Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 5 Psychoanalysis
transfers all his interest, and his libido too, to the wishful constructions of his life
of phantasy, whence the path might lead to neurosis (423).
The artist sublimates his or her desire. In so doing, she or he makes his or her
fantasies available to others, thus making ‘it possible for others to share in the enjoyment
of them’ (423–4). He or she ‘makes it possible for other people . . . to derive consolation
and pleasure in their unconscious which have become inaccessible to them’
(424). Texts ‘allay ungratified wishes – in the first place in the creative artist himself and
subsequently in his audience or spectators’ (1986: 53). As he explains: ‘The artist’s first
aim is to set himself free and, by communicating his work to other people suffering
from the same arrested desires, he offers them the same liberation’ (53).
The second approach is reader-centred, and derives from the secondary aspect of the
author-centred approach. This approach is concerned with how texts allow readers to
symbolically play out desires and fantasies in the texts they read. In this way, a text
works like a substitute dream. Freud deploys the idea of ‘fore-pleasure’ to explain the
way in which the pleasures of the text ‘make possible the release of still greater pleasure
arising from deeper psychical sources’ (1985: 141). In other words, fictional texts
stage fantasies that offer the possibility of unconscious pleasure and satisfaction. As he
further explains,
In my opinion, all the aesthetic pleasure which a creative writer affords us has the
character of a fore-pleasure . . . our actual enjoyment of an imaginative work proceeds
from a liberation of tensions in our minds . . . enabling us thenceforward to
enjoy our day-dreams without self-reproach or shame (ibid.).
In other words, although we may derive pleasure from the aesthetic qualities of a text,
these are really only the mechanism that allows us access to the more profound pleasures
of unconscious fantasy.
Little Redcape
There was once a sweet little girl who was loved by everyone who so much as
looked at her, and most of all her grandmother loved her and was forever trying
to think of new presents to give the child. Once she gave her a little red velvet
cape, and because it suited her so well and she never again wanted to wear anything
else, she was known simply as Little Redcape. One day her mother said to
her: ‘Come, Little Redcape, here’s a piece of cake and a bottle of wine; take them
out to your grandmother, she’s sick and weak and she’ll enjoy them very much.
Set out before it gets hot, and when you’re on your way watch your step like a
good girl and don’t stray from the path, or you’ll fall and break the bottle and
grandmother will get nothing. And when you go into her room, remember to say
good morning and not to stare all round the room first.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll do everything as I should,’ said Little Redcape to her mother
and promised faithfully. Now her grandmother lived out in the forest, half an