Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism

(1930s-present)
Literary Theory
 "Literary theory" is the body of ideas and methods we use in the practical reading of
literature. By literary theory we refer not to the meaning of a work of literature but to the
theories that reveal what literature can mean. Literary theory is a description of the
underlying principles, one might say the tools, by which we attempt to understand
literature. All literary interpretation draws on a basis in theory but can serve as a
justification for very different kinds of critical activity. It is literary theory that formulates
the relationship between author and work; literary theory develops the significance of race,
class, and gender for literary study, both from the standpoint of the biography of the author
and an analysis of their thematic presence within texts. Literary theory offers varying
approaches for understanding the role of historical context in interpretation as well as the
relevance of linguistic and unconscious elements of the text. Literary theorists trace the
history and evolution of the different genres—narrative, dramatic, lyric—in addition to the
more recent emergence of the novel and the short story, while also investigating the
importance of formal elements of literary structure. Lastly, literary theory in recent years
has sought to explain the degree to which the text is more the product of a culture than an
individual author and in turn how those texts help to create the culture.
 Psychoanalytic Literary Theory

As a form of literary criticism, it uses

 Techniques of Psychoanalysis in the
interpretation and analysis of literature.
 A Psychoanalytic critic exposes the “Latent
Content” of “Manifest Content” of a work.
Importance of Psychoanalytic Criticism
 Decodes symbols, images, metaphors
 Asserts that nonsense is meaningful
 Distortion is inescapable and creative
 Analyzes and evaluates the characters
 Enables the readers to penetrate deep into human
psychology
 Expression of both the reader and the writer’s inner
conflicts
Difference between Psychological
Criticism and Psychoanalytic Criticism

Psychological Criticism Psychoanalytic Criticism

 Psychological criticism  Psychoanalytical

was a kind of criticism is a theoretical
Biographical criticism frame work for the
analysis of literature.
Theorists/Critics of Psychoanalysis
 Sigmund Freud: (1856-1939) Austrian neurologist and founder of
psychoanalysis
 Carl Gustav Jung: (1875-1961) Swiss psychiatrist
 Jacques Lucan: (1901-1981) French psychoanalyst & psychiatrist
 Alfred Adler: (1870-1937) Austrian doctor, Psychotherapist, and
founder of the School of Individual Psychology. (Inferiority Complex)
 Gilles Dleuez French philosopher & Félix Guattari, French
psychiatrist: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Kafka: Toward a Minor
Literature and What is Philosophy. Their conjoint works are a critique of
psychoanalytic conformity, marked a significant step in the evolution of post-
structuralism.
Two Models of Human Psychology

Model 1 consists of:

 Consciousness
 Sub-Conscious
 Un- conscious
Model 2 consists of:
 Id
 Ego
 Super ego
Three Minds:
Consciousness, Subconscious & Unconscious

 Below Conscious is a slightly larger section that Freud

called the preconscious, or what some refer to as the
subconscious.
 It is much larger than the conscious mind and accounts for
around 50-60% of your brain capabilities.
 The section below this is the unconscious mind.
Three Minds:
Consciousness, Subconscious & Unconscious
Human mind is DUAL in nature

 Passion, irrational, unknown and unconscious part is ID

 Rational logical and conscious part is EGO.

 SUPER ego: is about moral judgement , self sacrifice and

projection
 Discovery of Human Unconscious:
Id, Ego, and Superego
Freud maintained that our desires and our unconscious
conflicts give rise to three areas of the mind that wrestle for
dominance as we grow from infancy, to childhood, to
adulthood:
 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 listed above
 superego - the area of the unconscious that houses Judgment and
"...which begins to form during childhood as a result of the
Oedipus complex"
 Freud's Theory of Repression

Psychological repression is the psychological attempt made by an

individual to direct one's own desires and impulses toward
pleasurable instincts by excluding the desire from one's
consciousness and holding or subduing it in the unconscious.

