Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

Figure 5.2 Freud’s conflict model of the human psyche.
Freudian psychoanalysis 93
the internal world, of the id’ (366). ‘Thus the super-ego is always close to the id and
can act as its representative vis-à-vis the ego. It reaches deep down into the id and for
that reason is farther from consciousness than the ego is’ (390). Furthermore, ‘Analysis
eventually shows that the super-ego is being influenced by processes that have
remained unknown to the ego’ (392).
There are two particular things to note about Freud’s model of the psyche. First, we
are born with an id, while the ego develops through contact with culture, which in turn
produces the super-ego. In other words, our ‘nature’ is governed (sometimes successfully,
sometimes not) by culture. What is called ‘human nature’ is not something
‘essentially’ natural but the governance of our nature by culture. This means that
human nature is not something innate and unchangeable, it is something at least in
part introduced from outside. Moreover, given that culture is always historical and variable,
it is itself always open to change. Second, and perhaps much more fundamental
to psychoanalysis, the psyche is envisaged as a site of perpetual conflict (see Figure 5.2).
The most fundamental conflict is between the id and the ego. The id wants desires
satisfied regardless of the claims of culture, while the ego, sometimes in loose alliance
with the super-ego, is obliged to meet the claims and conventions of society. This
conflict is sometimes portrayed as a struggle between the ‘pleasure principle’ and the
‘reality principle’. For example, while the id (governed by the pleasure principle) may
demand ‘I want it’ (whatever ‘it’ might be), the ego (governed by the reality principle)
must defer thinking about ‘it’ in order to consider how to get ‘it’.
‘The essence of repression’, according to Freud, ‘lies simply in turning something
away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious’ (147). In this way, then, we
could say that repression is a special form of amnesia; it removes all the things with
which we cannot or will not deal. But as Freud (1985) makes clear, we may have
repressed these things, but they have not really gone away: ‘Actually, we never give anything
up; we only exchange one thing for another. What appears to be a renunciation
is really the formation of a substitute or surrogate’ (133). These ‘substitutive formations’
make possible the ‘return of the repressed’ (Freud, 1984: 154). Dreams provide
perhaps the most dramatic staging of the return of the repressed. As Freud (1976)
claims, ‘The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to the unconscious’ (769).
The primary function of dreams is to be ‘the guardians of sleep which get rid of disturbances
of sleep’ (Freud, 1973a: 160). Sleep is threatened from three directions:
external stimulus, recent events, and ‘repressed instinctual impulses which are on the
watch for an opportunity of finding expression’ (45). Dreams guard sleep by incorporating
potential disturbances into the narrative of the dream. If, for example, a noise
sounds during sleep, a dream will attempt to include the noise in its narrative organization.
Similarly, when a sleeper experiences somatic disturbances (indigestion is the