TKL 302.

01
FREUDIAN CRITICISM

Dr. Deniz Gundogan ibrisim

deniz.gundogan@boun.edu.tr
 ABOUT RESPONSE PAPERS

• More close reading; taking a few sentences from the text itself and analyzing it.
• More connection to the theories you select. How does that particular text
actually speak to the theory?
• How does your own analysis contribute to the general stakes of theory and
methodology? What do you and the reader gain in analyzing that particular text
within and from those theories?
• Broader implications of your analysis, significance?
• Reference and in –text citation! we’ll talk more on this.
• (author, year, page no) or footnote style? Do not mix them!
 TODAY’S OUTLINE

• Psyhoanalytic Criticism
•
• Terry Eagleton “Psychoanalysis” from Literary Theory
• Sigmund Freud from The Interpretation of Dreams (NA 960-77)
• Kristeva “The Semiotic and the Symbolic” (NA 2169-79)
• A Psychoanalytic Approach to Little Red Riding Hood:
https://prezi.com/f9i7iqjr2uc4/psychoanalytic-approach-to-little-red-riding-hoo
d/
 FREUDIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS

• Psychoanalytic criticism (emerged in the 1960s), the most

influential interpretative theory among the series of waves
in the post war period is based on the specific premises of
the workings of the mind, the instincts and sexuality,
developed by the 19th century intellect, Austrian
Sigmund Freud ( who along with Marx, Darwin and
Nietzsche, subverted the centres of Western society by
boiling down the human individuality into an animalistic
sex drive).
 FREUDIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS

• Freud, greatly influenced by the psychiatrists

Jean-Martin Charcot (an exponent in hypnosis) and
Josef Breuer (pioneer of “talking cure”) proposed his
theoretical opus, the notion of the unconscious mind
(disseminated in his significant works like The Ego and the Id
, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Interpretation of Dreams
, Totem and Taboo etc.), which proved fatal to the
Enlightenment ideals, Auguste Comte’s Positivism etc., the
pivots of Western rationalism.
• This stream of criticism has become one of the most exciting
and challenging areas of literary and cultural studies today.
 FREUDIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS

• The relationship between psychoanalysis and literary criticism which spans

much of the 20th century is fundamentally concerned with the articulation of
sexuality in language.
• It has moved through three main emphases in its pursuit of the “literary
unconscious” — on the author (and its corollary character), on the reader
and on the text.
• It started with Freud’s analysis of the literary text as a “symptom of the artist”,
where the relationship between the author and the text is analogous to dreamers
and their dreams.
 FREUDIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS

• More recently, this theoretical delineation has been reworked in

Poststructuralist context by Jacques Lacan, who coupled the dynamic notion of
desire with Structuralist Linguistics; this has been influentially innovative as
echoed in the Feminist psychoanalytic criticism.
• The psychoanalytic impetus which is compatible with contemporary concerns
of uncertainties of time, subjectivity and meaning gained a new critical
currency in Postcolonial studies, where the interest in destabilized borders and
identities is very much evident.
• The uniqueness of Freud’s explorations lies in his attributing to the unconscious a
decisive role in the lives of human beings.
• The unconscious is the repository of traumatic experiences, emotions, unadmitted
desires, fears, libidinal drives, unresolved conflicts etc. This unconscious comes
into being at an early age, through the expunging of these unhappy psychic events
from the consciousness, a process which Freud terms “repression”.
• Repression is crucial to the operations of the unconscious.
• There has been a consistent interest in contemporary literary studies in the unconscious
and the notion and effects of repression linked often with debates on sexuality (eg.
Foucault‘s rejection of Western belief that history of sexuality has been the history of
repression).
 FREUD AND REPRESSION

• Repression does not eliminate our fears, agonies and drives, but it gives them
force by making them the organizers of our current experience. Through a
similar process called Sublimation the repressed material is promoted into
something more grand or is disguised as something noble. For instance, sexual
urges may be given sublimated expression in the form of intense religious
longings.
• A related neologism is defence mechanism which is a psychic procedure for
avoiding painful admission or, recognition.
 ID, EGO, SUPEREGO

• Id, Ego, Superego

• Later in his career, Freud suggested a tripartite model of the psyche, dividing it into. id, ego and superego
• The id, being entirely in the unconscious is the most inaccessible and obscure part of our personality. It is
the receptacle of our libido, the primary source of our psychic energy. Its function is to fulfil the primordial
life principle, which is the pleasure principle. It is entirely without rationality and has a tremendous
amorphous kind of vitality.
• Ego, governed by the reality principle, is defined as the rational governing force of the psyche. It is mostly
conscious and protects the individual from the id. It is the site of reason and introspection. It is the
intermediary between the world within (id) and the world outside (superego).
• The superego, which is another regulatory agent, protects the society from id. It is partly conscious and in
moral parlance, can be called as the conscience of the individual. It is governed by the “morality principle”
and represses the incestual, sexual passions, aggressiveness etc. Being a repository of pride, self esteem
etc., it compels the individual to move towards perfection
 DREAM WORK

