Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Wilhite: What Objects Mean: Chapter
Two: Freudian Psychoanalytic
Approach
- analyze material culture in terms of the way artifacts reflect various unconscious needs and desires
and relate to our psychological make up (44)
- psychoanalytic theory as an interpretive art (31)
- it is the hidden meanings and symbolic significance of various artifacts of material culture that a
psychoanalytic approach to the subject attempts to discover (32)
- Can understanding the meanings we invest in our surroundings and objects give us clues to mental illnesses/nuerosis and perhaps the help/cures thereof?
- There will be myriad interpretations; be open to all - be aware of others insights and ready to both explain (not defend) and change your own
- Who should be trusted as best authority?
- advertisers and the political machine are light years ahead of the general populace
- Purpose of focus groups in product research and development
- much of our thinking is based on ‘significant’ symbols and that we use symbols to impose
meaning on things (42)
- our understanding of symbols is connected to the communities in which we are born (42)
- Our understanding/projected meaning of symbols is often unconscious and always social
- Matches part of P's classification in Chapter Three
- Levels: Classifications of artifacts
- Consciousness: What an artifact does (33)
- Collective projection on an object
- Preconsciousness: Other aspects of the artifact's functionality of which we may be aware (33)
- At this level we can make a symbol take on our own idiosyncratic meaning
- Unconscious: Unrecognized symbolic meanings connect to the artifact (33)
- How deeply ingrained are our responses?
- Helpful in organizing the intention of the object and ethos of the culture that makes/gives meaning to the artifact
- Typology o' Freud
- Id: provides energy, but is unfocused and dissociated (37)
- psychic representatives of the [motivational] drives (36)
- shadow energies?
- root of Spoonerisms and "Freudian slips"
- Superego: provides restraint, but if too strong, it inhibits us too much and we become overwhelmed by guilt (37)
- moral precepts of our minds as well as our ideal aspiration
- Our completely impossible standards: our + projections on objects and people
- Ego: stores up experiences in memory...guides us and mediates between id and superego (37)
- Channel energy in to appropriate activity
- Keep Mom at bay
- individual’s relationship with environment (36)
- Make your life your own- what symbols make you YOU?
- Stages of life
- oral
- anal
- phallic
- genital
- This categorization is where Jung and Freud differed and split
- Freud is one way of interpretation- there are others; remember, working with any framework limits and expands
- While more inclined towards Jungian analysis; I give Papa Freud his due