Thanks for another great class! Your comments and observations in response to the Blood bot's latest tweet have perceptively and creatively brought Hans Holbein the Younger's The Ambassadors into meaningful dialogue with conflicts between the conscious and the unconscious, manifest and latent content, and the secular and the religious. For your viewing pleasure, here's the full painting with the anamorphic skull included:
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| Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors (1533, oil on oak) |
I hope my remarks on Freud's understanding of dreams, lapsus and jokes shed some light on our seemingly paradoxical ability to apprehend the unconscious despite the fact that it's largely inaccessible to our conscious awareness.
For your amusement and edification, you may be interested in viewing George Bush's comments on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Justin Trudeau can be seen making a similar lapsus here.
Stephen Colbert's joke on the incestuous relations between Donald and Ivanka Trump is likewise a superb specimen of a pun which channels unconscious thoughts into the open arena of consciousness. You can watch it here (start viewing at about five minutes into the video!).
As I indicated in the lecture, in his dense and brilliant masterpiece Totem and Taboo (1912-13), Freud builds upon his complementary clinical discoveries of the unconscious and the Œdipus complex by applying a psychoanalytic lens to ethnological data, discourse and puzzles circulating in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In so doing, he underscores how violence, lust and transgression at once lie at the origins of, and remain ever-present within, human culture, society and religion. We'll see next week how Renée Girard draws upon and further explicates these motifs and insights.
Francisco de Goya, Cannibals contemplating human remains (1800-1808, oil on wood)
For this week's blogging assignment, I'd like you to identify and describe an example (from history, current affairs, popular culture or your life experience) of a lapsus or joke which could be interpreted as evincing the existence of unconscious thoughts. Let me know how your example illustrates the Freudian understanding of the human mind and/or other themes from our course.
If you can't come up with an example, please articulate one question which arose for you in relation to this week's reading, lecture and/or tutorial.
I look forward to learning from your blogs!