PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

Psychoanalytic concepts have become part of our everyday lives, and therefore
psychoanalytic thinking should have the advantage of familiarity. If you’ve ever told an angry friend
“Don’t take it out on me!” you were accusing that friend of displacement, which is the
psychoanalytic name for transferring our anger with one person onto another person (usually one
who won’t fight back or can’t hurt us as badly as the person with whom we are really angry).
Psychoanalytic concepts such as sibling rivalry, inferiority complexes, and defense
mechanisms are in such common use that most of us feel we know what they mean without ever
having heard them defined.
When we look at the world through a psychoanalytic lens, we see that it is comprised of
individual human beings, each with a psychological history that begins in childhood experiences in
the family and each with patterns of adolescent and adult behavior that are the direct result of that
early experience. Because the goal of psychoanalysis is to help us resolve our psychological
problems, often called disorders or dysfunctions (and none of us is completely free of psychological
problems), the focus is on patterns of behavior that are destructive in some way. I say patterns of
behavior because our repetition of destructive behavior reveals the existence of some significant
psychological difficulty that has probably been influencing us for some time without our knowing it.
Assignment:
1. Read and understand the article, Id, Ego, and Superego by Saul McLeod.
2. Using the table below, cite examples of psychoanalytic concepts that could be found in your
chosen literary pieces.

Examples of Stories Id Ego Superego

(Title, Situation,
Characters being
analyzed)
1.

2.

3.