{"id":2719,"date":"2009-09-17T13:48:25","date_gmt":"2009-09-17T17:48:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=2719"},"modified":"2009-09-17T13:48:25","modified_gmt":"2009-09-17T17:48:25","slug":"mervyn-nicholson-frye-freud-displacement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/09\/17\/mervyn-nicholson-frye-freud-displacement\/","title":{"rendered":"Mervyn Nicholson: Frye, Freud, Displacement"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"200px-Die_Traumdeutung\"<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that Frye used Freud in a variety of ways<\/a>, but that does not mean that their \u201cmodels\u201d or outlook were similar. \u00a0As I noted earlier<\/a>, their attitudes toward human desire were very different.<\/p>\n

In Anatomy of Criticism,<\/em> Freud re-creates a key concept in Freud\u2019s great book, The Interpretation of Dreams<\/a><\/em> (and elsewhere), namely:\u00a0 displacement.\u00a0 This term is a fascinating illustration of the way Frye\u2019s thinking worked, the way he absorbed and adapted earlier conceptions.<\/p>\n

In Freud, \u201cdisplacement\u201d is a technique of dreams:\u00a0 dreams shift emotional emphasis from important to unimportant objects.\u00a0 Intense emotion is thus \u201ccathected<\/a>\u201d from its actual inspiration to an object that stands in for it, that \u201cdisplaces\u201d it, in order to conceal from the conscious mind the source of anxiety (or desire, desire being normally the cause of anxiety in Freud).\u00a0 Neurosis does the same thing: the emotion causing the neurosis is \u201cdisplaced\u201d from its real object to things that are irrelevant or connected by some chain of association.<\/p>\n

Frye picks up the term and changes its meaning.\u00a0 In Frye, \u201cdisplacement\u201d refers to literature\u2019s habit of adapting mythical forms to standards of plausibility or accepted morality.\u00a0 In Anatomy of Criticism<\/em> [150, Princeton edition] he illustrates displacement with an ingenious exposition of the use of ghosts.\u00a0 Displacement is a function of the modes he outlines in the first essay\u2014the kind of things you can have in a story is determined by the kind of world assumed in the story, and that world is indicated by the powers of the protagonist.\u00a0 Displacement in this sense is a vital and powerful conception, showing how mythical formulas are adapted and reappear in realist texts, but in displaced form.\u00a0 Instead of a man turning into a bat and flying away, you might have him associated with bats in some significant way, or wishing he could fly away with bats (my example \u2014 OK, Bram Stoker<\/a>\u2019s example).<\/p>\n

Frye\u2019s use of \u201cdisplacement\u201d gave the term new life.\u00a0 From Frye, it went on its merry way in literary theory, being a natural sort of concept for deconstruction<\/a>, where what is is not and what is not is what is, and \u201cdis placement\u201d is also \u201cplacement\u201d.<\/p>\n

My book 13 Ways of Looking at Images<\/a><\/em> deals with Freud\u2019s conceptions at length.\u00a0 The Interpretation of Dreams<\/em> is one of the great books, when it is detached from Freud\u2019s psychoanalytic apparatus.\u00a0 In this respect, I think my adaptation of Freud is close to the kind of method Frye worked with.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s true that Frye used Freud in a variety of ways, but that does not mean that their \u201cmodels\u201d or outlook were similar. \u00a0As I noted earlier, their attitudes toward human desire were very different. In Anatomy of Criticism, Freud re-creates a key concept in Freud\u2019s great book, The Interpretation of Dreams (and elsewhere), namely:\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[4,75,92],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anatomy-of-criticism","category-guest-bloggers","category-literary-criticism"],"yoast_head":"\nMervyn Nicholson: Frye, Freud, Displacement - The Educated Imagination<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/09\/17\/mervyn-nicholson-frye-freud-displacement\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Mervyn Nicholson: Frye, Freud, Displacement - The Educated Imagination\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"It\u2019s true that Frye used Freud in a variety of ways, but that does not mean that their \u201cmodels\u201d or outlook were similar. \u00a0As I noted earlier, their attitudes toward human desire were very different. 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