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Psychoanalytic Criticism

Psychoanalytic criticism is based on Freudian theories in psychology,

presented in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, later developed by the
French psychologist Jacques Lacan. However, according to Sigmund Freud,
literature and other works of arts, like dreams and neurotic symptoms, consist of
the imagined, or fantasized, fulfillment of the wishes that are either denied by
reality or are prohibited by the social standards of morality and propriety.1
Nonetheless, for Freud, the working of the mind was taken mostly as a
conscious phenomenon, but then he devised the typographical divisions of the
mind into the conscious, the unconscious and the preconscious. In addition, the
human psyche consists of what he named the id (forming the reservoir of libido or
psychic energy), the ego (representing conscious life) and the superego
(functioning as the voice of conscience and censorship). According to Freud, the
ego represents the organized part of the psyche in contrast to the unorganized
elements of the unconscious (the id), and the ego is that part of the id that has been
modified by direct influence of the external world. The ego represents what may be
called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the
passions.2
While describing his theory of the psychological development of the infant,
Freud postulates three stages in the life of infants — the oral, the anal, and the
phallic — arguing that it is the Oedipus and Castration complex that end earlier
thoughts and create adult beings.3
Therefore, according to Freud, it is the pre-Oedipal complex what makes
Hamlet hesitant to act. That is, Hamlet has suppressed his affections to his mother
until the appearance of the Ghost, which triggers in him the wish of his childhood:
killing his father and to own his mother. Therefore, Hamlet identifies with
Claudius, who does as Hamlet wished to do. It follows that if Hamlet kill Claudius
then, in fact, he is killing himself.4
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However, Lacan, developing Freud theories, creates different categories to

explain a similar path from “infant” to “adult.” He formulates three newly devised
concepts – need, demand, and desire – which roughly correspond to the three
phases of development or three fields in which humans develop or grow: the
Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real.5
The human, who emerges from the Oedipal process, is a split subject, torn
between conscious and unconscious; and the unconscious can always return to
plague him. In popular English speech, the word 'subconscious' rather than
'unconscious' is often used; but this is to underestimate the radical 'otherness' of the
unconscious, imagining it as a place just within reach below the surface. "It
underestimates the extreme strangeness of the unconscious, which is a place and a
non-place, which is completely indifferent to reality, which knows no logic or
negation or causality or contradiction, wholly given over as it is to the instinctual
play of the drives and the search for pleasure."6
The road to the unconscious is dream. Dreams allow us one of our few
privileged glimpses of unconscious at work. Dreams, for Freud, are essentially
symbolic fulfillments of unconscious wishes; and they are cast in symbolic form
because if this material were expressed directly then it might be shocking and
disturbing enough to wake us up. In order that we should get some sleep, the
unconscious charitably conceals, softens and distorts its meanings, so that dreams
become symbolic texts which need to be decoded or condensed constantly. 7
This constant condensation and displacement of meaning corresponds to what
Roman Jakobson identified as the two primary operations of human language:
"metaphor:" condensing meanings together, and "metonymy:" displacing one to
another. It was this which moved Lacan to comment that "the unconscious is
structured like a language". Dream-texts are also cryptic because the unconscious
is rather poor in techniques for representing what it has to say, being largely
confined to visual images, and so must often craftily translate a verbal significance
into a visual one: it might seize upon the image of a tennis racket to make a point
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about some shady dealing. At any rate, dreams are enough to demonstrate that the
unconscious has the admirable resourcefulness of a lazy, ill-supplied chef, who
slings together the most diverse ingredients into a cobbled together stew,
substituting one spice for another which he is out of, making do with whatever has
arrived in the market that morning as a dream will draw opportunistically on the
'day's residues', mixing in events which took place during the day or sensations felt
during sleep with images drawn deep from our childhood.8
It follows that, according to Lacan, human language works by the lack of
desire: the absence of the real objects which signs designate, the fact that words
have meaning only by virtue of the absence and exclusion of others. To enter
language, then, is to become a prey to desire: language is what hollows being into
desire. Language divides up, articulates, the fullness of the imaginary: we will
now never be able to find rest in the single object, the final meaning, which will
make sense of all the others. To enter language is to be severed from what Lacan
calls the 'real', that inaccessible realm which is always beyond the reach of
signification, always outside the symbolic order. In particular, we are severed from
the mother's body: after the Oedipus crisis, we will never again be able to attain
this precious object, even though we will spend all of our lives hunting for it. We
have to make do instead with substitute objects, with which we try vainly to fill in
the gap at the very center of our being. We move among substitutes for substitutes,
metaphors of metaphors, never be able to recover the pure self-identity and self-
completion which we knew in the imaginary. There is no transcendental meaning
or object which will ground this endless yearning.9
However, Ronald Granofsky, commenting on D. H. Lawrence's fictions, cites
Ruderman that the pre-oedipal relationship is more important to an understanding
of Lawrence's works than the heterosexual, genital love relationship for which they
are commonly known."10
The poetry of Lawrence, however, can equally be interpreted in of his pre-
oedipal relationship. Lawrence was firmly attached to his mother. Therefore,
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Lawrence's "Sorrow" shows his getting rid of this sick relationship, after the death
of his mother. This poem opens with a question in which the poet makes an
implicit comparison between the movement of the grey strands of smoke and the
process of his mother's passing away. Lawrence wonders why the smoke of his
cigarette agitates him:

Why does the thin grey strand

Floating up from the forgotten
Cigarette between my fingers,
Why does it trouble me?

In the next stanza, Lawrence answers his own question through revealing that
it is the death of his mother, which the poet compares to a thief that walks in
stealth, that makes him fall in deep sorrow:

Ah, you will understand;

When I carried my mother downstairs,
A few times only, at the beginning
Of her soft-foot malady,

In the last stanza, however, Lawrence shows that his pleasure, his "gaiety,"
has come to an end by the death of his mother. This gaiety ends as the "few long
grey hairs" of his mother move from "the breast" of his coat to "the dark chimney."
However, these grey hairs are reluctant in their movement. That is, they move one
by one, and slowly floating to the chimney:

I should find, for a reprimand

To my gaiety, a few long grey hairs
On the breast of my coat; and one by one
I let them float up the dark chimney.
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Notes

1
Bijay Kumar Das, Twentieth Century Literary Criticism (New Delhi:
Atlantic Publishers and Distributors Ltd., 2005), 105.
2
Khursheed Ahmad Qazi (2011), "Lacanian concepts – Their Relevance to
Literary Analysis and Interpretation: A Post Structural Reading," The Criterion:
An International Journal in English Vol. 2 Issue 4 (December 2011), www.the-
criterion.com (accessed April 16th, 2013).
3
Ibid.
4
Raman Selden, Practicing Theory and Reading Literature: An Introduction
(Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), 83.
5
Qazi
6
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (London: Blackwell
Publishing, 1996), 136.
7
Ibid.: 136.
8
Ibid.: 137.
9
Ibid.: 156.
10
Ronald Granofsky, D. H. Lawrence and Survival: Darinsim in the Fiction
of the Transitional Period (Quebec: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003), 37.