The Erotic Life& Libido ( contriversal Idea)

• Libido- sexual desires 

• A child has sexual instincts from birth calling it “The pressure principle”.
•  “A child has its sexual instincts and activities from the first; it comes into the world with them; and, after an important course of development passing through many stages, they lead to what is known as the normal sexuality of the adult. There is even no difficulty in observing the manifestations of these sexual activities in children; on the contrary, it calls for some skill to overlook them or explain them away”(Freud 2228). 
• After babies are born and they start feeling loved, the “normal sexuality” is  hetronormative ( getting married and creating babies).
• The five stages happen through (self-pleasure) and through simulation of erotogenic zones. Such as masterbation, sucking of your thumb, back rubs. 

The Five Psychosexual Stages of Development

• Oral Stage (0-1 year)
• Centered around babies thumb such as sucking on a pacifier, sucking on the thumb or breast. 
• Anal stage (1-3 year)

• Potty training that is harsh can lead to being “anal retentive” (someone who is very OCD)
• “Anal Expulsive”- leads to someone who is messy and rebellious 
• Phallic Stage (3-5 or 6 years) 
• Discovering body parts of other genders
• Latency Stage (5 or 6 years)
• The libido is is sleep and sexual impulses are repressed 
• Gential Stage (6+)
• Final sexual preferences is determined, finding a spouse to make babies

• If not completed correctly, you develop fixation 
• Ex: Smoking, biting on nails
• If worst you develop a perversion (“homosexuality” )
• Ex: Abnormal pleasure such as toe sucking, foot feetish

Object Choice, The Oedipus Complex, N Identification  

• When children are young, boys want to marry their mothers and kill their fathers and girls want to marry their fathers and kill their mothers (Oedipus Complex). 
• As they get older they want to marry someone who is LIKE their parents 
• They want to replicate the love of their parents
• New Process of identification happens when they get over the fact that they don’t necessarily want to kill their parents or in other words they don’t hate them anymore. Instead the daughter wants to be more like the mother and the son wants to be more like their father.
• As they grow up they now want the person they marry to be more like the parent they were trying to kill.

The Five Psychosexual Stages of Development

• Oral Stage (0-1 year)
• Centered around babies thumb such as sucking on a pacifier, sucking on the thumb or breast. 
• Anal stage (1-3 year)

• Potty training that is harsh can lead to being “anal retentive” (someone who is very OCD)
• “Anal Expulsive”- leads to someone who is messy and rebellious 
• Phallic Stage (3-5 or 6 years) 
• Discovering body parts of other genders
• Latency Stage (5 or 6 years)
• The libido is is sleep and sexual impulses are repressed 
• Gential Stage (6+)
• Final sexual preferences is determined, finding a spouse to make babies

• If not completed correctly, you develop fixation 
• Ex: Smoking, biting on nails
• If worst you develop a perversion (“homosexuality” )
• Ex: Abnormal pleasure such as toe sucking, foot feetish

Object Choice, The Oedipus Complex, N Identification  

• When children are young, boys want to marry their mothers and kill their fathers and girls want to marry their fathers and kill their mothers (Oedipus Complex). 
• As they get older they want to marry someone who is LIKE their parents 
• They want to replicate the love of their parents
• New Process of identification happens when they get over the fact that they don’t necessarily want to kill their parents or in other words they don’t hate them anymore. Instead the daughter wants to be more like the mother and the son wants to be more like their father.
• As they grow up they now want the person they marry to be more like the parent they were trying to kill.

Discussion Board- Due 9/9 and 9/12

In your own words, discuss the relationship between the main character and her husband in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Consider how the relationship evolves or changes throughout the story, how it affects her mental state, and any Freudian concepts you see within the story. Your response should be at least 1-2 paragraphs (4-6 sentences per paragraph) and needs to include textual evidence from “The Yellow Wallpaper,” “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,'” and Freud’s first lecture, as it relates to your response. You must include textual evidence from at least one, if not more, of the aforementioned texts.