"...repression doesn't eliminate our painful experiences and

emotions...we unconsciously behave in ways that will allow us to
'play out'...our conflicted feelings about the painful experiences
and emotions we repress"
 Freud's Theory of Repression
 Denial: a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept
and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be
overwhelming evidence.
 Censor Repressed wishes desires slip into unconscious
 Fixation: When one's desire is tied to an object of desire connected to an
earlier phase in one's psychosexual development.
 Oedipal Complex: a child's desire, that the mind keeps in the
unconscious via dynamic repression, to have sexual relations with the
parent of the opposite sex (i.e. males attracted to their mothers, and
females attracted to their fathers).
 Electra Complex: girl's sense of competition with her mother for the
affections of her father.
 Significance of Dreams
 Dreams represent symbolically unfulfilled desires and wishes
 The second medium is jokes, anecdotes and anger.
 CONDENSATION: In Freudian psychology, a condensation is when a
single idea (an image, memory, or thought) appropriates the whole charge
of libido of at least two other ideas. The charges are displaced from the
originating ideas to the receiving one, where they merge and "condense"
together.
 DISPLACEMENT: In Freudian psychology, displacement ("shift, move") is
an unconscious defense mechanism whereby the mind substitutes either a
new aim or a new object for goals felt in their original form to be
dangerous or unacceptable.
 Freudian Slip of Tongue: an error in speech, memory, or physical action
that is interpreted as occurring due to the interference of an unconscious
subdued wish or internal train of thought.
Free Association
The mental process by which one word or image may spontaneously
suggest another without any necessary logical connection. A
psychoanalytic technique for investigation of the unconscious mind,
in which a relaxed subject reports all passing thoughts without
reservation.
 Free association is a technique used in psychoanalysis which was
originally devised by Sigmund Freud out of the hypnotic method of his
colleague, Josef Breuer.
 IMPORTANCE: Patients spoke for themselves, rather than repeating the
ideas of the analyst; they work through their own material, rather than
parroting another's suggestions'.
 Freud’s theory can be summarized as:

 Anindividual’s processes are largely

unconscious
 Human behaviour is motivated by sexuality
 Social taboos attached to sexual impulses.
 Lacan’s Views on Psychosexual Development:
Lacan thought that Freud's ideas of "slips of the tongue," jokes, and the
interpretation of dreams all emphasized the agency of language in
subjective constitution.
In "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since
Freud," he proposes that "the unconscious is structured like a language.“

 Pre linguistic stage as imaginary

 Acquisition of language as symbolical
 Advocate Saussure's theory of structuralism
 The law of father
 Focus on language and its relation to gender
 Psychoanalysis as Interpretation

 Lacan developed a psychoanalytic conception of how the body is caught

in the play of meaning-formation between subjects, and expressive of
the subjectivity that "lives" through it, as well as being an objectificable
tool for the performance of instrumental activities.
 For Lacan, that is, "the unconscious" does not name only some other
part of the mental apparatus than consciousness.
 It names all that about a subject, including bodily manifestations and
identifications with others and "external" objects that insist beyond
his/her conscious control.
Lacan’s concept of Mirror stage
 Lacan's contribution to psychoanalysis was the MIRROR STAGE,
"formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic
experience."
 Lacan regarded the mirror stage as more than a moment in the life of the
infant; instead, it formed part of the permanent structure of subjectivity.
 In "the Imaginary order," their own image permanently catches and
captivates the subject.
 Lacan explains
"the mirror stage is a phenomenon to which I assign a twofold value. In
the first place, it has historical value as it marks a decisive turning-
point in the mental development of the child. In the second place, it
typifies an essential libidinal relationship with the body-image".
Psychoanalysis:
LIBIDINAL DEVELOPMENT
 Libido, a Latin term meaning desire, want, amorous
desire, is defined as the instinctual sexual energy
underlying all mental activity.
 Libido is all of the instinctual energies and desires that
are derived from the id, sexual instinct or sexual drive.
A major contribution of psychoanalysis to human
understanding is its explanation of neurotic mental
disorders in terms of fixation or regression of the libido.
Carl Jung views

