on the other hand, presented characters that were hardworking, ordinary farming people struggling against famine, weather, natural disaster, poverty, war, and corruption. She was able to present a sympathetic portrait of a Chinese farmer and his family that rang true to the American experience of rural existence, while in no way threatening white supremacy. She used the details of daily life to present her characters, the landscape, the houses, the village, the food, the tools, the clothes, and the rituals of death and marriage. Readers could identify with the daily lives of these characters. Soon after initial publication, The Good Earth was praised for its universal appeal and its realistic portrayal of Chinese characters. For example, The New York Times Book Review from 1931 says, "One tends to forget, after the first few pages, that the persons of the story are Chinese and hence foreign." Buck, the review says, portrays "a China in which, happily, there is no hint of mystery or exoticism." Buck biographer Peter Conn continues to echo such sentiment when he praises the novel's portrayal of Chinese characters as "ordinary, believable human beings rather than as cartoon 'Orientals'" ("Introduction" xi). Thus, the relatively small numbers of Chinese immigrants, coupled with the perception of Japan as a fascist nation attacking a helpless China, aided in preparing an audience for The Good Earth that did not perceive the Chinese as a threat, but as a people distantly exotic, submissive, and hard-working, struggling against the threat of poverty, natural disaster, and Japanese fascism.
Certainly Buck's own experiences in China and her social involvement suggest that she was, indeed, sympathetic to the Chinese. Although critics have rarely used race as a frame of reference for discussing The Good Earth, they have noted Buck's concern for tolerance and her own multi-cultural past. The "current academic enthusiasm for the multicultural and the interdisciplinary," as Jane Rabb writes, "should revive interest in the best works of Buck, who is nothing if not multicultural and interdisciplinary" (109). In her public life, Buck did much to promote civil rights. She served as a trustee of Howard University, received an honorary degree from Howard in 1942, spoke about the issue of black patriotism in the early days of World War II, opposed British colonialism, became close friends with Paul and Eslanda Robeson, coauthored American Argument, a dialogue on racism, with Eslanda Robeson, and attracted the attention of J. Edgar Hoover for her civil rights work.
Buck's expressed ideas on race and civil rights reflected the more enlightened cultural theories of the 1930s. As a result of anthropologists like Frank Boas, Americans were gradually accepting non-racialized explanations of cultural difference. In the ihirties, race as an affirming theory of superiority and inferiority would be relegated to the back alleys of American culture, no longer supported by science. In a review of Jacques Barzun's Race: A Study in Modern Superstition (1937), Buck criticized America's "'absurd modern belief in the inherent superiority of one race over another'" (qtd. in Conn, Pearl S. Buck 185). She pointed out that race could not be defined in any scientific or rational way, arguing instead that all cultures are "hybrids and amalgams" (Conn, Pearl S. Buck 185). From that point on, Conn claims, the opposition to racial hierarchies would become the central theme of Buck's work. In the forties, Buck lead a national campaign against the Chinese exclusion laws and spoke out against the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. She was active in the civil rights movement from the moment she returned to the United States, contributing regularly to Crisis, published by the NAACP, and Opportunity, published by the National Urban League. In a rally at Madison Square Garden in 1942, Walter White, long-time leader of the NAACP, said Eleanor Roosevelt and Pearl Buck were the only two white Americans who understood the reality of black life (Conn, Pearl S. Buck xvi).
In a conversation after Buck gave a speech to a group in Harlem in 1932, Buck traced her attitudes about race to her childhood experiences living as a minority in China. The racial attitudes of Buck's father, Absalom, had also been shaped by his own childhood. Absalom's family owned at least two slaves and did not seem troubled by the moral dilemma this presented. His family taught him that racial hierarchy is natural, an attitude that would explain his sense of superiority over Chinese people, whom he was determined to save by leading them to a higher way. Buck spent the first half of her life as a missionary child and minority person, an experience, Conn asserts in his biography, that had much to do with her lifelong passion for racial understanding. In China, Buck had been both insider and outsider in two different cultures. Conn compares her position as similar to the "two-ness" of African-Americans as described by Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk. Buck, Conn argues, was one of the few white Americans to experience the double-consciousness, the sense of isolation and presumed inferiority that African-Americans experienced in American society. One of Conn's central assertions is that Buck's racial position in China strongly influenced her later commitment to racial equality and pluralism.
