Psychoanalytic literary criticism analyzes texts through the lens of Freudian psychoanalytic theory. It seeks to understand the author's unconscious desires that may have influenced the work and interprets characters' motivations through concepts like the id, ego, superego, Oedipus complex, and psychosexual development stages. Jacques Lacan further developed psychoanalytic theory, proposing three orders of the mind - the symbolic, imaginary, and real - and the concept of the mirror stage in developing self-identity. Psychoanalytic criticism focuses on understanding the author's psyche through their work and interpreting characters' actions based on their unconscious motivations.
Psychoanalytic literary criticism analyzes texts through the lens of Freudian psychoanalytic theory. It seeks to understand the author's unconscious desires that may have influenced the work and interprets characters' motivations through concepts like the id, ego, superego, Oedipus complex, and psychosexual development stages. Jacques Lacan further developed psychoanalytic theory, proposing three orders of the mind - the symbolic, imaginary, and real - and the concept of the mirror stage in developing self-identity. Psychoanalytic criticism focuses on understanding the author's psyche through their work and interpreting characters' actions based on their unconscious motivations.
Psychoanalytic literary criticism analyzes texts through the lens of Freudian psychoanalytic theory. It seeks to understand the author's unconscious desires that may have influenced the work and interprets characters' motivations through concepts like the id, ego, superego, Oedipus complex, and psychosexual development stages. Jacques Lacan further developed psychoanalytic theory, proposing three orders of the mind - the symbolic, imaginary, and real - and the concept of the mirror stage in developing self-identity. Psychoanalytic criticism focuses on understanding the author's psyche through their work and interpreting characters' actions based on their unconscious motivations.
libido along with urges and impulses that we PSYCHOANALYTIC LITERARY typically do not give into. CRITICISM EGO - acts as the intermediary between the id and the socially oriented external world. - Adopts the methods of "reading" employed by SUPEREGO - the voice of our conscience and Freud and later theorists to interpret texts. also our self-criticism. - Seeks evidence of unresolved emotions, psychological conflicts, guilts, ambivalences, 2. Dreams that a literary work is a manifestation of the author's own neuroses Freud thought of dreams as the ultimate insight into - Author's own childhood traumas, family life, an individual’s unconscious mind. This was based sexual conflicts, fixations, and such will be on a dream that he had in 1895 about a patient, Irma, traceable who was not responding well to treatment. Freud - Validates the importance of literature, as it is dreamt that Irma’s condition was caused by an built on a literary key for the decoding. infected syringe that was used by her previous doctor. This lead Freud to conclude that dreams FOUNDER function as a wish fulfilment exercise for our unconscious mind. There are two influential psychoanalytical theorists: Sigismund ‘Sigmund’ Schlomo Freud (May 6,1856 to Dream terminology September 23, 1939) two types of content: • The founder of psychoanalysis, was born in Austria and spent most of his childhood and adult life in manifest - the dreamer’s memories that have Vienna (Gay, 2006). He entered medical school and materialised in their dream trained as a neurologist, earning a medical degree in 1881. latent - the symbolic or underlying interpretation of that dream • Soon after his graduation, he set up in private practice and began treating patients with psychological Displacement involves dreaming of one thing as another disorders. His colleague Dr. Josef Breuer’s intriguing thing, usually with that thing taking on a symbolic experience with a patient, “Anna O.,” who experienced a meaning. range of physical symptoms with no apparent physical cause (Breuer & Freud, 1895/2001) drew his attention. Condensation is the act of combining multiple images or symbols into one thing. This allows for symbols in • Dr. Breuer found that her symptoms abated dreams to take on multiple meanings. when he helped her recover memories of traumatic experiences that she had repressed from conscious Freud calls the process of translating an individual’s awareness. This case sparked Freud’s interest in the unconscious desires into the manifest content unconscious mind and spurred the development of some dreamwork. Dreamwork transforms the wishes of the id of his most influential ideas. (which may be forbidden or socially unacceptable) into a more palatable form in an individual’s dream. PROPOSED: Secondary elaboration refers to the unconscious mind 1. The unconscious mind ordering a sequence of wish-fulfilment events into an According to Freud, the unconscious is a part of the order that is believable to the dreamer, thus hiding the mind that you are not aware of. It sits outside the latent content of the dream. conscious mind and contains elements of repressed or forgotten memories and urges that the individual either cannot acknowledge or refuses to acknowledge in their conscious mind. 3. Oedipus complex The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) was when • His teachings and writings explore the Sigmund