 Presented theory of Collective

Unconsciousness
 To analyze text in terms of images, symbols,
myths of ancient cultures
 Doesn’t focus the personal unconsciousness of
the author
Concepts of Analytical Psychology developed by Jung:
 Synchronicity - an acausal principle as a basis for the apparently random
simultaneous occurrence of phenomena.
 Archetype - a concept "borrowed" from anthropology to denote supposedly
universal and recurring mental images or themes. Jung's definitions of
archetypes varied over time and have been the subject of debate as to their
usefulness.
 Archetypal images - supposedly universal symbols that can mediate opposites
in the psyche, often found in religious art, mythology and fairy tales across
cultures
 Complex- the repressed organisation of images and
experiences that governs perception and behaviour
 Extraversion and introversion - personality traits of degrees of openness or
reserve contributing to psychological type.
Concepts of Analytical Psychology developed by Jung:
 Collective Unconscious - aspects of unconsciousness experienced by all
people in different cultures
 Anima - the contrasexual aspect of a man's psyche, his inner personal
feminine conceived both as a complex and an archetypal image
 Animus - the contrasexual aspect of a woman's psyche, her inner personal
masculine conceived both as a complex and an archetypal image
 Self - the central over-arching concept governing the individuation process, as
symbolised by mandalas, the union of male and female, totality, unity. Jung
viewed it as the psyche's central archetype
 Individuation - the process of fulfilment of each individual "which negates
neither the conscious or unconscious position but does justice to them both".
 Shadow - the repressed, therefore unknown, aspects of the personality
including those often considered to be negative
 Archetypal Literary Criticism
(Greek archē "beginning," and typos "imprint")

 A Critical Theory that interprets a text by focusing on recurring myths and

archetypes in the narrative, symbols, images, and character types in literary
work.
 In 1934 Maud Bodkin published Archetypal Patterns in Poetry.
 Archetypal literary criticism's origins are rooted in two other academic
disciplines, social anthropology and psychoanalysis; each contributed to
literary criticism in separate ways, with the latter being a sub-branch of
critical theory.
 Archetypal criticism was at its most popular in the 1940s and 1950s, largely
due to the work of Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye.
 Though archetypal literary criticism is no longer widely practiced, nor have
there been any major developments in the field, it still has a place in the
tradition of literary studies.
 Demerits of Psychoanalytic Theory

 It is little unfair to the fair sex

 Literature is not merely an expression of sexual desire
 The author may camouflage and incidents may be
completely fictitious
 It ignores sociopolitical factors
 It forces the reader to perceive the concepts in the
given text through the author’s point of view
 Psychology & Literature

 So what does all of this psychological business have to do with

literature and the study of literature?
 Put simply, 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).
 Tyson provides some insightful and applicable questions to help
guide our understanding of psychoanalytic criticism.
 Freudian Criticism
 Freudian criticism, literary criticism that uses the psychoanalytic theory
of Sigmund Freud to interpret a work in terms of the known psychological
conflicts of its author or, conversely, to construct the author’s psychic life
from unconscious revelations in his work.
 Freudian critics depart from the traditional scope of criticism in
reconstructing an author’s psychic life on the basis of his writings. Edmund
Wilson’s Wound and the Bow (1941) explored this realm, and Van Wyck
Brooks used this approach to biography in works such as The Ordeal of
Mark Twain (1920).
 Professional analysts have applied their techniques to literature,
notably Ernest Jones in Hamlet and Oedipus (1910 and 1949), which traces
the famous problem of Hamlet’s irresolution back to William
Shakespeare’s own Oedipal guilt.
Typical Questions:
 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"?
In literary analysis, a Jungian critic would look for
archetypes: Typical questions:
 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-Sea-
Journey)
 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?
Application of Psychoanalytic Theory on
Literary Texts
 Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
 Hamlet by Shakespeare
 Macbeth by Shakespeare
 Mourning becomes Electra by Eugene O’ Neil
 Long Days Journey into Night by Eugene O’ Neil
 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams
 The Glass Managerie by Tennessee Williams
 Araby by James Joyce
 The Little Willow by Francis Tower
 To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
 Works Consulted:

 Twentieth Century Literary Criticism

 “Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis” (1922)
 “The Interpretation of Dreams”
 “The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming” (1908)
 “The Uncanny” (1919)
 “What is Psychoanalytic Criticism?” (Google Scholars)