How to Read a Text using Psychoanalysis

 The job of the psychoanalytical critic is to see which concepts are operating in the
text that will yield a meaningful psychoanalytic interpretation. For example:
 You might focus on the work’s representation of oedipal dynamic of family
dynamics in general
 You might focus on what work tells us about human beings’ psychological
relationship to death or sexuality
 You might focus on how the narrator’s unconscious problems keep appearing over
the course of the story.

Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism

 Adopts the methods of "reading" employed by Freud and later theorists to
interpret texts. It argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret
unconscious desires and anxieties of the author, that a literary work is a
manifestation of the author's own neuroses. It approaches an author’s work as a
kind of textual “talk therapy”.
 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.
 Like psychoanalysis itself, this critical endeavor seeks evidence of unresolved
emotions, psychological conflicts, guilt, ambivalences, and so forth within the
author’s literary work. The author's own childhood traumas, family life, sexual
conflicts, fixations, and such will be traceable within the behavior of the
characters in the literary work.

Questions Psychoanalytic Literary Theorists Ask about Literature

 How does the work reveal the particular conflicts produced by family life or
social conditions during a particular historical period?
 Functions or dysfunctions of society?
 Does the work suggest anything about the psychological workings of the author’s
mind?
 Is there evidence of repression, dreams and desire?
 What unresolved issues are evident from unconscious behavior and language?
 What do the characters’ emotions and behaviour reveal about their psychological
states? What types of personalities are they?
 Id, ego or superego
 Do the characters seem to participate in Oedipal patterns of desire, guilt, or
punishment?
 What unresolved issues are evident from unconscious behaviour and language?
What neuroses (obsessive or phobic behaviour), wounds, fears, or desires do the
characters` express?
 What unresolved issues are evident from unconscious behaviour and language?
What neuroses (obsessive or phobic behaviour), wounds, fears, or desires do the
characters` express?
 What relationship do characters have to the human body or to its desires and
functions?