Romance, the Novel, Psychoanalysis and Sexual Fantasy
“According to Jung, there is a sort of art which deals with the conscious surface of experience, and there is a different sort of art which deals with “primordial experience,” or with the archetypes of the collective unconscious. It is the latter which fascinates Jung more.” (1)
The archetypes of the collective unconscious are the universal symbols belonging to the human collective experience such as The Great Mother, The Wise Old Man, the Shadow, the Tower, Water, and the Tree of Life. These symbols are sometimes used to separate the signified by the signifier. For example, the womb may be represented as a beautifully well-crafted colorful vase and the fertile man’s symbol of a ‘phallus’ may be represented as a garden Venetian obelisk or some such projectile. Such images when combined together in a woman’s dreams may represent the successful copulation and fertilization of a woman ushering in the woman’s transition into motherhood by her signifier/husband. The image of a slain animal and the image of a bloody sword may represent the weak being castrated by the superior. Such images when combined together in a woman’s dream who is contemplating motherhood may represent the feminist’s fear of motherhood and all that it entails because feminism rejects the image of maternity as a form of abuse. As a result, this dream sequence repudiates and denies a woman’s very manifest reason for her gendered self-hood as a woman. Sex is power, and the body as a sex object that entices men to bed never parades in the female pregnant form. (2)
Interestingly in literature, there is a motif used that morphs or transforms villans into different forms. We see this as early as 1808 in the stage play Faust by Goethe in which Mephistopheles, who plays the Devil and right-hand man to God, appears to Heinrich Faust, a disenchanted professor who has become dissatisfied with his life and who ultimately makes a pact with Mephistopheles. In 1824 in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner we see Gil-Martin, one of the first examples of a doppelganger in literature, a diabolical man who is able to morph into anyone and ultimately drives a man to suicide. Jump ahead 150 years and we see in the Star Trek series a mischievous alien named “Q” who retains this very ability, being able to appear, as he chooses, in any form he wishes, and creates chaos and stress on the ship.
In the realm of sexual fantasy, we have a form of BDSM known as Body Inflation Fantasies. These fantasies provide the individual with the power to morph the body. Body Inflation Fantasies are sexual fantasies in which individuals, using the properties of latex suits and air pump compressors, force air into their suits to transform their entire bodies or parts of their bodies; usually breasts, hips, buttocks, into over-exaggerated forms of expansive largeness. These fantasies give onlookers a sexually derived thrill at watching their own body, as well as the body parts of others, expand. (3)
From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, the fantastic, the grotesque, the irrational are closer to the true sources of art than is realism, and are therefore at the very least interesting if not actually “better.” The fictional fantasy, like the sexual fantasy, masquerades the truth which the onlooker or reader must uncover. According to Freud, all forms of literature are analogous to dreams, which are disguises of the truth rather than expressions of it. In his early essay “On the Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming” (1908), Freud argues that literary productions, like dreams and sexual seductions, are based upon patterns of wish fulfillment, and that “His Majesty the Ego” is “the hero of all daydreams and all novels.” For Freud, all dreams and all artworks are substitute gratifications.
It is here that I’d like to make my point. If dreams are analog to fantasy, then fantasy, in the role of sexual fantasy, offers gratifications that become the substitute for what’s missing in one’s life. The pre-oedipal oral gratifications, food from the nipple at the breast of the mother which may be read as “missing mother’s loving touch.” For it is with her that we have our first experiences. These experiences are formed and remain the latent content of our future psychic life. They can be very fulfilling and they can be very sexual, or not. Her expansive largeness is experienced during pre-oedipal when we are in our most diminutive state. Tiny, naked, and afraid without the warmth of the womb. It is, for this reason, the most used adjectives in internet-based searches for sexually-oriented content are the following; “large” “big” “enormous” followed by vagina, penis, boobs, breasts, and butt. It would seem that the exaggerated largeness of body parts harkens us back to our early pre-Oedipal and Oedipal experiences at the breast with mother and castrating experiences with father’s larger-than-life phallus.
“…in Fiction and the Unconscious,” Simon Lesser points out the “the desire to conciliate a sensed fear of fantasy…is one of the perennial motives for ‘realism’, and also that “the theme of failure may conceal wish fulfillments and perverse satisfactions.”
The advanced technology of electromagnetic frequency stimulation and electromagnetic frequency sedation has either directly or unwittingly helped create the art of overinflating the body to the point of exaggerated forms of expansive largeness, uncovering the fantastic, grotesque, irrational, and supernatural display of a Symbol; for me its the pre-oedipal mother. The IQ behind this technological design has expressed an art form in which psychoanalysis can be used to uncover the truth behind its purpose. For some, expansive largeness may be desired. For others, expansive largeness may be feared.
All fictions, whether fantasy fiction or realistic fiction, are elaborate seductions concealing psychoanalytic truths.
Fantasy is better than realism because realism harbors a desire to conciliate a real sensed fear of fantasy, one of its perennial motives, and also the theme of failure may conceal wish fulfillments and perverse satisfactions. Realism connection to the psychic stage of “omnipotence of thought,” a primitive kind of mastery of reality which is made possible by an exchange of psychic for actual reality. This magical technique resides in the pleasure principle; it originates in the very early phase of psychic development at which the individual looks upon himself as omnipotent because wishes are experienced at this period as if their fulfillment, in reality, were achieved by the mere act of wishing. In my analysis of this technology, the realism provided through accredited professional degrees and knowledge can act as a conciliate mechanism masquerading reality because of the individuals very real fears by creating an insulated bubble around one’s own sense of felt security protected through an elaborate defense mechanism masquerading as “realism” or “truth.”
Sources:
(1) BRANTLINGER, P. (1975). Romances, Novels, and Psychoanalysis. Criticism, 17(1), 15–40. Retrieved August 7, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/23099626
(2) WALKER, MICHELLE BOULOUS. (1998) Philosophy of the Maternal Body: Reading Silence. New York. Routledge. Chapter 7, Collecting Mothers, pp 134.
(3) GATES, KATHERINE. (2000) Deviant Desires: Incredibly Strange Sex. New York. Juno Books. Chapter “Body Inflation: To Dream The Impossible Dream” pp. 95–105