In the story “ The Yellow Wallpaper”, the relationship between the narrator and the husband evolves throughout the story. From the very beginning of the story the narrator complains about how her husband John, who is also her doctor, and how he belittles both her illness and  ignores her opinions and thoughts in general, quickly shutting her down. She continues to give an example of how John doesn’t really care for her work, “ It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about my work.” (pg.649) As the story continues the narrator talks about a yellow wallpaper in the nursery in which she is sleeping there and how hideous it is and creeps her out. John just keeps ignoring her and pays her little to no attention about this wallpaper. He just wants her to get better and back to her old self, “He said I was his darling and his ­ comfort and all he had, and that I must take care of myself for his sake, and keep well . He says no one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me.” (pg.652) It gets to the point where the narrator is starting to get scared of John because she sees that John himself and his sister are also starting to look at the wallpaper weirdly. Nevertheless, they never brought it up and he just wanted to get better.

In Lecture 1 Freudian had a patient with similar symptoms as the narrator in “the yellow Wallpaper”. Freudian also had a patient who was suffering from hallucination, this patient of his had a dream about a snake crawling on her and then being paralyzed and seeing this. The narrator had a similar story of her seeing a lady out in her garden hiding and at night time she stays up making sure she doesn’t leave behind the wallpaper. She continues to say “I always lock the door when I creep by daylight. I can’t do it at night,…”.(pg.654) This comes to show that she only sleeps during the daytime and stays awake during the night because she is afraid.

Marclysa, Rothna, Michael, Karen, Cindy

As a group come up with 2-3 central themes in SB. Find specific passages – textual evidence- in the story that supports that. Discuss how Baldwin is using themes to critique society, and also consider where you see the Freudian concepts. 

Rothna

•  Familial Support
• Music as a way for redemption
• Drug abuse
• Bettering yourself/salvation
• Suffering 

Marclysa

•  Drug addiction (heroin) – his escape from his actual problems 
• Music is his artistic gift (jazz)
• Family issues (his brother) 

Michael

•  Addiction
• Brotherhood
• Music
• Redemption
• Night/darkness as a metephor for things coming to an end

Karen

• Mental health 
•  Depression 
• Society impact 

Cindy

• Racism
• Family Dynamic
• Drugs/Addiction

Textual Evidence

Racism

•  “Your father says he heard his brother scream… ain’t stopped till this day.” (pg. 8)
• “These boys, now, were living as we’d been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities.” (pg. 1)

Family

•  “I was scared, scared for Sonny.” (pg. 1)
• “He and Sonny hadn’t ever got too well.And this was partly because Sonny was the apple of his father’s eyes.It was because he loved Sonny so much and was frightened for him that he was always fighting him”(pg.6) 
• “You don’t know how much I needed to hear from you.” (pg. 4)

Drug/Addiction 

•   “Her voice reminded me for a minute of what heroin feels like sometimes” (pg. 15)
• “‘Why does he want to die? He must want to die, he’s killing himself, why does he want to die?’” (pg.3)
• “But the reason I wanted to leave Harlem so bad was to get away from the drugs.And then when I ran away, that’s what i was running from really.When I came back, nothing had changed, I hadn’t changed, I was just older”(pg18)
• “I said ‘I don’t wanna see you die trying not to suffer” (page 17)

Music 

•  “Then they all gathered around sonny and sonny played. Every now and again one of them seemed to say amen” (pg. 20)
• “…it wasn’t like living with a person at all, it was like living with sound. And the sound didn’t make any sense to her, didn’t make sense to any of them – naturally.” (pg.12)
• “The silence of the next few days must have been louder than the sound of all the music ever played since time began.” (pg. 13)

Redemption

• “Then they all came together again, and sonny was part of the family again” (pg. 20)
• “And I didn’t write Sonny or send him anything for a long time… Then I kept in constant touch with him and I sent him whatever I could and I went to meet him when he came back to New York.” (pg. 4)

Breakout room 1- Ron, Cindy, Michael, Leon, Lysa

ID:

Michael- id is instinctual desires: “It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs”

Cindy- The id is comprised of pure instinct and urges: “The id of course knows no judgements of value: no good and evil, no morality.”

Lysa- The Id is in the unconscious mind when a baby is born. Collection of urges waiting for it to be fulfilled. “We approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations. We picture it as being open at its end to somatic influences, and as taking up into itself instinctual needs which find their psychical expression in it.” 

Leon- The recesses of the mind “Wishful impulses which have never passed beyond the id,

but impressions, too, which have been sunk into the id by repression, are virtually immortal; after the passage of decades they behave as though they had just occurred.”

