PSYCHOANALYTIC LITERARY CRITISM

Psychoanalytic Literary Critism - refers to literary Critism or literary theory which, in method, concept or
form, is influence by the tradition of psychoanalysis begun by Sigmund Freud.
Freud begun his psychoanalytic work in 1880’s while attempting the treat behavioral disorders in
his Viennese patients. He dubbed the disorders “hysteria” and began treating them by listening to his
patients talk through their problems. Based on this work, Freud asserted that people’s behavior is affected
by their unconscious( the notion that human beings are motivated, even driven, by desires, fears, needs
and conflicts of which they are unaware.
Freud developed a language that described a model that explained, and a theory that
encompassed human Psychology .His theories are directly and indirectly concerned in the nature of the
unconscious mind. Probably because of Freud’s characterization of the artist’s mind as “one urged on by
instincts that are too clamorous.” Psychoanalytic Critism written before 1950 tended to psychoanalyze the
individual author .Literary works were read- sometimes unconvincingly - as fantasies that allowed authors
to indulge repressed wishes, to protect themselves from deep- seated anxieties, or both. After 1950,
psychoanalytic critics begun to emphasize the ways in which authors creates works that appeal to reader’s
repressed wishes and fantasies.
Freudian Psychoanalytic Literary Critism see the literary works as having a conscious and
unconscious meaning, that is the work has a surface meaning and then there is what the work is “really”
about.
The object can be the psychoanalysis of the author or a particular interesting character in a given
work.
Psychoanalytic Literary Critism adopts the methods of “reading” employed by Freud and later
theorist to interpret texts. It argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires
and anxieties of the authors that a literary works is a manifestations of the authors own neuroses. One may
psychoanalyze a particular character within a literary work, but it is usually assumed that all such
characters are projections of the author’s psyche.
One interesting facets of this approach is that- it validates the importance of literature, as it built on
a literary key for the decoding.
Like psychoanalysis itself, this critical endeavor seeks evidenced of unresolved emotions, psychological
conflicts, guilt’s, ambivalences and so forth within what may will be a disunified literary wok. The author’s
own childhood traumas, family life, sexual conflicts, fixations and such will traceable within the behavior of
the characters in the literary work. But psychological material will be expressed indirectly, disguised, or
encoded(as in dreams) through principles such as “symbolism”-(the repressed object represented in
disguised),,”Condensation”-(several thoughts or persons represented in a single image),,and
“Displacement”’-(anxiety located onto another image by means of association).
Freud’s notes that literary text are like dreams: they embody or express unconscious material in
the form of complex displacements and condensation. Literature is not a direct translation of the
unconscious into symbol that “stands for” unconscious meanings. Rather, literature displaces unconscious
desires, drives and motives into imagery that might bear no resemblance its origin, but nonetheless
express it.
According to Freud, the human psyche may be divided into three components:

1.”the id”- the unconscious reservoir of instinctual or libidinal desires and impulses that seeks gratification
often sexual, and follow the dictates of the pleasure principle;
2.”The superego”- the moral sensor that internalizes the “thou shalt not’s” of the given social order, its
ethical proscriptions and;
3.”the ego”- the conscious self that tries to mediate between the conflicting demands of id and superego
through accommodation, repression(denial of unconscious desires and impulses),,or
sublimation(translations of this desires and impulses into “higher” aims).Despites its mastery of the defense
mechanisms and repression and sublimation, the ego is perpetually in a state of conflict.

EARLY APPLICATIONS

Freud wrote several important essays in literature, which he used to explore the psyche of the authors
and characters, to explain narratives mysteries, and to develop new concepts in psychoanalysis( for
instance, delusion and dream in Jensen’s gradiva and his influential readings of the Oedipus myth and the
Shakespeare’s hamlet in the interpretation of dreams). The critism has been made, however, that in his and
his early followers’ studies’ what calls for elucidation are not the artistic and literary works themselves, but
rather the psychopathology and biography of the artist, writer or fictional characters. Later analysts would
conclude that clearly one cannot psychoanalyze a writer from his text; one can only appropriate him.
Early psychoanalytic literary critism would often treat the text as if it were a kind of dream. This
means that the text represses its real(or latent) content behind obvious(manifest) content. The process of
changing from latent to manifest to manifest content is known as the dream work and involves operations
and concentrations and displacement. The critics analyzes the language and the symbolism of the text to
reversed the process of the dream work and arrive at the underlying latent thoughts. The danger is that
such critism tends to be reductive, explaining away the ambiguities of works of literature by reference to
established psychoanalytic doctrine; and very little work retains much influence today.