Freud first introduced the theory of the significance of Freud’s discovery of the Oedipus complex. The Oedipus complex is named unconscious both within the theory and practice of after the eponymous main character of Sophocles’ analysis itself as well as in connection with a wide Oedipus Rex (429 BC). Oedipus was abandoned as range of other disciplines. an infant after a prophecy that he would grow up to kill his own father and marry his own mother. He • He re-conceptualized Freud’s theory of the was eventually rescued and adopted by another unconscious by delving into the self as the human King until he came across the prophecy himself and, being is created through social interaction i.e. unaware that he was adopted, left his parents in culture (language) which creates desire. order to protect them from his fate. On the journey away from his supposed parents, Oedipus Mirror stage unknowingly meets his biological father and kills him in an argument. He then arrives at Thebes, This refers to the period when a child develops a sense where he solves a riddle from the Sphinx and of self through noticing a distinction between the self marries the newly widowed Queen Jocasta, as a and the other. Lacan named this stage the ‘mirror stage’ reward. After a plague strikes Thebes, Oedipus as it is around this period that a child will recognise their makes the gradual discovery that he has married his own image in a mirror, suggesting that they have own mother, whom he widowed by killing his own developed the concept of self identity. This is also the stage in which language emerges. father, thus fulfilling the oracle’s prophecy. Three ‘orders’ to the mind: the symbolic, the Drawing from this story, Freud puts forward the imaginary, and the real. suggestion that both modern and classical audiences were captivated by Oedipus as it depicts a Symbolic is a register that encapsulates things like the subconscious desire that all humans experience as law, language, and tradition. It is the symbolic register children. According to Freud, all sons and daughters that affords us names and the ability to communicate develop a sexual attraction to their parent of the through language, and our relationship with our own opposite sex. Not only do they desire that parent, relatives are governed by the symbolic register. but they also desire to kill the other parent due to Real As Lacan explains, whatever we do not say or viewing them as competition for their desired symbolise through communication, we leave in the ‘real’ parent’s affection. For Freud, this was an essential register. part of a child’s development process. Imaginary is the relation between the self and the self PSYCHOSEXUAL DEVELOPMENT image. Lacan theorised that when identifying one’s image in the mirror, the disharmony between the Oral cohesive image and the fragmented self produces the ego Anal (not to be confused with Freud’s definition of the ego). Phallic Latency Psychoanalytic literary criticism focuses on the Genital following:
1. The mind of the author: psychoanalytic
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (April 13, 1901 to literary criticism treats the work of the September 9, 1981) author as a manifestation of their own unconscious desires. A psychoanalytic • He was a major figure in Parisian reading may attempt to relate certain aspects intellectual life for much of the twentieth century. of a text to its author’s life to give the text a Sometimes referred to as “the French Freud,” he is psychoanalytically biographical meaning. an important figure in the history of psychoanalysis. 2. The mind of the characters: psychoanalytic literary criticism can be used to analyse and explain the motivations and actions of certain characters in an author's work. This is the most common form of Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism - Key analysis, which we will apply to Hamlet takeaways (below). 3. The mind of the audience: Freud makes Psychoanalytical readings focus on the references to universal anxieties and desires relationship between literature, the that we, as human beings, all innately share. unconscious mind and our conscious actions Psychoanalytic literary criticism can be used and thoughts. to explain why certain works are very There are two influential psychoanalytical appealing to a wide audience, as it appeals to theorists: Sigmund Freud and Jaques Lacan. the universal unconscious mind. Freud developed theories on the Oedipus 4. The text: psychoanalytic literary criticism Complex and the interpretation of Dreams. can be used to analyse why certain linguistic He also developed ideas about our and symbolic choices are made by the author unconscious mind and separated our psyches to be used in a text. into the id, ego and superego. Lacan expanded on Freud through Theory Benefit: developing the mirror stage theory, and Outside of knowing of the author’s life to understand the separating the psyche into the symbolic, real text, psychologically, readers can also understand the and imaginary realm. character/s’ mind by what they go through within the story, especially if they have psychological problems. Theory Disadvantage: Theorists tend to ask questions that relate to the author’s past and the mind state of the reader when interpreting the text which poses problems if the reader’s state of mind is in the positive or negative of what the author’s state of mind was or the condition of what the story is.