Ron- The id is found totally in the unconscious. For example, “It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle” (Freud n.p.g). It’s the instincts and desires that are in the unconscious mind which are not allowed to be emotionally displayed, they don’t act upon those urges. 

Ego:

Michael- the ego is the mediator between the Id, superego, and the real world. It chooses an appropriate way and time to perform what the Id wants and is then judged by the superego: “The poor ego has things even worse: it serves three severe masters and does what it can to bring their claims and demands into harmony with one another. These claims are always divergent and often seem incompatible. No wonder that the ego so often fails in its task. Its three tyrannical masters are the external world, the super-ego and the id”

Leon- “The relation to the external world has become the decisive factor for the ego.” 

“Its three tyrannical masters are the external world, the super-ego and the id.” The ego is best analyzed in relation to these “tyrannical masters”

Ron- The Ego is what balances the Id and Superego. For example, “It is the sense-organ of the entire apparatus; moreover it is receptive not only to excitations from outside but also to those arising from the interior of the mind (Freud n.p.g). 

Cindy- The ego is a balance between the id and superego and it is a portion of the id that has learned and adapted to the external world: “…it has taken on the task of representing the external world to the id…”

Lysa- The Ego is letting you know that your desires may not always be fulfilled. “The ego controls the approaches to motility under the id’s orders; but between a need and an action it has interposed a postponement in the form of the activity of thought,1 during which it makes use of the mnemic residues of experience.” 

Superego:

Michael- the superego is your conscience, it judges the ego on its choices and reprimands or praises it :”The super-ego applies the strictest moral standard to the helpless ego which is at its mercy; in general it represents the claims of morality, and we realize all at once that our moral sense of guilt is the expression of the tension between the ego and the super-ego.”

Ron- The superego is part of the conscious mind. In other terms, it’s like perfection for human morals. The superego also acts upon the egos. For example, “It is also the vehicle of the ego ideal by which the ego measures itself, which it emulates, and whose demand for ever greater perfection it strives to fulfil” (Freud 5).

Leon- it “takes over the power, function and even the methods of the parental agency.” Takes the role of the parent in a form of identification.  

Cindy- The superego is kind of an offshoot of the ego since it’s mainly comprised of what was observed from the external world, but it takes it to a higher degree and has a higher moral standard: “The superego applies the strictest moral standard to the helpless ego which is at its mercy…” 

Lysa- The superego is also found in your conscience. According to Freud  “The superego seems to have made a one-sided choice and to have picked out only the parents’ strictness and severity, their prohibiting and punitive function, whereas their loving care seems not to have been taken over and maintained.” (Freud 4)

Choose one of Reid’s “Metaphoric Musings” and explain how Reid’s identification of that particular “Metaphoric Musing” helps you become a better academic writer. You are required to use a direct quote and a paraphrase with proper in-text citations from Reid’s essay to earn full credit for this discussion board post; no responses are required. 
Your post is due Sunday, midnight, but do it before Sunday so you can enjoy Halloween! 
Here is the Works Cited citation (all lines but the first of a Work Cited entry are indented [BB is being weird about formatting]):
Reid, E. Shelly. “Ten Ways to Think About Writing: Metaphoric Musings for College Writing Student.” Writing Spaces 2, edited by Pavel Zemliansky and Charles Lowe, 2nd ed., Amsterdam, Netherlands, Amsterdam University Press, 2011, pp. 3–23, wac.colostate.edu/docs/books/writingspaces2/reid–ten-ways-to-think.pdf.

One of Reid’s “Metaphoric Musings” that was discussed in “Ten Ways To Think About Writing: Metaphoric Musings for College Writing Student” was the idea of being very precise when writing so people don’t either misinterpret what you mean and know exactly what you said is what you meant. In one of the ten ways that was discussed in the text, Reid used the idea of the little green ball by saying that if you say a green ball without saying exactly what shade of green the ball is or how big or small the ball was, the audience will have their own perspective of the green ball. In the text she states“I care that you know exactly what I’m thinking, the more the details matter to me, then the more information I need to give you”(Reid 6). Which indicates that if you are not very descriptive then the audience will know exactly what you meant by what you said. 

