Psychoanalytic Criticism

Introduction

Psychoanalytic criticism is one of the forms of literary criticism formally uses some of the
techniques of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of literature. As a therapy it aims to cure mental disorders
'by investigating the interaction of conscious and unconscious elements of the mind through interaction.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was the forerunner of this field and connected literature to psychology. His
major ideas include the unconscious and conscious workings of minds. He divided the model of the psyche:
into three parts. i.e.: id, ego and super ego; unconscious, conscious and conscience vice versa. Most of
Freud‟s ideas concern on the basis of sexuality. His concepts are deeply masculine in nature. His idea is that
'Libido' is the energy drive which is associated with the sexual desire and is the most powerful factor
pushing all sorts of desires and fears in a human life. It is of three stages; they are oral, the anal, and the
phallic states. Then he identified libido in the individual is the part of a more generalised drive which be
pointed as 'Eros'-love or life instinct or the opposite 'Thanatos' - death or death instinct. The psychic
processes are of by two matters. They are transference, as Projection. Transference refers to the reactivated
past and projection to the negative aspects of ourselves. They are the defence mechanisms of the mind. Very
important in Freudian ideology is the 'dream work' which is a clear example for psychoanalysis. In it we can
find the real events and desires are transformed into dream images. These include displacement and
condensation; displacement means in some way one person or event is represented by another with a
symbolic substitution and condensation means the production of single image in the dream where a number
of people events or meanings are combined. Thus the characters, motivation and events are represented in
dreams in a very literary way involving the translation, dream work of abstract ideas or feelings into
concrete images. Dreams alike literature do not explicit statements both tend to communicate: obliquely or
indirectly, through concrete embodiments of time, place, or person neglecting direct statements.

Freudian Interpretation

Freudian interpretation works through the attribution of sexual connotations to objects. Freudian
interpretation is highly ingenious, rather highly simplistic For example: Think of a Roman soldier and
interpret. In the dream of an young adult; The Roman soldier might represent his father by a process of
association. The father is associated with the ideas of strictness, authority, and power in the domestic circle.
Indeed, the father also have several meanings might be also condensed into this symbol. For e.g. to the
young man involves in love; the Roman soldier represent him because he is to fight against the disapproval
of the fathers side. Thus, it can be possible that both the feared father (authoritarian) and the desired lover
(himself) are condensed into the single dream figure of the Roman soldier.

They in the manner Freudian interpretation always stand a considerable interest to literary critics.
Due to the basic reason not its nature unconscious, cannot directly speak directly but through the images,
symbols, emblems metaphors. Literature in the same manner, does not expect directly but through imagery,
symbolism and metaphors. However, there is an inevitable judgemental element is needed and sometimes
psychoanalytic interpretations of literature are offer controversial.

Freudian Psychoanalytic Critics

They give more importance to:

1. Literary interpretation to distinguish the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious mind.
2. They associate the literary work's overt content with the former and convert content with the latter,
privileging the latter as being that the work is really about and aiming to disentangle the two.
3. They pay close attention to unconscious motives and feelings, whether those of the author or characters.
4. They demonstrate the presence of psychoanalytic symptoms, conditions, or Freudian phases in the literary
 works.
5. They make large scale applications of psychoanalytic concepts to literary history; for e.g.:
Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence (1973) studies the struggle for identity by each generation
of poets with relation to Oedipus complex.
6. They identify a 'psychic' content for the literary work at the regard of social or historical
content, pointing the individual psycho-drone above the social drama of class conflict.

Freudian Psychoanalytic Criticism

To know about Freudian psychoanalysis Shakespeare‟s Hamlet is a well-known example often the
Freudian critics do: (i) stressing the distinction between conscious and unconscious (ii) uncovering the
unconscious motives of characters and (iii) seeing in the literary work, on embodiment of classic
psychoanalytic conditions.
In Hamlet the father of Hamlet is murdered by his own brother, Claudius. Later, he marries his
mother Gertrude. The ghost of his father appears to Hamlet and tells him to avenge the murderer by killing
his uncle, Claudius. Even there is no difficulty in doing this, Hamlet procrastinates. He is not a coward
because he kills other people in the play. After knowing the truth from the father's ghost, he also gathers
other evidences to find the truth. In that sense, why he procrastinates? That is the question of the
Psychoanalytic critics.

