One minor correction I would like to make to a previous blog post before going ahead with this blog post – lest my readers mistakenly think I am misleading them – is in regards to the minute detail I provided about the origins of my introduction to Shakespeare in high school. The play which I reenacted in high school was actually “Macbeth,” not “Hamlet.” For some reason, I often confuse “Macbeth” for “Hamlet” and vice versa, notwithstanding the fact that the detail which I recalled goes back almost two decades. One is susceptible to making certain errors when going that far back. And although it was a minor error – and perhaps the only error made through the course of this blog – it is an error that should be corrected nonetheless.
In retrospect, Freud looms large over a number of my previous blog posts. I mentioned the Freudian and psychoanalytic element involved in the high school experience in America, with the American high school experience serving as an analogy, anecdote, or metaphor for the broader American experience. The idea that the American experience is embedded at the core with a Freudian or psychoanalytic element was an idea I was first exposed to in my sophomore year of college. I was exposed to the idea that Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis are at the core of the American experience in a ‘1960’s American Literature’ course taught by a professor named David Williams. Before becoming an English professor, Williams received his PhD from Brown University.
As a result of that course, I was able to grasp the essence of the American psyche, and in turn the ideas and material I drew from that course impacted the content of this blog to a certain extent. Moreover, once you grab the essence of something like the American psyche, you can then make sense of everything else that involves the American experience. That course introduced me to the likes of Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Wolfe, James Baldwin, Ken Kesey, and other American thinkers and writers of that unique period of American history. But the leitmotif or the overarching theme of that course was Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis.
When applying the leitmotif or overarching theme of that course to everyday life in America, the characters and issues drawn from that unique period of American culture and literature are ubiquitous even in this day and age, but in different forms. The “Nurse Ratched” of that time can be found even in this day and age by simply watching the news, but the characters and issues manifest in a different form. Thus, the contents of the past remain in the subconscious of the American psyche, and are brought to the fore even in the present moment. Also, the essence remains the same, but the form changes.
There is also the issue of discourse which requires a degree of emphasis before concluding. On one hand, there is an abundance discourse. And on the other hand, there is a scarcity discourse. Essentially, a discourse amounts to a chain of actions, thoughts and words which stem from a foundational idea or text. Thus, the discourse which shapes the entirety of this blog is essentially an abundance discourse, which impacts the receptivity or lack of receptivity given to the content of this blog in the public sphere.
Adam A. Azim 