In the “Five Lectures on psycho-Analysis” by Sigmund Freud, he asserts in lecture 3 that dream is the disguised fulfillment of a repressed wish. Dreamworks was discussed by Freud’s concepts, regardless if these wishes were through the unconscious and conscious minds. He backs up this claim by saying that there are four parts to figuring out what the dream actually means, which is through; the manifest content, latent content, displacement, and though condensation. Some of these concepts were shown throughout the story “A country doctor” by Franz Kafka.

In this exploratory essay we were asked to pick one of the following stories; “A Rose for Emily” or “A Country Doctor” and speak on the newer concepts of psychoanalysis. For this paper I chose “A Country Doctor” because the other story lies more in hysteria and we were told not to talk about that specifically. “A Country Doctor” is a fictional short story about a doctor on his way to help a patient during a snowstorm but has a lot of obstacles along the way to his patient. Such as, his horse dying and leaving his partner/servant Rose behind. I believe this story was a bit more difficult because it wasn’t as straightforward as the other story“The Yellow Wallpaper”. There were much deeper meanings behind the characters and we had to decipher the meaning behind everything happening  and especially the overuse of the horse dying in the story. 

I believe I had a clear purpose in my essay based on my thesis. My thesis was clearly stated in my introduction paragraph and shown throughout my essay with evidence and through different examples of dreamwork. One strength that I believe I had in my essay was the fact that I had clear examples of the elements of dreamwork throughout my essay. One way of enhancing my reading comprehension of such difficult passages as these is to refer back to the class zoom calls. I realized those recording classes really do help me better understand the story. 

One weakness that is very clear is my time management. Not only for the papers but for every other assignment that I do get from my classes. Another weakness that I do struggle with this essay and my last essay is definitely my analysis. My analysis can definitely be improved by simply better understanding the text and asking questions if I have any. Overall, I definitely feel like I could’ve done better with analysis and trying to understand the story better because I kept getting confused with Freud’s concept of dreamwork through the story “A Country Doctor”.

Summary & Response Reflection

Lecture 1: Doctors Attitude Towards Hysterical Patients

In the summary response essay, we were supposed to demonstrate our understanding of Freud’s lecture 1 and the “The Yellow Wallpaper”. We were also supposed to  summarize and respond to how Freud’s concepts were used throughout the story. In addition, I had to summarize what Freud said in lecture 1 about the attitude of most doctors towards hysterical patients and how it was shown in “the yellow wallpaper”. The genre of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short  fiction story that shows a great example based on Freud’s lecture . I believe this essay was a little challenging to me because of how dense the readings were. There was always a deeper meaning into Freud’s lecture where I had to keep revising my work to make sure I understood everything to the best of my ability. 

I believe that I had a clear purpose for why I wrote the essay based on my thesis. The thesis was shown throughout the essay based on the evidence that I had and analysis of my evidence. Even though I was struggling a little, I repeatedly kept revising my work and writing notes on Freud’s lecture and comparing it to “The Yellow Wallpaper”. One way I can enhance my understanding of such a difficult reading next time or anytime  is by writing a little summary for each paragraph in my notes. Another one of my strengths when writing this essay was my clear thesis and evidence to back up this thesis.

One of my weaknesses that I feel that can be improved  to better my writing is my analysis. My analysis could have definitely been longer and overall written better. I’ve always struggled with my analysis and I can see my impovents but I know I can definitely improve my analysis.

Overall, I definitely believe that I did a good job on this essay but there is still room for improvement. The assignment was to help us better understand freud’s concept and how to summarize a text without actually writing a summary  of the lectures/ short or any type of writing.

Hello, My name is Marclysa Theagene and I’m a freshman at CCNY. This is a portfolio I put together showing my progress of the past couple of weeks during my first semester at the school. While showing my progress as a writer, I also put some the strategies and self reflections of what I did and how I can improve as a writer. During the first semester with Professor Elizabeth Von Uhl, and Professor Alyssa Yankwitt. During our lectures we spoke about the Austrian neurologist, Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalytic theory. Some of the major principles of psychoanalysis include the significance of the unconscious, hysteria, the idea of hypnosis, early sexual development, repression, dreams, death and life drives, and transference. We further analyzed his concepts while looking at several short stories by other highly recognized authors such as James Baldwin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman etc…