1) Wow -- this sounds like a very personal assignment.
2) Are we really going to try to see whether we can diagnose the other students in our class as hysterical? Funny, and not awkward at all, I'm sure . . . haha

Believe it!!!!!1111oneoneeleven

I've finished the essay on hysterical phantasies and I'm not seeing how this is going to work. Aside from the fact that we only average like five responses per wiki page when the assignment is to write any soulless three sentences of commentary and how that doesn't bode well for large scale participation on this, I just don't get what you want. I look for what Freud tells us about hysterical phantasies: we've got a woman who realizes her unconscious phantasy about how she had a child with a well known pianist who then abandoned her and her child, and we've got the statement that "an unconscious phantasy...is identical with the phantasy which served the person in his sexual gratification during the period of masturbation." Or to go non-Freudian in trying to fathom the assignment, most people now think of "daydreams" as juvenile bouts of more or less conscious imaginings of desire-fulfillment.

So, yeah, if we break down into inexplicable tears, then realize how the pianist abandoned us in our phantasy, then we are pretty clearly hysterical. But I don't think many of us has that kind of experience. I don't believe in the existence of forgotten masturbatory fantasies from when I was like 5 years old, and if they exist in a repressed form I am incapable of describing them. And juvenile daydreams are just...juvenile. I don't consider myself to really have daydreams in that sense anymore, and they certainly wouldn't be interesting if I tried to recreate now my daydreams from elementary school.

What kind of phantasies are you actually hoping for? Isn't Freud fundamentally talking about unconscious, repressed phantasies? If I was actually capable of writing it down on a piece of paper, how could it possibly be the source for my hysteric symptoms?

On the basis of that last point, I predict that no one will be able to truly share their repressed phantasies, and that a total of 0 people will be categorized as hysterical.

Jack, the intent of this exercise is not so much to declare whether a person is really hysterical or not. We haven't studied the subject enough to presume that we can. Nor are we asking you to dig in your subconscious to find that repressed phantasy. Last Wednesday, you had us attempt to define what kind of interpreter Freud was and you gave us four options. We all said that he embodied all four interpreters. This experiment would, in theory, give us a better understanding of Freud's process of analyasis and perhaps we will realize that he is closer to being one type of interpreter than another.

A phantasy/daydream can be anything. If I told you that I daydream about driving a red corvette, you could interpret that in a couple of different ways.The following being the most obvious, in my opinion. Red, you can say is the symbol of passion. The corvett itself a symbol of power. Driving could signify that I wish for control over something. Put them together and you can interpret it as me wanting to control my own sexuality. Now what hysterical symptoms can I be expected to have?

Hopefully I answered your question. And you may be right. The activity could be a total failure but we would have at least attempted to apply Freud's theories on hysteria.

Oh, and although he does fundamentally talk about unconscious, repressed phantasies, don't these sometimes manifest themselves in the conscious? We may not see the direct connection but isn't this where Freud, the interpreter as "meaning-giver" come in?

i don't so much care what the specific activity is -- but i think it's important to understand what the essays mean. they're pretty dense and they do make complex arguments. how can we get the class engaged with the arguments that freud is making in them?

Essentially, he's arguing that there are certain elements that define or are inherent to most/all fantasies; we were thinking that this activity could illustrate Freud's points regarding these elements. Admittedly anyone could make anything up for this activity, but that is the same barrier facing Freud himself, so. Yeah.

the point is that i DO think it's good to make use of examples -- but we need to apply them to help us understand freud's words.

to wit: what does he mean when he says that the masturbatory act at one time consisted of "two parts" and that these two components "had to be welded together"? what is the role of the "wish emanating from the sphere of object love"? how does this process manifest a "morbid symptom"?

what is the "repressed complex" and what does it mean that it consists of "libidinal cathexis" and "ideational content"?

i think the class needs to come to grips with some of these ideas and work through them so we can arrive at some sort of common understanding of what freud is talking about.

and of course, we need to understand what freud says a daydream is, because this is critical to his argument.

I don't see working all that theory into our discussion as a difficult task, but maybe I'm missing something...?

I don't think that daydreaming about a red corvette, for example, as Stacy suggested, is the kind of thing Freud is talking about. I doubt that driving a Corvette really expresses Stacy's "masturbatory phantasy" on any level--I don't think she really has such fantasies on any level. I certainly don't daydream about possessing cars. I feel like making up some little thing like that would be a complete falsehood, without any emotional truth. I don't think we'll be able to find what Freud was talking about in such inventions, and I feel that saying "red = passion = hysterical symptoms" completely ignores the substance of the essays and would lead us down a short path to nowhere.

Sorry if I sound overly pessimistic, I'm off to the courthouse now to try to contest a traffic ticket.

Sorry guys.. but i'm with jack.. i don't see how this could work

i think even this little debate has got a couple of us started thinking about the idea, which is good. driving the fancy car -- does it qualify as a fantasy of erotic nature (for a man or a woman)? or of heroic nature (strictly for men, f will claim on p. 133)? how can we consider the wish-fulfilment it embodies as being repressed in "unconscious" of the hysteric?

when f says that the masturbatory act "AT ONE TIME consisted of two parts" what does he mean? was that a time in the patient's life? what does he mean that "ORIGINALLY the active performance was a purely auto-erotic proceeding for the purpose of obtaining pleasure from a particular erotogenic part of the body"? what is the sense of ORIGINALLY? i would argue that he's referring to the stage of infancy, before masturbation is married (or fused or bound up) with a wish.

i just write these comments in the spirit of getting us started on a productive conversation about this material. see you all soon.

d

or if not "infancy", childhood.

Um, my copy ends at p.124, am I missing something?

As for the 'originally' comment, he seems to be saying that there is a time before people have erotic fantasies because they have not yet completely developed the ability to abstract (i.e. to create ideational content for themselves), and that at that time those people pursue auto-eroticism in a purely physical way. It's unclear to me where the cut-off is, age-wise, though it seems likely that it would be different for different people.

Also Freud makes the distinction of erotic fantasies and heroic fantasies only to show that heroic fantasies have erotic fantasies as their ends; he seems to be saying that women are incapable of having stories leading up to their erotic fantasies (that only the erotic fantasies of men can have plots), and this is obviously untenable.

If you all think it would work better, we can just have a straight-up discussion of this stuff in class, but...

1. the content is fairly straight-forward, so
2. we'd either have to be agreeing or disagreeing with it rather than attempting to understand it
3. because he's wrong (yay science), we'd be disagreeing with it
4. this doesn't sound like a barrel of monkeys, so
5. we thought we'd do an activity

But maybe the activity is so _un_-enlightening that it is of no interest either.

Frankly, the essays are both crocks (enjoy my usual spite once again, though this time backed up by science more than aesthetics), though to be fair they are interesting crocks. Whatevs. We'll see how class goes. Should be fun whatever happens!

so should we write out our daydreams.......?

Quote from the page:

1.Write down/type your own phantasy/daydream.
a. Keep it to one page. *