What psychoanalysis and literature have in common, and what psychoanalysis can contribute to literature:

Psychoanalysis is a "talking cure"; language and narrative are fundamental to it. In a sense psychoanalytic therapy is
the re-narratization of a person's life.

As psychoanalysis deals with language and with interpretation, it introduces a significant approach to the
hermeneutics of suspicion, the idea that there are motives and meanings which are disguised by and work through
other meanings. The "hermeneutics of suspicion" (Paul Ricoeur's term) is not limited to psychoanalytic thought but is
found in structural thought generally -- the idea that we look, to understand action, to sub-texts, not pre-texts.

Psychoanalysis deals with motives, especially hidden or disguised motives; as such it helps clarify literature on two
levels, the level of the writing itself, and the level of character action within the text. A 'companion' level to the level of
writing is the level of reading; both reading and writing, as they respond to motives not always available to rational
thought, can be illumined by psychoanalytic thought.

Psychoanalysis deals with many basic elements which we might think of as poetic or literary, including metaphor and
metonymy; Freud deals with this particularly in his work on the interpretation of dreams, and Lacan sees metaphor
and metonymy as fundamental to the workings of the psyche.

Psychoanalysis opens the nature of the subject: who it is who is experiencing, what our relationships of meaning and
identity are to the psychic and cultural forces which ground so much of our being. This understanding, particularly in
terms of Lucan’s sense that the subject is ex-centric to itself, is very important in contemporary understandings of
reading, meaning, and the relation of literature to culture.

Psychoanalysis examines the articulation of our most private anxieties and meanings to culture and gives us a
perspective on them as cultural formations.

Psychoanalysis looks to culture as informative of our deepest psychic levels.

Psychoanalysis deals with the relations of 'body' meanings (what Kristeva would call, in her formulation, the
'semiotic') and drives to symbolic, or cultural, meanings.

Psychoanalytic thought is part of the project of much 20th Century thought to 'correct' the Cartesian mind/body split,
to see humans as bodily, incarnate beings. Psychoanalysis tends to read this split as a deracination of the self from
its vital and formative being.

Psychoanalysis constitutes one approach to the questions of good and evil, and especially of suffering and error,
which plague us as humans. Despite the importance of the authors here, psychoanalytic critism is similar to new
critism in not concerning itself with “what the author intended.” But what the author never Intended( that is repressed)
is sought. The unconscious material has been distorted by the censoring conscious mind.

PSYCHOANALYTIC APPROACHES

All psychoanalytic approaches to literature have one thing in common—the critics begin with a full
psychological theory of how and why people behave as they do, a theory that has been developed by a
psychologist/psychiatrist/psychoanalyst outside of the realm of literature, and they apply this psychological
theory as a standard to interpret and evaluate a literary work. The developer of the theory and the details of
the theory will vary, but the theories are all universalist in scope, positing patterns of behavior that are not
dependent on specific times, places, and cultures. Frequently invoked theorists include Sigmund Freud,
Carl Jung, and Jacques Lacan.

Because psychoanalytic theories have been developed outside the realm of literature, they are not tied to a
specific aesthetic theory and are frequently coupled with other schools of literary criticism (e.g., feminist
psychoanalytic criticism, reader-response psychoanalytic criticism, etc.).

Psychoanalytic literary criticism can focus on one or more of the following:

 the author: the theory is used to analyze the author and his/her life, and the literary work is seen to
supply evidence for this analysis. This is often called "psychobiography."
  the characters: the theory is used to analyze one or more of the characters; the psychological
theory becomes a tool that to explain the characters’ behavior and motivations. The more closely
the theory seems to apply to the characters, the more realistic the work appears.
 the audience: the theory is used to explain the appeal of the work for those who read it; the work is
seen to embody universal human psychological processes and motivations, to which the readers
respond more or less unconsciously.
 the text: the theory is used to analyze the role of language and symbolism in the work.

