Graduate Workshop " Advances in Cultural Psychology: Moving Beyond Freud"

This past wednesday, I participated in a Graduate level workshop hosted by Professor Jaan Valsiner regarding "Advances in Cultural Psychology: Moving Beyond Freud". There is no doubt that Freud wasn't right about many things, and some would say he isn't right about anything! However, we must remind ourselves that Freud was limited by the time he lived in (19th century Vienna). A product of his socio-cultural and historical period, Freud yielded a theory in which major premises were uncritically borrowed from a narrative cultural myth--oedipus--and minor premises with conceptual clarity that prevents the current standards of a "scientific psychology" from proving their existence. But in our ignorant joking, blaming, forgetting, and sometimes even hating of Freudian Psychoanalysis we fail to recognize developments in psychoanalytic theory which parallel those of modern "scientific psychology" (such as the research in 3 of the psychoanalytic societies and institutes in Boston, and more in New York). By immediately rejecting psychoanalysis, we reject the phenomena which Freud treated. Even if Freudian interpretation is incorrect, misguided, or only deserves partial merit, we fail to complement the way in which Freud treated phenomena.

The graduate workshop was about going back to Freudian Phenomena and looking at them through a slightly different lens. In order to move beyond Freud, we looked at his major premises, and attempted to construct a novel psychoanalytic theory through the alteration of said premises.

The first workshop discussion was "A Freudian Cultural Psychology". Cultural psychology is a field that involves the construction a phenomena across cultures. Professor Valsiner's cultural psychology relies heavily on semiotics--the science of signs. In this discuss, both marxist and freudian psychology were used to present a theory of constructionist repression in a consumer-fetish society. Here, repression was a "collective cultural construction" and not an individual process. Therefore, when I go to the grocery store, and see row after row of frozen chicken, I do not think of the ACTUAL chickens, nor do I think about THE PROCESS by which they are caged, slaughtered, and packaged. When I go shopping in the mall, I do not think about where each item of cloth comes from, and how it was made. As a culture, we "repress" the negative aspects in order to keep out consumer habits alive. (MAJOR PREMISE: INDIVIDUAL REPRESSION TO THE PROCESS OF REPRESSION AS A COLLECTIVE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION)

The second workshop discussion was about Obeyesekere--an anthropologist who focuses on psychoanalytic interpretation. Here we discussed the relevance of psychoanalysis in different cultures. The picking apart of Freudian theory and the attempt to validate its universality was hard. However, the tools used in the interpretation of dreams--symbols, distortions, displacements, etc.--were used quite often to explain different cultural myths, stories, and practices. These rituals and practices were not reduced to unconscious elements in a dynamic hidden psyche, but rather, displayed that certain cultural constructions are symbols to promote behaviors, and to taboo others.

A nice segue from the cultural myth was the third workshop discussion--Constructing a Psychoanalytic Theory around the Kali Myth. In this myth, psychoanalytic theory would be forced to change its application form the mother-child dyad or even the mother-father-child triad, to the husband-wife dyad. The woman in this case is also the dominant power (one that in freudian psychoanalysis, would be considered the "castrating female"--a woman without a penis but is symbolically given such through many arms and spears). Constructing a new psychoanalysis around the Kali myth was hard, but do-able with more thought.

Lastly, the fourth presentation was on "Constructing a Future-Oriented Unconscious". The unconscious in Freudian psychoanalysis is on of the past--past experiences effect the present by "bubbling" up in dreams, hysterical symptoms, and everyday practices of forgetting, slips of the pen and tongue, jokes, etc. How then, can we get such past to present phenomena to orient themselves in anticipation of the future? or is it not possible?

So, overall, it was an interesting and productive workshop. But what else can we borrow from psychoanalysis? what other merits does psychoanalytic theory give us--individually, culturally, or universally?