In her work, Buck often openly addressed racial and sexual equality as well. The Townsman (1945), according to Conn, "addresses America's racial prejudices, which Pearl Buck found even more retrograde and destructive than the nation's obsolete attitudes toward women" ("Pearl S. Buck" 115). The same year as the novel's publication, Buck wrote that the United States was tearing itself in two over the issue of race (Conn, "Pearl S. Buck" 116). Obviously, she felt it was important to write a novel with strong black characters like the Parrys, the only black family in Median, the small town of The Townsman. Buck also expressed her wish to the producers of the film version of The Good Earth that all Chinese be cast, but the two lead characters, Wang Lung and O-lan, ended up being played by white actors (Hoban 130).
For many reviewers and critics, the realism of The Good Earth contributed to its universal appeal, making discussions of race irrelevant. Paul Doyle writes, "Later she [Buck] came to realize, however, that these people were not just Chinese; they were representative of farming people the world over. They were universal in their struggles, in their joys, in their disappointments" (37). "Never by the slightest word or turn of phrase," Phyllis Bentley observes, "does Mrs. Buck call our attention to the difference of these customs from our own" (793). Not everyone, however, recognized the universality of the novel. According to Helen Snow:
No one was more astonished by the fantastic popularity of The Good Earth than its author. Neither the foreigners nor the Chinese liked it. The missionaries felt it lost them "face"; so did the nationalist Chinese, chiefly because of its "pornography." Yet for 40 years, the picture of China that was imprinted on the Western mind was the one Mrs. Buck had drawn. She must have got hold of a piece of the truth somewhere, I thought, if not about China then about humankind in a primitive setting. (28)
Despite the limited criticism of the novel, readers in the western world have overwhelmingly considered the novel realistic in its portrayal of Chinese culture. Given Buck's political involvement and sympathetic portrayal of Chinese life, no one has been willing to brand The Good Earth as a racist novel.
However, critics have also not addressed the subtle ways in which Buck's novel ultimately constructs the Chinese as a racial other in opposition to whiteness. Unlike "A Chinese Woman Speaks," with its normalization of Asian images, The Good Earth reveals hidden assumptions about race critics have failed to consider. The few specific references to dark and light skin and Wang Lung's two brief encounters with white characters reveal the ways in which race often remains a hidden discourse within the study of literature. Looking at his wife early in the novel, Wang Lung sees no "beauty of any kind in her face," but rather "a brown, common, patient face" with no "pock-marks on her dark skin" (19). After the birth of their first child, the narrator describes O-lan and the child as "brown as the soil and they sat there like figures made of earth" (41). Later when Wang Lung decides to give two pearls, that O-lan had kept to give to her first daughter, to a prostitute in the town, Wang Lung angrily says to O-lan, "Why should that one wear pearls with her skin as black as the earth? Pearls are for fair women!" (188). The narrator describes the second daughter of Wang Lung as "an exceedingly pretty girl," with skin "fair and pale as almond flowers and she had a little low nose and thin red lips" (281). These descriptions privilege light skin, associating dark skin with rural life, poverty, and labor, and, in short, equating dark skin with lower-class status.
This association of skin tone and class is further highlighted in Wang Lung's two encounters with white foreigners. In his first encounter in the city, Wang Lung picks up a passenger, "a creature the like of whom he had never seen before" (108). He does not know if the person is male or female, but sees that it is tall and well-dressed. The foreigner, who is a white woman from America, pays him double his usual fair. Curiously, this encounter prompts Wang Lung to conclude that "after all people of black hair and black eyes are one sort and people of light hair and light eyes of another sort" (109). Later that evening O-lan tells him that she always begs of these white foreigners because they give silver instead of copper. The narrator says that this experience teaches Wang Lung "that he belonged to his own kind, who have black hair and black eyes" (110). In his second encounter with a white person, Wang Lung gives a ride to a man with "eyes as blue as ice and a hairy face" (125). The man gives Wang Lung a paper with a picture of a man, "white-skinned, who hung upon a crosspiece of wood" (125). This picture means nothing to Wang Lung, and his father says this must have been an evil man to have been punished this way. Soon after this second encounter, a man gives Wang Lung a picture "of blood and death," but the man pictured was "a man like Wang Lung himself, a common fellow, yellow and slight and black of hair and eye and clothed in ragged blue garments" (126). These examples suggest that light skin is associated with urban life, wealth, and upper-class status.