Psychoanalytic criticism offers a needed solution: Hamlet cannot average the murder to his father
because he is guilty of wanting to commit the same crime himself. He has an Oedipus complex, that is, the
repressed sexual desire for his mother and to thwart his father. Thus, his uncle did what he wanted to do. So,
it is the difficulty of Hamlet to avenge his murder. Freud sketched about this play in his The Interpretation
of dreams. Today, the Freudian analysis of literature is in vogue in literary analysis.

Lacan and Psychoanalysis

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was a French psychoanalyst. His works in the field of psychology had an
extraordinary influence upon many changes of recent literary theory. He was basically a psychiatrist. His
theory of 'Mirror stage' influenced many of the scholars like Levi-Strauss, Saussure and Roman Jacobson.
His unorthodox views on Freudian ego made him to come out of the International Psychoanalytic
Association. Then he set his own break away from Freudians‟ and his rest of his ideas on the published
seminars, The Ecrits. It is a kind of extended lecture for graduate level students. His famous essays are:

1. “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious”

2. “The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida and Psychoanalytic Reading”.

3. “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet”.

Lacan's own explication of his ideas is often obscure. It is very important to devote time to study his
ideas for literary students “The insistence of the Letter” (1857). He being in diligence to the intellectual
dominance in language studies and asks how could psychoanalysis of today not realize the truth that their
realm is word? He says that language is the central one so that no analysis can understand the conscious of a
man. To him Freudian psychiatry is entirely a verbal science but to him psychoanalysis disconnecting the
unconscious and the whole structures of language. So, the unconscious, for displacement (a person
represented by one of his attributes) and condensation (things compressed into one symbol) can be the
evidence to prove that unconscious is a linguistic whole. He takes up the child for example; the stage before
the sense of self emerges is called by him as Imaginary. Then six to eighteenth month is called as the mirror
stage. When the child enquires the language system, it also marks socialization with prohibitions and
restraints associated with the figure of the father. It is the symbolic (father) stage. The distinction between
the Imaginary and the symbolic has been used extensively in the study of literature.

Lacanian Critics
1. Like Freudian critics, they also pay close attention to unconscious desires and feelings. Instead of
excavating the author or characters, they search out the text, uncovering the undercurrents of
meaning, by doing the process of „deconstruction‟.
2. They demonstrate the presence in the literary work of Lacanian psychoanalytic symptoms or phases, such
as mirror stage or the sovereignty of the unconscious.
3. They treat literary texts in terms of a series of Lacanian view point, such as lack or desire.
4. They see literary texts as an enactment or demonstration of Lacanian views about languages and the
unconscious; particularly the signified and the centrality of the unconscious.

Lacanian Criticism

To know about Lacan‟s view point of psychoanalysis, his well-known interpretation of Poe‟s The
Purloined Letter serves Lacanian model. According to it, Poe‟s story has an archetypes air which lends itself
to psychoanalytic interpretation. The characters are just chess pieces moved by the author‟s sense. That story
was divided into four phases for explanation.
The story comprises of minister‟s discussion with queen having a letter and the king unexpectedly
comes and notices she is anxious. The minister replaces it with other. After knowing the trick, she checks
and finds nothings. She asks Dupin‟s help. He visits the minister and reasons that it would be in his house.
Later, he sees the letter above the mantel piece, carelessly pushed amongst other things. He visits again and
arranges a distraction in the road substitute‟s the letter with an empty one. Then, the letter is returned to the
queen finally, the minister meets his downfall.

Lacan interprets it as: the stolen latter is an emblem of the unconscious itself unknowing. Likewise
unconscious is also unknowable.

Dupin‟s investigation of the crime of the stolen letter enacts the process of psychoanalysis. The
analyst in psychoanalysis uses repetition and substitution to get the memoires of the person to decipher his
unconscious Dupin‟s investigation is also in this process.

The letter with the unknown content is an embodiment of aspects of the nature of language. The
language there is a senseless play of signifiers but no simple connection with any signified content beyond
language. The signified is also lost or purloined. As the same the unconscious is always hidden just like the
purloined letter of Poe‟s tale.

When comparing Freud and Lacanian examples from this view points, it makes us clear that there is
a cut between these two approaches. Paradoxically, they both stem from the same original Freudian
ideology.