Psychoanalytic Critisism
From monstrouspossibility
[edit] Origins of Psychoanalytic Criticism
Sigmund Freud is overwhelmingly considered to be the founder of the psychoanalytic approach to the understanding and treatment of mental illnesses. Freud's work introduced to the scientific community and to the general public the clinical potential of talk-therapy (the "talking-cure"), the diagnostic value of dreams, a new structural model of the human psyche, and an entirely new approach to understanding the cause and treatment of psychoses. The emphasis of the correlation between sexuality and mental health was particularly original and pushed the accepted limits of exploring themes of sexuality and behavioral development. For many doctors and scientists, Freud's theories offered a refreshing outlook on the potential to cure mental illness, whose causes and cure had previously been inextricably correlated with a physical abnormality or deformity of the brain (Hale 4).
In the realm of literary criticism, Freud's ideas introduced new areas to be explored in analyzing and interpreting characters within text, as well as the authors of the text itself. His ideas stress the notion of revealing hidden, repressed, or conflicted desires and motivations as a way to gain clarity on the subject in question. In a clinical setting, this clarity and perspective would be used to treat or "cure" the patient. Since the beginning of the 20th century, when his work was first published, many of the assumptions of psychoanalysis have changed. However, the basic clinical application that Freud introduced, which involves a collaboration between a professional psychoanalyst and a patient willing to surrender to the psychoanalyst his or her memories, thoughts, or responses, is still the dominant structure of contemporary psychotherapy. It may be helpful to compare this relationship between patient and physician to the relationship of a reader to a text, in understanding the change that Freud's ideas presented to the realm of literary criticism; a position which empowers the critical reader in this sense generally discredits an assumption that the text is the only authority on its own meaning. Freud’s own description of the intentions of a psychologist or physician can be used to describe possible motivations of psychoanalytic criticism of literary works: “When the physician is carrying out psychoanalytic treatment of a neurotic, his interest is by no means primarily directed to the patient’s character. He is far more desirous to know what the symptoms signify, what instinctual impulses lurk behind them and are satisfied by them, and by what transitions the mysterious path has led from those impulses to these symptoms” (84 of S.F. on Creativity and the Unconscious). Freud proposed that the breakdown of the human psyche into individual, semi-autonomous roles (the "Id", or unconscious, instinctual desires; the "Ego", or the conscious intermediary between the Id and the external world; and the "Super-Ego", or an extension of the parental influence into adult life) is universally applicable.
In his essay, "The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming", Freud describes the act of writing as a unique therapy : "You will remember that we said the day-dreamer hid his fantasies carefully from other people because he had reason to be ashamed of them... But when a man of literary talent presents his plays, or relates what we take to be his personal daydreams, we experience great pleasure arising probably from many sources. How the writer accomplishes this is his innermost secret; the essential ars poetica lies in the technique by which our feeling of repulsion is overcome, and this has certainly to do with those barriers erected between every individual being and all others. (53-4 in On Creativity and the Unconsicous, by Sigmund Freud).
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Freud on psychoanalysis and language:
"The attitude of dreams towards the category of antithesis and contradiction is most striking. this category is simply ignored; the word "No" does not seem to exist for a dream. Dreams show a special tendency to reduce two opposites to a unity or to represent them as one thing." (Quoting himself, in 'The Antithetical Sense of Primal Words'. Original quotation found in Die Traumdeutung, Section VI)
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Useful Texts:
English Institute.Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text'. Geoffrey Hatman, ed. Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 1978. Freud, Sigmund. An Outline of Psycho-Analysis. James Strachey, trans. W.W. Norton: New York, 1970. Freud, Sigmund. On Creativity and the Unconscious: Papers on the Psychology of Art, Literature, Love, Religion". Benjamin Nelson, ed. Harper & Row: New York, 1958. Hale, Nathan G. The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and the Americans, 1917-1985". Oxford UP: New York, 1995. Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie. Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis.Jacques Lacan. Univ. of Illinois: Chicago, 1986. Farrell, B.A. The Standing of Psychoanalysis. Oxford UP: Oxford, 1981.
Begun by Ben Lemmond, who quite obviously has not yet written anything on the changes in theory/practice over time. I found some of Freud's own literary criticisms especially interesting.