These references to skin tone that seem to privilege and set apart whiteness do not fit with Buck's commitment to racial equality and understanding, critical claims of the novel's universality, and the book's resonance with American audiences in the Great Depression. The lack of critical attention to race in The Good Earth reveals the ways in which whiteness is accepted as the universal, the norm, while remaining an absence. "Whiteness," according to Ruth Frankenburg in Displacing Whiteness, "makes itself invisible precisely by asserting its normalcy, its transparency, in contrast with the marking of others on which its transparency depends" (6). This invisibility, according to Ann Louise Keating, gives whiteness "a rarely acknowledged position of dominance and power" (905). The privileged position of whiteness is relational, however, maintaining its meaning only in the context of social and cultural groups in relation to each other. In a hierarchical system in which whiteness remains securely at the top, all non-white groups are racialized and set in opposition to whiteness as the sine qua non of American life.
Before Wang Lung's encounter with white foreigners, light skin in the novel is already associated with beauty and higher class status. His actual encounters with the white foreigners reveal them as both rich and generous, unlike the rich Chinese in the novel, who are rich and greedy. Wang Lung, who had never seen a white foreigner before, automatically assumes the opposition of dark and light skinned people. He accepts that these different people are and should remain separate, sticking to their own kind in a sense. These differences are assumed to be innate and essential and are further highlighted in Wang Lung's and his father's response to the second picture. In not recognizing the figure of Christ, the Chinese are set in opposition to white Anglo and European cultures because they do not recognize the most sacred, essential image of western Christian culture. Buck's experiences in China would seem to contradict the opposition of Anglo-European and Chinese cultures in The Good Earth.
This disruption of the belief in whiteness as the norm appears in Buck's story "A Chinese Woman Speaks," published in Asia in 1925. Kwei-lan, the narrator, reveals the shock that her first contact with westerners has on what Conn calls a "sensitive but cloistered imagination" (Pearl S. Buck 84). When she sees a white foreigner for the first time, Kwei-lan describes him as a hideous, frightful creature. She observes that the man and his white wife are barbarous because they were born outside of China. Conn calls such episodes examples of "occidentalism," in which Asian images become the norm and the West as the symbol of deviance (Pearl S. Buck 84). Despite Buck's enlightened views of difference and her life experiences, Peter Conn does concede that whites in China in the years of Buck's childhood did occupy a privileged position, largely as a result of western military force (Pearl S. Buck 24).
The efforts to exploit China for trade reached a climax with the Opium War (1839-1842). British merchants and traders demanded that China open its ports to trade, including opium that was being grown and processed in British colonial plantations in India. China's defeat in the Opium War lead to the Treaty of Nanking. The main articles of the treaty secured privileges for the British throughout China. The United States and France quickly presented their own demands, ensuring one-sided advantages for Europeans and Americans. Westerners living in China were exempt from Chinese law under the terms of the treaty and could only be prosecuted by western authorities under western law and policy. These privileges extended to missionaries who were able to preach the gospel unimpeded by persecution or restriction. Chinese who attacked missionaries were arrested and punished severely. Since missionaries were protected by British military forces, the Chinese perceived them as a part of the effort to subject China to western imperialism. At the turn of the century, opposition to foreign occupation of China culminated in the Boxer Rebellion. Although Chinese committed acts of violence against some missionaries and Chinese Christian converts, troops from Russia, Japan, and the United States crushed the uprising. The treaty that followed imposed financial penalties and installed a permanent western military presence that would protect western interests in the region. As a result, white missionaries were beyond the reach of Chinese law; however, Conn argues that this position did not prevent Chinese contempt of whites and even periodic violence against missionaries. They knew that at any moment they could be attacked as foreigners.
