EL109 LITERARY CRITICISM

CHAPTER 7: Freudian Literary Criticism

Objectives:

a.) Define Freudian criticism and its characteristics.

b.) Analyze how it affects the reader’s interpretation of the text.

They pay close attention to unconscious motives and

feelings, whether these are those of the author or of the
characters depicted in the work.
They demonstrate the presence in the literary work of
classic psychoanalytic symptoms or conditions.

Theory of Neurosis

(Decade of the 1890’s) – When Freud used

hypnosis and Breuer’s cathartic method of
psychotherapy, gradually developing the psychoanalytic
methods of free association, dream interpretation, and
the analysis of transference.

Neurosis

Is a defense against intolerable memories of a traumatic experience- infantile

seduction at the hands of a close relative.
―Psychology for Neurologists‖ or (―Project for a scientific Psychology‖) – On 1895
Freud sending a comprehensive anatomical-physiological model of the nervous system
and its functioning in normal behavior, thought, and dreams, as well as in hysteria.

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Freud’s Topographic Model

The interpretation of Dreams (1900)

Was further elaborated in the

metapsychological papers (1915), conceptualizes
thought and behavior in terms of processes in three
psychological systems.
1st: Conscious
2nd: Preconscious
3rd: Unconscious

Three essays on the Theory of sexuality (1905)

Which advanced his theory of sexuality, in particular its relation to childhood. The
following are the three essays on the Theory of Sexuality
1st: The Sexual Aberrations
2nd: Infantile Sexuality
3rd: The Transformation of Puberty

“Contributions” Freud may be said to have made five major contributions.

1. Psychic determinism
The lawfulness of all psychological phenomena, even the most trivial, including
dreams, fantasies, and slips of the tongue
2. Psychic apparatus
That characterizes the unconscious id; indeed. It is the principal property by
means of which the latter is denned, cesses characterized by magical rather than
rational logic and by wish fullness-a seeking for immediate gratification of crude
sexual or aggressive impulses-are called primary. Freud emphasized the
concepts of displacement and condensation of psychic energy in his
conceptualization of the primary process and noted that it often makes use of
symbols, which differ from other types of displacement substitutes in having been
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shared by many persons for generations. These were the main theoretical
resources Freud called upon to explain dreams, neurotic symptoms, psychotic
thought and language, normal character traits, myths, creative thought, art, and
humor.

3. Of the many contributions Freud made to our understanding of sexuality,

the following seem to enjoy the most acceptance:

His stress on its great importance in human life generally; his broad definition,
which includes oral, anal, and other bodily pleasures and links them to the phallic
genital; his conception of its plasticity-it can be delayed, transformed, or fixated,
and interest can be shifted from one ―component drive‖ or ―partial instinct‖ to
another; his discovery that it appears early in human life (infants and young
children masturbate, have sexual curiosity, etc.) and follows a typical
developmental sequence; his insistence that bisexuality and ―polymorphous
perversity‖ are universal endowments or potentialities; his explanation of sexual
perversions as pathological developments, not (or not wholly) as constitutional
givens and not as sins; and his elaborations of many aspects of the Oedipus
complex-the fact of inevitable but tabooed incestuous attraction in families, the
associated phenomena of anxiety that castration (or, more generally, mutilation),
and of intra-familial jealousy, hatred, and envy, much of it unconscious.

4. Three of Freud’s concepts

Conflict, Anxiety, and Defense – are so interrelated that we may look on them
as constituting one major contribution. He saw the pervasive importance of

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conflict (not merely the traditional opposition of reason and passion, or ego
versus id, but also ego versus superego and superego versus id) in both normal
and abnormal behavior.

5. A number of Freud’s lasting discoveries and insights make up the genetic

point of view
He showed the necessity of knowing facts of development in order to understand
personality.
The importance of the events of the early life for the main features of character,
including the specific syndromes of the oral and anal character types as
outgrowths of events at the corresponding psychosexual stages;
The role of identification as the principle of learning and development; the
importance of drive delay and control in development; and the nature of
psychopathology as regression along a developmental path.

Freudian criticism takes many forms. The sexual

imagery can be analyzed, but sheds little light on this
poem. More useful is Freud's approach to dreams and
fantasies. The processes of condensation,
displacement, representation and secondary revision
disclose elements that would have escaped traditional
criticism.

Freud was a cultivated man and, while not entirely approving of artists, did take a
close interest in artistic production and appreciation. Psychic energy (libido) was sexual
at base, but was not channeled wholly into sexual activity. Amongst its expressions
were dreams, fantasies and the personality disorders that arose when instinctual drives
were constrained by exterior reality: the pleasure principle versus the reality principle.
Desire was the motivating force of the artist — an inordinate desire to win honour,

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power, wealth, fame and the love of women with a corresponding lack of means of
doing so. Notoriously, the artist was an introvert, and not far removed from a neurotic.
Nonetheless, Freud did not confuse daydreams and artistic creation, did not reduce
aesthetics to wish fulfillment, and admitted that psychoanalysis could not say how the
artist achieved his successes. Dreams and art both employed strategies to transform
primitive desires into the culturally acceptable, and indeed the artist masked and
sweetened his daydreams with aesthetic form. Even Freud's much-criticized
essay Leonardo and a memory of his childhood is more a psycho-biography than art
criticism.
Freudian literary analysis comes in various degrees of subtlety. At its most
elementary, the novel or poem may be analyzed simply in terms of phallic symbols: the
assertive male organ or receptive female organ. More usually there is some attempt to
see these as the secret embodiment of the author's unconscious desires.
Examples of Freudian Literary Criticism:
 Sigmund Freud's Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood (1910)
 Edmund Wilson's The Turn of the Screw (1948)
 Marie Bonaparte's The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1949)
 Henry Murray's In Nomine Diaboli (1951)
 Aubrey Williams's The 'Fall' of China in John Dixon Hunt's (Ed.) Pope: The Rape
of the Lock (1968)
 Maud Ellmann's Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism (1994)

For More Knowledge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA_bIwwg5xI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdGCDN9RRSk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2Qcmhsvcms

Reference:
http://www.textetc.com/criticism/freudian-criticism.html

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