Questions of Psychoanalytic Theorists to Interpret a
Text:
Through understanding the text’s author and
characters readers can begin to understand their own psyche and how it plays out in society.
How do operations of repression structure
the world of the text? What repressed desires/wounds lie underneath? Where are there oedipal (family/sexual) dynamics? Where are the patterns in behaviors in the character/s? Can character’s behavior/motivation be explained psychologically? Is this behavior a product of the culture it’s around? What dreamlike symbols can be identified? Are there any phallic symbols? What do these repressed symbols/desires/ fears suggest about the author? the paper until everyone has drawn. He calls all the The Lottery names, greeting each person as they come up to draw a paper. Mr. Adams tells Old Man Warner that The villagers of a small town gather together in the people in the north village might stop the lottery, square on June 27, a beautiful day, for the town and Old Man Warner ridicules young people. He lottery. In other towns, the lottery takes longer, but says that giving up the lottery could lead to a return there are only 300 people in this village, so the to living in caves. Mrs. Adams says the lottery has lottery takes only two hours. Village children, who already been given up in other villages, and Old have just finished school for the summer, run Man Warner says that’s “nothing but trouble.” around collecting stones. They put the stones in their pockets and make a pile in the square. Men Mr. Summers finishes calling names, and everyone gather next, followed by the women. Parents call opens his or her papers. Word quickly gets around their children over, and families stand together. that Bill Hutchinson has “got it.” Tessie argues that it wasn’t fair because Bill didn’t have enough time Mr. Summers runs the lottery because he has a lot to select a paper. Mr. Summers asks whether there of time to do things for the village. He arrives in the are any other households in the Hutchinson family, square with the black box, followed by Mr. Graves, and Bill says no, because his married daughter the postmaster. This black box isn’t the original box draws with her husband’s family. Mr. Summers used for the lottery because the original was lost asks how many kids Bill has, and he answers that he many years ago, even before the town elder, Old has three. Tessie protests again that the lottery Man Warner, was born. Mr. Summers always wasn’t fair. suggests that they make a new box because the current one is shabby, but no one wants to fool Mr. Graves dumps the papers out of the box onto around with tradition. Mr. Summers did, however, the ground and then puts five papers in for the convince the villagers to replace the traditional Hutchinsons. As Mr. Summers calls their names, wood chips with slips of paper. each member of the family comes up and draws a paper. When they open their slips, they find that Mr. Summers mixes up the slips of paper in the box. Tessie has drawn the paper with the black dot on it. He and Mr. Graves made the papers the night before Mr. Summers instructs everyone to hurry up. and then locked up the box at Mr. Summers’s coal company. Before the lottery can begin, they make a The villagers grab stones and run toward Tessie, list of all the families and households in the village. who stands in a clearing in the middle of the crowd. Mr. Summers is sworn in. Some people remember Tessie says it’s not fair and is hit in the head with a that in the past there used to be a song and salute, stone. Everyone begins throwing stones at her. but these have been lost.
Tessie Hutchinson joins the crowd, flustered
because she had forgotten that today was the day of the lottery. She joins her husband and children at the front of the crowd, and people joke about her late arrival. Mr. Summers asks whether anyone is absent, and the crowd responds that Dunbar isn’t there. Mr. Summers asks who will draw for Dunbar, and Mrs. Dunbar says she will because she doesn’t have a son who’s old enough to do it for her. Mr. Summers asks whether the Watson boy will draw, and he answers that he will. Mr. Summers then asks to make sure that Old Man Warner is there too.
Mr. Summers reminds everyone about the lottery’s
rules: he’ll read names, and the family heads come up and draw a slip of paper. No one should look at QUESTIONS:
1. What repressed desires or fears
might be influencing the characters' behavior in the lottery? Is this behavior a product of the culture it’s around? 2. How does the ritual of the lottery serve as a manifestation of the characters' unconscious conflicts or desires? 3. In what ways does the community's collective participation in the lottery serve as a form of psychological coping mechanism?