Despite Conn's efforts to portray Buck's position in China as similar to that of a persecuted minority in the United States, Buck was still in a privileged position as a direct benefit of her own racial category. Her family lived in housing compounds surrounded by walls, equivalent to the houses of Chinese elites. She lead a protected home life, which included a Chinese "amah," or nanny, and other Chinese servants, and she was well aware of this privileged position as a white missionary. Later, she would call the missionaries' freedom to preach, open schools, establish hospitals, and preach "spiritual imperialism" (qtd. in Conn, Pearl S. Buck 28). She would even reject Christianity and openly criticize the missionaries. From the mid-1920s on, Conn observes, both popular culture and mainstream churches would join in such criticism (Pearl S. Buck 149).
Reading The Good Earth in these ways reveals how a novel not overtly concerned with race may contain a subtle discourse that, in fact, says much about racial construction in American culture. Whiteness, as Elizabeth Ellsworth argues, is a dynamic of cultural production and interrelation, of learned social and cultural performances (260). Whiteness is always shifting, always historically framed and situated. And as Martha Mahoney writes, "whiteness, like other racial constructions, is subject to contest and change" (330). "Whiteness," Mahoney continues, "is historically located, malleable, and contingent" (330). Since whiteness is not a real, inherent, natural phenomenon, it must be understood, Rebecca Aarenud argues, as "a highly orchestrated product of culture and nature" (43). She believes that we must recognize whiteness not as a matter of skin color, but as a phenomenon that must be continually reproduced in order to disrupt the belief of whiteness as the status quo, as the norm, as the standard. By analyzing the production of whiteness in The Good Earth, we may disrupt the privileged position of whiteness and, as Morrison suggests, recognize the subtle ways in which the novel is complicit in the discourse of white supremacy.
Works Cited
Aanerud, Rebecca. "Fictions of Whiteness: Speaking the Names of Whiteness in U.S. Literature." Displacing Whiteness. Ed. Ruth Frankenberg. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997. 35-59.
Bell, Derrick. "Property Rights in Whiteness—Their Legal Legacy, Their Economic Costs." Critical Race Theory. Ed. Richard Delgado. Philadelphia: Temple University, 1995. 75-83.
Bentley, Phyllis. "The Art of Pearl S. Buck." English Journal (1935): 791-800.
Buck, Pearl S. The Townsman. New York: J. Day Co., 1945.
——. The Good Earth. New York: Washington Square Press, 1994.
Conn, Peter. "Introduction: Rediscovering Pearl S. Buck." The Several Worlds of Pearl S. Buck. Eds. Elizabeth J. Lipscomb, Frances E. Webb, and Peter Conn. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994. 1-5.
——-. "Pearl S. Buck and American Literary Culture." The Several Worlds of Pearl S. Buck. Eds. Elizabeth J. Lipscomb, Frances E. Webb, and Peter Conn. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994. 111-117.
——-. Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.Doyle, Paul A. Pearl S. Buck. Boston: Twayne, 1965.
Ellsworth, Elizabeth. "Double Binds of Whiteness." Off-White: Readings on Race, Power, and Society. Eds. Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda C.Powell, and L. Mun Wong. New York: Routledge, 1997. 259-269.
Frankenberg, Ruth. Displacing Whiteness. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Hoban, James L. Jr. "Scripting The Good Earth: Versions of the Novel for the Screen." The Several Worlds of Pearl S. Buck. Eds. Elizabeth J. Lipscomb, Frances E. Webb, and Peter Conn. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994. 127-143.
Keating, Ann Louise. "Interrogating 'Whiteness,' (De)Constructing 'Race.'" College English 57.8 (1995): 901-918.
Mahoney, Martha R. "The Social Construction of Whiteness." Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror. Eds. Richard Delgado and Jean Stafancic. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997. 330-333.
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.Cambridge: Harvard Press, 1992.
Rabb, Jane M. "Who's Afraid of Pearl S. Buck?" The Several Worlds of Pearl S. Buck. Eds. Elizabeth J. Lipscomb, Frances E. Webb, and Peter Conn. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994. 103-110.
Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso, 1999.
Snow, Helen. "Pearl S. Buck 1892-1973." New Republic. 24 March 1973: 28-29.
Spencer, Stephen. "Popular Culture and the Rural Dream: Cultural Contexts and the Literary History of The Good Earth." Atenea (June 2000): 125-138.
Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1993.