Introduction

Introduction

1. Do we use sex as self defence

   • n the work of Marx and Freud the term 'fetishism' is used to identify a misunderstanding of the world in which properties are attributed to objects that can only correctly be attributed to human beings. Fetishism and the social value of objects file 68098
     • Our fetishisms are used as displacement self defences
     • Art can be fetish and visualise displacement
     • Objects and attributes are displaced in art
     • Fetishm in art is displacement of our desires
   • . To identify a fetish is to expose the inadequate beliefs of those who revere it for what they believe it is capable of, by pointing to the real, material, qualities of the object and identifying its presumed capacities as really residing elsewhere - in the 'true' god; in human labour; in arousal by a person of the opposite sex. file 68098
     • Does art display inadequecys of our sexual desires?
     • Do we want sex but cannot get none
     • We are too horny for art
   • A fetish is created through the veneration or worship of an object that is attributed some power or capacity, independently of its manifestation of that capacity. file 68098
     • We displace our sexual desires onto art
     • Art are sex objects
   • Charcot was experimenting with the use of hypnosis, and he and Freud found that under hypnosis many of the hysterical patients reported having experienced a traumatic sexual experience, such as sexual abuse, as children (Dolnick, 1998) https://opentextbc.ca/introductiontopsychology/chapter/11-2-the-origins-of-personality/
     • Sex is hiding our inadequecies of our sex life

2. Does sex make us feel better

   • causal relationship one image of a dream of person or thing is transferred to another File: Freud Dreams VI_BE PDF
     • Dreams and art is transfered to another
     • Art can reflect our misrepresented dreams
     • Art is displacement of our dreams and desires
   • A revisionist idea, proposed by Fenichel (1945), is that defense mechanisms are actually designed to protect self-esteem https://faculty.fortlewis.edu/burke_b/personality/readings/freuddefense.pdf
     • Is art good for self esteem?
     • Art boosts our confidence
     • Art conveys our confidence and needs

3. Sexual repression as defence mechanism

   • Displacement, like many other psychological defense mechanisms, often occurs subconsciously—the person is not aware they are doing it. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-displacement-in-psychology-4587375
     • Art is the window to our subconcisous
     • Art has hidden meaning
   • A person is attracted to their spouse's best friend, but they know that acting on it would have catastrophic consequences. Instead, the desire they feel is unconsciously displaced, and they develop a sexual fetish for glasses similar to the ones worn by the spouse's best friend. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-displacement-in-psychology-4587375
     • Art represents our sexual desires
     • Art has hidden sexual symbols and displacement
   • When we use defense mechanisms, we are unaware that we are using them. Further, they operate in various ways that distort reality. According to Freud, we all use ego defense mechanisms. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/atd-bhcc-intropsych/chapter/freud-and-the-psychodynamic-perspective/
     • Sex in art is distorted to displace our fears and wants
     • Displacement in art creates sexual desires
     • Art hides our sexual fustrations
   • Freud believed that feelings of anxiety result from the ego’s inability to mediate the conflict between the id and superego. When this happens, Freud believed that the ego seeks to restore balance through various protective measures known as defense mechanisms https://courses.lumenlearning.com/atd-bhcc-intropsych/chapter/freud-and-the-psychodynamic-perspective/
     • Art shows visuals clues on egos wants and defenses
     • Art can be represented as the ego with hidden underlying meaning
     • Sex as underlying meaning
   • Yet a particular crisis in selfperception may arise when an internal or external event occurs that clearly violates the preferred view of self. In such cases, it is necessary for the self to have some mechanism or process to defend itself against the threatening implications of this event. Such processes are commonly called defense mechanisms (e.g., Cramer, 1991; A. Freud, 1936) https://faculty.fortlewis.edu/burke_b/personality/readings/freuddefense.pdf
     • Art is protecting you from threats
     • Pleasing visual art creates defense mechanisms
     • Protecting your self from negative thoughts

