Psychoanalytic Theory

Overview
One might consider that Freudian psychoanalytic theory is basically a family theory as Freud considered how the individual develops overtime within the context of a family, specifically interacting with mother and father, later siblings.

 Psychoanalytic theory was the first of many psychodynamic theories to follow many within a direct line from Freudian thinking. Freud discovered the unconscious which is the basis for all psychodynamic theories Psychodynamic theories hold that human behavior is primarily the function of reactions to internal (thus mostly unconscious) stimuli instincts, urges, thoughts.

 Theories of human behavior give rise to how behavior changes.

For example, if behavior is result of unconscious motivation, treatment would aim at making the unconscious conscious and behavior change would follow. Additionally, an assumption is that current

behavior is the result of early childhood experiences primarily in the family. Again treatment would focus on uncovering childhood experiences and connecting them to current behavior; examining the appropriateness of current reactions.

 Freud developed a topography of the self: id, ego and superego. Freud also posited that human behavior was built up over time through distinct stages.

 Freudian stages were oral, anal, oedipal, latency, genital. Observation of infant reveled to him the preoccupation with feeding and nurturance; excretion and toilet training, discovery of genitals and sensation from erogenous zones. Following is a period of when the child is less preoccupied with their bodily functions and concerned about relations in the social world. When adolescence presents another radical physiological change, once more the person is preoccupied with the body and sexual feelings and activities now they are living in an adult body.

Consciousness
The conscious: all thought processes operate. Anything that is thought, perceived or understood resides in this conscious level. pre-conscious: memories and thoughts which may threaten at any moment to break into the conscious level, easily recalled, strongly influence conscious processes.

 Unconscious: the wishes, urges, memories and thoughts, represent individual's past experience. impulses and memories which threaten to debilitate or destabilize the individual's mind if they break into unconsciousness; by means of repression the mind maintains its tenuous balance.

 id - "...the location of the drives" or libido ego - "...one of the major defenses against the power of the drives..." and home of the defenses The ego banishes the urges of the id to unconscious where they cannot cause mental anguish but may cause anxiety superego - the area of the unconscious that houses judgement (of self and others) and "...which begins to form during childhood as a result of the Oedipus complex Oedipus complex: desire to possess mothers

 repression doesn't eliminate our painful experiences and emotions. To keep all of this conflict buried in our unconscious, we develop defenses: selective perception, selective memory, denial, displacement, projection, regression, fear of intimacy, and fear of death, among others.

Freud and Literature

some critics believe that we can "...read psychoanalytically...to see which concepts are operating in the text in such a way as to enrich our understanding of the work and, if we plan to write a paper about it, to yield a meaningful, coherent psychoanalytic interpretation" (Tyson 29)

 How do the operations of repression structure or inform the work? Are there any oedipal dynamics - or any other family dynamics - are work here? How can characters' behavior, narrative events, and/or images be explained in terms of psychoanalytic concepts of any kind (for example...fear or fascination with death, sexuality - which includes love and romance as well as sexual behavior - as a primary indicator of psychological identity or the operations of ego-id-superego)?

 What does the work suggest about the psychological being of its author? What might a given interpretation of a literary work suggest about the psychological motives of the reader? Are there prominent words in the piece that could have different or hidden meanings? Could there be a subconscious reason for the author using these "problem words"?

Jung
Jungian criticism attempts to explore the connection between literature and what Carl Jung (a student of Freud) called the collective unconscious of the human race: "...racial memory, through which the spirit of the whole human species manifests itself" (Richter 504). Jungian criticism, closely related to Freudian theory because of its connection to psychoanalysis, assumes that all stories and symbols are based on mythic models from mankinds past.

 Jung developed archetypal myths, the Syzygy: "...a quaternion composing a whole, the unified self of which people are in search" (Richter 505). These archetypes are 1. the Shadow: splitting into parts, deeper elements of our psyche, latent dispositions, we deny it in ourselves and project it onto others 2. the Anima: feminine side of the male Self 3. the Animus: the corresponding masculine side of the female Self

 Anima/animus beginning with infant projection onto the mother, then projecting onto prospective partners until a lasting relationship can be found.
The Syzygy (the divine couple): soul mate, perfect match

the Spirit: me+God, spirit that connects and is part of the universe. coherent whole that unifies both consciousness and unconsciousness. Nirvana/ecstatic harmony

 creation of the self as a process of individuation, where all aspects are brought together as one. Thus 're-birth' is returning to the wholeness of birth, before we start to split our selves into many parts.

Jung & literarture

In literary analysis, a Jungian critic would look for archetypes Jungian criticism is generally involved with a search for the embodiment of these symbols within particular works of art." (Richter 505). When dealing with this sort of criticism, it is often useful to keep a handbook of mythology and a dictionary of symbols on hand.

 What connections can we make between elements of the text and the archetypes? (Mask, Shadow, Anima, Animus) How do the characters in the text mirror the archetypal figures? (Great Mother or nurturing Mother, Whore, destroying Crone, Lover, Destroying Angel) How does the text mirror the archetypal narrative patterns? (Quest, Night-SeaJourney)

 How symbolic is the imagery in the work? How does the protagonist reflect the hero of myth? Does the hero embark on a journey in either a physical or spiritual sense? Is there a journey to an underworld or land of the dead? What trials or ordeals does the protagonist face? What is the reward for overcoming them?

Lacan
His influence has been especially marked in literary criticism, film theory, art history and theory, continental philosophy and in some areas of social and political thought. Lacan is properly post-structuralist, which is to say that Lacan questions any simple notion of either "self" or "truth," exploring instead how knowledge is constructed by way of linguistic and ideological structures that organize not only our conscious but also our unconscious lives.

 The emphasis was thus less on the bodily causes of behavior (cathexis, libido, instinct, etc.) than it was on the ideological structures that, especially through language, make the human subject come to understand his or her relationship to himself and to others.

 Lacan rejected attempts to link psychoanalysis with social theory, saying 'the unconscious is the discourse of the Other' -- that human passion is structured by the desire of others and that we express deep feelings through the 'relay' of others. He thus saw desire as a social phenomenon and psychoanalysis as a theory of how the human subject is created through social interaction. Desire appears through a combination of language, culture and the spaces between people.

 Lacan focused largely on Freud's work on deep structures and infant sexuality, and how the human subject becomes an 'other' through unconscious repression and stemming from the Mirror phase. The conscious ego and unconscious desire are thus radically divided. Lacan considered this perpetual and unconscious fragmentation of the self as Freud's core discovery. Lacan thus sought to return psychoanalysis on the unconscious, using Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistics, structural anthropology and post-structural theories.

 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 unde rstanding, particularly in terms of Lacan's sense that the subject is excentric 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 de racination 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.