THREE POPULAR PSYCHOANALYTICAL APPROACHES FOR INTERPRETING LITERATURE-

Freudian, Lacanian, and Jungian. There are four ways to focus a psychoanalytical interpretation;

1.You can analyze the author’s life

2.You can analyze the thematic content of the work, especially the motivations of characters and
the narrator’s

3.You can analyze the artistic construction of a text.

4.You can analyze yourself or the reader of the literary work using reader-response theory.

In a nutshell, the key to understanding the history of psychoanalytic literary critism is to recognize that
literary critism is about books and psychoanalysis is about minds. Therefore, the psychoanalytic critic can
talk about in the book.

Freud remarks on literature in the letter to flies of oct. 15, 1897 in which he discussed Oedipus Rex. He
applied the idea of oedipal conflict to the audience response to Oedipus and to the character of hamlet,
Hamlet’s inability to act and he speculated about the role of oedipal guilt in the life of Shakespeare.(There
are three people in psychoanalytic critism can talk about; author, audience and some character.)

LACANIAN THEORY

-Defined psychoanalysis as “ the study of the traces left in the psyche of individual as a result of their
conscription into systems of kinship”.

-He is an interpreter of Freud’s analytic method, who stresses the fragility of sexual identity and it links to
language acquisition.He claim that the unconscious is structured like a language and sees a linguistic
aspect to Freud’s work.

-Jacques Lacan, also revised Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex- the childhood wish to displaced the
parents of one’s own sex and take his or her place in the affections of the parent in the opposite sex- by
relating it to the issue of language. He argues that the Pre- Oedipal stage is also a pre- verbal or “mirror
stage”, a stage he associate with the imagery order. He associates the subsequent oedipal stage- which
roughly coincides with the child entry into language- with what he calls the symbolic order , in which words
are not the things they stand for but substitutes for those things. The imagery order and the symbolic order
are two of Lacan’s three orders of subjectivity, the third being the real, which involves intractable and
substantial things or states that cannot be imagined, symbolized or known directly(such as death).
JUNGIAN THEORY- it attempts to explore the connection between literature and what Carl Jung( a student
of Freud) called the “collective unconscious” of the human race. A racial memory through which the spirit of
the whole man species manifest itself.”

-Closely related to Freudian theory because of its connection to psychoanalysis, assumes that all stories
and symbols are based on mythic models from mankind’s past.

-Best known psychological concepts- including the archetypes, the collective unconscious, the complex and
synchronity. Jung saw the human psyche as “by nature religious” and make his focus of explorations.

-contemporary contributors to dream analysis and symbolization.

ARCHETYPES- are universal archaic patterns and images that derive from the collective unconscious
(psychic counterpart of instinct).

-They are hidden and autonomous forms which are transformed once they enter
consciousness and are given particular expressions by individuals and their cultures. Being unconscious,
the existence of archetypes can only be deduced indirectly by examining behavior, images, art, myths,
religious or dreams. They are inherited potentials which are actualized when they enter consciousness as
image or manifest in behavior or interaction with the outside world.

Tyson provides some insightful and applicable questions to help guide our understanding of psychoanalytic
critism;

1.How do operations of repression structure or inform the work?

2.Are they any oedipal dynamics- or any other family dynamics- are work here?

3. How can character’s behavior, narrative events, and/or images be explained in terms of psychoanalytic
concepts of any kind- (for example, fear or fascination with death, sexuality- w/c includes love and romance
as well as sexual behavior- as a primary indicator of psychological identity or the operations of ego, Id-
superego?

4.What does the work suggest about the psychological being of its author?

5.What might a given interpretation of a literary work suggest about the psychological motives of the
reader?

6.Are there prominent words in the piece that could have diff. or hidden meanings? Could there be a
subconscious reason for the author using this “problem words”.
PSYCHOANA
LYTIC
LITERARY
CRITISM
PREPARED BY;

Diana Ross Erivera

BSED 2