4. Is art just sexy for arts sake?

   • Jung argued that in addition to the personal unconscious, there was also a collective unconscious, or a collection of shared ancestral memories Carl Jung (1875-1961) https://opentextbc.ca/introductiontopsychology/chapter/11-2-the-origins-of-personality/
     • Art represents our collective conscious
   • For Freud, perversion is initially a question of partial drives that fail to be harmonized into normal adult sexuality. Perversion, as he puts it, is the remnant of a failing Oedipus. Looking at this failure through the lens of fetishism, he attributes it to the uncanny perception of the absence of the missing female phallus and the ensuing disavowal of castration. But when he uses masochism/sadism as the paradigm to explain the failure to harmonize the partial drives, it is the deadly character of the masochistic and sadistic drives that will be held responsible. https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8532234/file/8532235
     • Sex in art is just a failure in pleasing our sex drive
     • Failure to harmonize with normal adult sexuality
     • Fetishm and perversion is because of failing oedipus
   • But the novel idea of the fetish representing the woman’s missing penis, makes here its first appearance. Freud combines it with the idea of a symbolic connection between the fetish and a significant memory from early infancy, which is already to be found in Binet. https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8532234/file/8532235
     • Art evokes sexual desires and needs

5. The ID says yes the superego says no

   • According to Freud, the id is driven by the pleasure principle — the desire for immediate gratification of our sexual and aggressive urges. The id is why we smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, view pornography, tell mean jokes about people, and engage in other fun or harmful behaviours, often at the cost of doing more productive activities. https://opentextbc.ca/introductiontopsychology/chapter/11-2-the-origins-of-personality/
     • Art pleases our ID through submilinal sexual messages
     • We all like to feel sexy and turned on
     • Is art censoring sex?
     • Doorway to sex
     • Art pleases our ID
     • Artists are generally driven by our ID
   • Diagram of id, ego and superego
     • ID can be seen as our main sexual drive
     • Good visual art pleases the ID and our ego responds with pleasure

6. Layers of sex

   • In the same way as in that scene described by Freud in which the dandelion flowers stand out for their ‘disproportionately relevant’ yellow, as the bread for its delicious flavor, exaggerated ‘in an almost hallucinatory way’ (FREUD, 1899/1996, p. 294)
     • Sex in dreams are exaggerated by condensation to create a rich symbolisation
     • Layers of sex symbols are exaggerated in our dreams
     • Dreams contains layers of sex symbols and meanings
   • Condensation refers to the reduction and simplification of rich contents of latent dream. Displacement refers to a process that substitutes various aspects (e.g., constituents, intensity, significance, and properties) of manifest and latent dream to render them dissimilar. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6115518/#:~:text=Condensation%20refers%20to%20the%20reduction,dream%20to%20render%20them%20dissimilar.
     • Dreams simplify our needs and desires
     • Condensation reduces and simplifies our rich contents
     • Sex is condensed in our dreams as different meanings
   • No analogous symbols exist in dream content because the elements presented therein are merely memory fragments and other components of information processing (see Zhang, 2016) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6115518/#:~:text=Condensation%20refers%20to%20the%20reduction,dream%20to%20render%20them%20dissimilar.
     • Dreams are only fragements of our subconscouis
     • Fragmented dreams contains layers of metaphors

7. What are the sexual metaphors

   • Some researchers have also pointed out that dream symbols are too far-fetched (see Freud, 1916). In other words, dreams are not riddles to be translated (Hartmann, 2010a), and “the manifest dream is the real dream” (Jiménez, 2012); thus, Freud's dream-work does not exist according to this point of view. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6115518/#:~:text=Condensation%20refers%20to%20the%20reduction,dream%20to%20render%20them%20dissimilar.
     • Dream symbols can be too far condensed
     • Dreams may not directly mean what they show
     • Dreams are full of sexual metaphors that cannot be translated directly
     • The manifest is the true meaning and does not contain hidden metaphors
   • Therefore, the self-organization mechanism is necessary: it provides a relatively stable state for the dreaming brain, as it can offer a way in which the system can give rise to ordered behavior, structure, or pattern from disorder (Haken, 1977; Prigogine and Stengers, 1984; Fingelkurts et al., 2013) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6115518/#:~:text=Condensation%20refers%20to%20the%20reduction,dream%20to%20render%20them%20dissimilar.
     • Self organisation creates sexual metaphors which transfers sexual meaning
     • It creates ordered behaviour and structure or pattern of sexual urges

