Freud and the Imaginative World

For instance, the score is the image of the symphony, but the CD is also an image of the same symphony and the score is the image of the CD: The problem is to understand this faculty or function that belongs to images. A state of affairs can function as a sign; a fact can signify another fact when we understand its symbolic value, that is to say, when we put it in practice. In order to recognise the symbol in the sign, says Wittgenstein, we have to take into account its use; a use which is endowed with meaning see, for instance, Philosophical Investigations , I, Wittgenstein therefore appeals to praxis, to habit, to response, to meaningful action; that is to say, to the ethos.

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This is the meaning of that word in its entirety. The ethical solution shows that the problem of representation and of the image cannot find a way out, that is to say a reasonable solution from within. Language, says Wittgenstein, is the edge of the world: I cannot transcend my language as I cannot transcend my world.

And it is in this sense that the image is a fact and that it is a practical and not a theoretical fact. In other words, the very theory itself is ultimately a praxis, a way of organising signs based on their different contexts of use. Freud himself acknowledges that: Beyond the Pleasure Principle is as brilliant as it is adventurous and erratic: I am not at all sure to what extent it can find a proper application in clinical practice. In it, Freud advances the hypothesis of the death drive, but this is not the point I wish to consider here.

Instead, I would like to go back to the question that opens the paper, when Freud asks what is the law that regulates psychic events. Freud, we should remember, begins from a frank self-criticism: It must be recognised that the pleasure principle cannot account for and explain all psychic events, such as dreams that evoke a traumatic event and, more generally, the very mechanism of the anxiety on which psychoanalytical transference is grounded.

Hence the need to extend the hypothesis on the functioning of the mind, and the attempt to outline a new description of the psychic apparatus, a description that is grounded, as we know, in the idea of the vesicle elsewhere Freud uses the example of the magic pad with a similar intention. The basic idea is that the psychic is essentially a threshold, as exemplified by the vesicle: This threshold is the place where the events of the world that surround the vesicle write themselves and through which they pass.

For instance, we are connected to a vibratile and troubled oscillation of events that leave traces on us. Hence, as carrier of these traces, every image is a fact. In this way, Freud, on his part, pursues a brave attempt to derive the psychic image not from a presupposed theory of the mind but from those facts that, in physiological terms, refer, as Freud puts it, to the cerebral cortex. The vesicle is the cerebral cortex when it is invested with the events of the surrounding world, events that thusly translate into psychic facts and mnestic traces.

The vesicle protects itself from the excessive forces of the world with a coating that marks the distinction between the exterior and the interior, for instance in the human being. The vesicle makes a shield of the coating, opened only by small loopholes through which it can reduce the forces of the world to small samples which are subsequently interconnected according to spatial and temporal criteria.

In this way, the vesicle keeps the intensity of the world at a distance and at bay, filtering and ordering it.

However, the vesicle, being the place of conscious perceptions PC system , must also be able to retain the traces written on it by the events of the world. It must be both threshold and medium. Hence, it is flexible in allowing perceptions to pass through itself so that they can settle in the unconscious in the form of mnestic images.

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The vesicle resembles a wax tablet, a magic pad, that is wiped clean every time it perceives, ready to perceive again. Its function is characterised by use: Mnestic traces cannot stay long in the conscious, so they settle in the inner part of the shield. It is here that a problem emerges: It is the effect of these traces, it is their presence making itself known from within that is responsible for all the phenomena of neurosis and psychosis.

The human being, this conscious vesicle, is a continuously tense being, not only tense towards the world, but also and especially towards those internal drives from which there is no shield or defence. In fact, there is a defence and it amounts to dealing with these drives with the same criteria adopted for dealing with the forces of the external world; it is a matter of projecting them towards the external, to confuse them with the phenomena of the external world, to sample them and link them in a spatial-temporal continuum.

Thus, the human being imagines a world of favourable or hostile phenomena, populated by friendly or hostile creatures, on whom to unload aggression and fear through superstition, magic, hallucination, that is to say, through pathological forms. The concept of projection thus becomes the theoretical core that propels all psychoanalysis: Instead, seeing the world aright concerns the acquisition of a habit that can appropriately curb aggression and anxiety.

Social philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote that utopias and images of fulfilment, however regressive they might be, also included an impetus for a radical social change. According to Bloch, social justice could not be realized without seeing things fundamentally differently. Something that is mere "daydreaming" or "escapism" from the viewpoint of a technological-rational society might be a seed for a new and more humane social order, as it can be seen as an "immature, but honest substitute for revolution". The Norwegian psychologist Frode Stenseng has presented a dualistic model of escapism in relation to different types of activity engagements.

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He discusses the paradox that the flow state Csikszentmihalyi resembles psychological states obtainable through actions such as drug abuse, sexual masochism, and suicide ideation Baumeister. Accordingly, he deduces that the state of escape can have both positive and negative meanings and outcomes.

Freud and the Imaginative World

Stenseng argues that there exist two forms of escapism with different affective outcomes dependent on the motivational focus that lies behind the immersion in the activity. Escapism in the form of self-suppression stems from motives to run away from unpleasant thoughts, self-perceptions, and emotions, whereas self-expansion stems from motives to gain positive experiences through the activity and to discover new aspects of self. Empirical investigations of the model have shown that: Alan Brinkley , author of Culture and Politics in the Great Depression , presents how escapism became the new trend for dealing with the hardships created by the stock market crash in Famous director Preston Sturges aimed to validate this notion by creating a film called Sullivan's Travels.

The film ends with a group of poor destitute men in jail watching a comedic Mickey Mouse cartoon that ultimately lifts their spirits. Sturges aims to point out how "foolish and vain and self-indulgent" it would be to make a film about suffering. Therefore, movies of the time more often than not focused on comedic plot lines that distanced people emotionally from the horrors that were occurring all around them.

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These films "consciously, deliberately set out to divert people from their problems", but it also diverted them from the problems of those around them. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Not to be confused with Escapology , the art of escaping physical means of restraint. For other uses, see Escapism disambiguation. Kainer, Grace and the Great Controversy p.

Baggett et al, C. Lewis as Philosopher p. Shipley, The Road to Middle-Earth p. Nicolay, Tolkien and the Modernists p. Merkur 66 , no.