• Dream Work
• Freud described dreams as the royal road to the unconscious, as they provide a better
understanding of the repressed desires in the unconscious.
• They are considered as the symbolic fulfillment of the wishes of the unconscious.
• According to him, dreams are symbolic texts which need to be deciphered, since the
watchful ego is at work, even when we are dreaming. The ego scrambles and censors the
messages as the unconscious itself adds to this obscurity by its peculiar modes of
functioning.
• Thus the latent dream content is not vividly displayed within the manifest one, but is
concealed within complex structures and codes, which is called dreamwork in Freudian
neologism.
 DREAM WORK

• The dream work includes displacement, whereby one person

or event is represented by another which is someway
associated with it (perhaps by a similar sounding word or by
some form of symbolic substitutions and condensation whereby,
a number of people, events and meanings are combined and
represented by a single image in the dream).
• For instance, the Roman soldier in the dream might
represent the father by a process of association
(displacement), as the father is associated with ideas of
strictness, authority and power in the domestic sphere, and
likewise the soldier is linked to these same ideas in the
political sphere.
 DREAM WORK

• The purpose of devices like condensation and displacement are two-fold:

• primarily they disguise the repressed fears and desires contained in the dream, so
that they can get passed the censor which normally prevents their surfacing into the
conscious mind, and secondly, they fashion this material into something which can
be represented in a dream, i.e., images, symbols, metaphors.
• Freudian interpretation, then, has always been of considerable interest to literary
critics as the unconscious, like a poem/ novel/play, cannot speak explicitly but does
so through images, symbols, metaphors, emblems.
• The Freudian critics’ analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a commendable attempt.
Hamlet’s procrastination is attributed to his Oedipus complex, i.e., Hamlet is reluctant to
avenge his father’s murder as he is guilty of wishing to commit the same crime himself.
 THE FREUDIAN SLIP

• the Freudian slip, which Freud himself called the “parapraxi” whereby
repressed material in the unconscious finds an outlet through such everyday
phenomena as slips of the tongue, pen or unintended actions. Thus, for
psychoanalysis, the unconscious is not passive reservoir of neutral data; rather
it is a dynamic entity that engages us at the deepest level of our being.
 EAGLETON ON FREUD

• Terry Eagleton started his chapter by breaking down essential constituents of

Psychoanalysis, and their relationship with different phenomena. Furthermore,
his commentary comes into play from time to time, in order to, both restate and
refute, some of the misconceptions about what Freud was trying to convey.
 PLEASURE PRINCIPLE,
SUBLIMATION

• Eagleton briefly discusses Pleasure Principle, Sublimation and erotogenic

zones.
• Freud contends that when a baby is being breastfed, he comes to grips with
finding pleasure in a biologically essential activity. The baby develops a sense of
understanding of body organs, as not merely organs but more of ‘erotogenic
zones.’ The reason why Freud calls sexuality as ‘perversion’ is owing to this
stage, in which he departs from seeing his, let’s say mother’s breast or his mouth,
as body organs but as erotogenic zones. In this, new erotogenic zones introduce
themselves. As mentioned before in the chapter, Freud’s first ever stage of
sexuality is that of the ‘Oral stage’. Mainly when the infant is involved in contact
with the breast he’s milking. And that’s the first object of libido.
• the second stage, is that of the ‘Anal Stage’. Here, the anus becomes part of erotogenic
zones, and gratification is derived from withholding feces. Upon the stage of breastfeeding,
Freud develops ‘Oedipal Complex’, a relationship that arises from the bodily intimacy
between the infant and his mother. The boy’s fear of the father’s threat of castration, makes
him renounce the early intimate desire he has for his mother. The boy, thus, resorts to his
father who is the symbol of authority, patriarchy and manhood.
• Once the boy enters the verge of man-in-the-making, he then adopts social images that are
deemed masculine. This inferiority complex of the girl, when she sees herself as castrated
amplifies to a state of envy for the penis.
• This Oedipus Complex, as posited by Freud, is not a mere stage but a phase of
diversion from pleasure principle to reality principle; in other words, this the stage
where the shift from natural to cultural occurs.
 DREAMS, FREUD

• Dreams, for Freud, are everything that we wished to fulfill unconsciously but
are not realized in real life; to the point before the dream.
• The ego, as a mediator between the id and the superego, does the job of
censoring and obscuring images, either by condensation or displacement. Just
like language, Lacan sees the unconscious to be structured too.
• The ego in its duty to block certain desires from the unconscious to the
conscious, and this war with these desires might result in Neurosis.
• On the other hand, we can find psychosis, in which these desires manage to
overthrow the ego, resulting in a rupture between the conscious and
unconscious, reality and delusion.
• Eagleton succinctly chronicles some of the criticism directed to Freud,
including the assumption that he is oversexual, his theories are all built on
heteronormative claims, and also counter-transference which he did with Dora,
a young patient of his (Eagleton, 140).

