Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis

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  PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
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  KEY FIGURES • SigmundFreud • Jacques Lacan
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  DEFINITION • adopts themethods of "reading" employed by Freud and later theorists to interpret texts. • argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the author • a literary work is a manifestation of the author's own neuroses. • 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.
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  • seeks evidenceof unresolved emotions, psychological conflicts, guilts, ambivalences, and so forth within what may well be a disunified 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.
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  • Psychological materialwill be expressed indirectly, disguised, or encoded (as in dreams) through principles such as – "symbolism" (the repressed object represented in disguise), – "condensation" (several thoughts or persons represented in a single image), and – "displacement" (anxiety located onto another image by means of association).
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  • According toFreud, all of us have repressed wishes and fears • We all have dreams in which repressed feelings and memories emerge disguised, and thus we are all potential candidates for dream analysis.
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  OEDIPUS COMPLEX • Oneof the unconscious desires most commonly repressed is the childhood wish to displace the parent of our own sex and take his or her place in the affections of the parent of the opposite sex • The male infant conceives the desire to eliminate the father and become the sexual partner of the mother.
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  • The Oedipalphase of development is supposed to bring about conformity to social rules of kinship, that is, conformity to the taboo of incest. • When a boy realizes he cannot have his mother as a sexual partner, he then aspires to the social rights which will grant him his own sexual partner outside the nuclear family. • This theory has been heavily criticized for its dependence on heterosexuality and the maintenance of a traditional nuclear family.
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  FREUDIAN SLIP • “slipof the tongue” when we say something we don't consciously mean but reveals part of our unconscious. • For Freud, the “unconscious” is a repository of repressed desires, feelings, memories, and instinctual drives mostly related to sexuality and violence. • The unconscious is the part of the mind beyond consciousness which nevertheless has a strong influence upon our actions.
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  • Freud notesthat literary texts are like dreams; they embody or express unconscious material in the form of complex displacements and condensations. • Literature displaces unconscious desires, drives, and motives into imagery that might bear no resemblance to its origin, but nonetheless expresses it.
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  • This kindof analysis can look at the unconscious motives of both author and characters, and identify psychoanalytic features in the text, such as the existence of an Oedipus complex.
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  Analysis • Text: TheGrinch Who Stole Christmas (Dr. Seuss)