8. Is sex hiding the truth?

   • Condensation is the reason why there is no neat, one-to-one correspondence between the elements of the manifest content and the latent content. https://www.freud.org.uk/education/resources/the-interpretation-of-dreams/the-dream-work/
     • Condensation distorts meaning through layers of elements
     • Condensation hides sexual desires in layers of the dream
   • It is also why the manifest content is so much more compact than the latent content. A single fragment of a dream can carry several latent dream-thoughts, even contradictory ones. https://www.freud.org.uk/education/resources/the-interpretation-of-dreams/the-dream-work/
     • Manifest dreams have layers condensed into a single fragement
     • Sex is hidden inside of condense dreams
     • Dream symbols contains many sex fragements
   • The intelligence and compensatory function of archetypal manifestations is an automatic concsequence of the design of the objective psyche. It is analogous to a thermostat turning an air conditioner on and off. The unconscious deos not reason. It remains limited to irrational symbol formation.https://www.freud.org.uk/education/resources/the-interpretation-of-dreams/the-dream-work/
     • The unconcsious is irrational and can hide sex urges in different layers
     • The irrational symbols can be condensed into multiple layers of meaning
   • Dreams are meaningful, motivated, and purposeful: they are not random, meaningless, and incoherent gibberish https://www.sunypress.edu/pdf/60336.pdf freud 1900
     • Dreams have meaning that can be interpreted
     • We can translate dreams into sexual urges
   • Unlike motivations, intentions, and desires, dreams involve more than wishing: they portray the fulfilling of wishes https://www.sunypress.edu/pdf/60336.pdf Freud 1900
     • Dreams fulfills our wishes and desires
     • They fulfil our sexual urges and desires
   • Freud 1900 regarded symbol formation as the whole of the unconscious process of dreaming. "dreams are nothing other than a particular form of thinking, made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep. It is the dreamwork which creates that form and it alone is the essence of dreaming
     • Dreams are a particular form of dreaming and reflects our subconscious desires
     • Dreams fulfil our subconscouis desires

9. What is sexy?

   • According to his theory, subconscious processes are continuously scouring our thoughts to keep our innermost desires locked away. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160706-what-freudian-slips-really-reveal-about-your-mind
     • What we find sexy is continously processed in our subconscious and keeps our innermost desires locked away
     • Our subconscious decides what is sexy and what is not
     • Art that keys into our subconscious unlocks our inner most desires
   • It’s the result of the way words are accessed in the brain. First, one must be selected from a network of words which are organised by similarity and meaning – an opportunity to mix up Culture and Hunt. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160706-what-freudian-slips-really-reveal-about-your-mind
     • Art with key themes are selected from a network of words by similarity and meaning
     • Similarity and meaning relating to sex symbols satisfy us the most

10. What is turning us on?

    • Emotion plays a distinctive role in condensation. Freud 1900 noted that in dreams the ideational content is not accompanied by the effective consequences that we should regard as inevitable in waking thought. Freud 1900
      • Our emotion causes condensation
      • Condensation in art is just for suppressing sex instincts
      • Art creates visual layers to the visual narrative
    • He suggested that the affect felt in the dream belongs to its latent and not to its manifest content, and that the dreams affective content has remained untouched by the distortion which has overtaken its ideational content freud 1900
      • Latent dreams condenses our dreams
      • Latent content does not distort but condenses our dreams
    • As Mackay (1996, pp. 10–11) points out, “any theory must, if it is to be coherent and a serious account of motivation, specify the states of the person that motivate action independently of the motivated action, and be able to show in principle how such states become linked to objects.”
      • Sexual instincts act as a motivator independent from our motivated actions
    • These drives as ‘biological engines’ provide the embodied motivational foundations driving thought and behavior, and determine the innate policy of human activity, even if their aims are modifiable via experiences (see Maze, 1983). Freud (1910) initially grouped these drives according to self-preservation (e.g., hunger) or libidinality (e.g., sexuality), and later between life and death instincts (Freud, 1920) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5216045/
      • Like hunger they drive our biological instincts to satisfy our needs
      • Sex in art focuses on drive and satisfaction
      • Sex is necessary for self preservation and for instincts
      • our subconscious condenses dreams because of biological drives needs for sex
    • For Freud (1915), somatically based drives are the policy makers of desires and affective responses generally, whereas affects appear to be the drives’ embodied experience of their relations toward objects (Boag, 2008, 2012, 2014) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5216045/
      • Our drives provide the framework for our instincts and needs and desires
      • Instincts creates the condensation of our dreams to feed our needs and desires
    • Freud, the drives are psychobiological systems: drives typically require interactions with the external environment for their gratification—to satisfy hunger, for example, requires finding and eating food. Freud’s view is consistent with research linking both drives and emotional systems with cognitive states Boag S 2017 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5216045/
      • Does art satisfy our hunger?
      • Art is condensed to satisfy our needs
      • Sexy art is just to satisfy our hunger
      • We are driven by our hunger for sex