• What do you think of Eagleton’s account of Freud?

 KRISTEVA “THE SEMIOTIC AND
THE SYMBOLIC”

• Julia Kristeva, (born June 24, 1941, Bulg.), Bulgarian-

born French psychoanalyst, critic, novelist, and educator,
best known for her writings in structuralist linguistics,
psychoanalysis, semiotics, and philosophical feminism.
 KRISTEVA’S TRENDS

• Two distinct trends characterize her writings: an early structuralist-semiotic phase and a later
psychoanalytic-feminist phase.
• During the latter period Kristeva created a new study she called “semanalysis,” a combination
of the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and the semiology, or semiotics (the study of signs), of
the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.
• Her most important contribution to the philosophy of language was her distinction between the
semiotic and the symbolic aspects of language. The semiotic, which is manifested in rhythm
and tone, is associated with the maternal body. The symbolic, on the other hand, corresponds to
grammar and syntax and is associated with referential meaning. With this distinction, Kristeva
attempted to bring the “speaking body” back into linguistics and philosophy. She proposed that
bodily drives are discharged in language and that the structure of language is already operating
in the body.
 DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: KRISTEVA

• What do you think of Kristeva’s piece? Not an easy read!

• What is Kristeva’s focus?

• How does she define “chora”?
• How does she differentiate between the semiotic and the symbolic?
• What is the significance of this differantitation in literary analysis?
• Kristeva’s essay analyzes the signifying process of language while differentiating between the semiotic and the symbolic, stating that, “these two
modalities are inseparable.”
• She introduces chora, a “nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is
regulated” that can never take on an “axiomatic form.”
• Kristeva believes that all discourse “simultaneously depends on and refuses” chora.
• The semiotic chora is structured around the mother and is a “psychosomatic modality of the signifying process” that is different from
language, feminine, and more rhythmic in nature.
• She compares the semiotic to the unconscious Freud defined in his psychoanalysis theory. Kristeva also contrasts the semiotic with the symbolic,
which she defines as a discourse that is “established through the objective constraints of biological (including sexual) differences and concrete,
historical family structures.”
• Unlike the semiotic, the symbolic is tangible and definable as discourse relating to an object; it is defined by an individual’s environment,
and it is defined in an instance. The semiotic, on the other hand, is evolving with each individual as the energies that compose it change and
move through the individual.
• the “chora” is a space shared by mother and child at the time of their initial and partial
separation through processes associated with the semiotic (and later, the abject), before the
subsequent and more definitive differentiation through the accession to language proper and
symbolic castration, when the child ceases to be the mother’s creature (for psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan, her imaginary phallus) and assumes a name and identity in the community to
which both belong.

• In attending to the importance of the maternal, pre-Oedipal object relations, and archaic, pre-
phallic drives directed towards the mother, Kristeva, like other feminists, supplements the emphasis in Freud
and Lacan on the role in subject formation of the father, language, law, the phallus, and castration.
• Kristeva adopts the term chora from Plato’s Timaeus where it is the (non) place of the inscription of the forms
or ideas, a matrix of becoming and change, and thus womb-like (Plato calls it a nurse and mother by contrast
with the forms as father and their worldly copies as offspring).
• Plato contrasts it with the two other realities he theorizes, the sensible (the earthly, material realm of
illusions, mere shadows of the forms) and the intelligible (the transcendental realm of the forms themselves as
the ultimate reality); it is therefore neither percepts nor concepts but what gives rise to them.
https://prezi.com/f9i7iqjr2uc4/psychoanalytic-approach-to-little
-red-riding-hood/

Enereğin Oğlu, Sema Kaygusuz

Çocuk engereği başından tutmuş, onunla oyun oynuyor.
Engereğin güzel başını bütün gücüyle sıkıyor. Yüzünde neşeli
bir gürültü, ağzının suyu çenesinden akıyor. (…) Âzem, anasına
dönüp elindeki siyah kuşağı gösterdi, sonra biraz daha sıktı
engereği. Kütür kütür bir ses geldi engerekten, kendi dişleri
kendi etine girdi. Zilver’in gözleri buz tutmuş, dişleri
kenetlenmiş, dudakları kanıyor, için için inliyor, onu bir tek
engerek duyuyor (Kaygusuz, 2004, s.28).
Âzem yılanı kıvırıyor, sallıyor, o çılgın kahkahalarıyla
gelişigüzel silkeliyor, engerek kuyruğunu kaldırıp oğlanın
boynuna dolanmıyordu. Zilver de ağlıyordu, engerek de. Her
ikisinin ağıdı bir ibadet kadar sessizdi. Âzem, bu tutmaca
oyunun sarhoşluğuyla bir anasına çınladı, bir elindeki engereğe,
parmaklarını biraz daha sıktı, ateşli avucuyla onu biraz daha
kavradı (s.29).