Freud = crazy

[beccaelizabeth]

So, I read a chapter from Literature and Gender about Ibsen's A Doll's House. Which is apparently only called A Doll's House in translation, and means something closer to neat and tidy and cosy type house in the original, I think it said.

I'm much less annoyed about the dumb book I read now. Mostly on account of being more annoyed about how women were treated 100+ years ago. And a bit because it used Freudian psychoanalysis again, so I get to have a nice cosy well worn annoyance about that Freud nutter again.

REally, is it just me, or is he completely off his nut?

I don't get how psychoanalysis can be so prevalent in literary analysis when it *totally makes no sense*. I mean, slashy though the idea may be, expressing sexual interest in women only means repressed sexual interest in men in opposites world. Or, to be more precise, if there was sexual interest in men it might be repressed in order to express socially acceptable interest in women, *but* that doesn't mean that interest in women *means* interest in men.

Also, fetish does not equal woman hate. It just means being really into shoes, or stockings, or whatever. It might mean that actual women are inaccessible for some reason - as they are for perfectly good physical health reasons to the character they're calling a fetishist. Perhaps his interest in silk stockings and not women is because silk stockings cannot in fact die of syphilis, which is apparently what he is dying of, slowly and with much moping. Maybe he has so much respect for women he can't touch them. I don't know, I've only read it once so far, might not be supportable from the text. But my point is, you don't have to go to opposites world to make a perfectly plausible explanation, so why on earth *do* they?

I'm sure it made some good points as well. I'm just in the habit of arguing with books. Is more fun.

Anyways, did more reading. Reading is yaay. Lots of thoughts all in a row.

Comments

[julia-here.livejournal.com]

Have you read Freud's own work yet, or just Freud-influenced social analysis? It' not that his ideas are missinterpreted by his followers so much as he's his own best salesman- read "Notes on the Interpretation of Dreams" if you haven't yet, and pay attention to the ways in which he skates right on by his mutually exclusive assumptions, for instance.

Julia, Freud was very good at the kind of writing that some fans do, using a whole lot of details to obscure questionable core assumptions

[beccaelizabeth]

no actual Freud read, just a bunch of cultural studies or lit stuff that thinks its a really good way to get meanings out.