Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism and Theory

Hello, my beautiful bookers!

Following on from Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism, today Instagram (@booksterblogger, https://www.instagram.com/booksterblogger/) chose for us a study into Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism and Theory! Now I have to mention, I didn’t know much about this criticism prior to this study,😱so it’s been really fun to get to grips with a different side of literary reading. 

Definitions 

psychoanalytic

adjective

1. relating to or involving psychoanalysis.
   "Freudian psychoanalytic theory"

   
   

psychoanalysis

noun

1. a system of psychological theory and therapy which aims to treat mental disorders by investigating the interaction of conscious and unconscious elements in the mind and bringing repressed fears and conflicts into the conscious mind by techniques such as dream interpretation and free association.

As you can see from our definitions, originally, psychoanalysis started as a clinical theory and a therapeutic technique but has later developed into a part of cultural theory and is now a way to analyse literary texts. Key names that may be useful for further research include; Carl Jung and Julia Kristeva (a feminist psychoanalysis). Today however, we will mainly be focusing on two prominent founders and psychoanalysts; Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. 

Many of you will already be very aware of the work of Freud as he is a household name due to his work in the psychological field. I’m briefly going to brush over a number of theories, mechanisms and structures coined by Freud in a series of quotations and analysis to help identify what Freud’s psychoanalytic theory suggests we should keep in mind. 

“In literary studies...psychoanalytic criticism often disregards the textuality of texts, their verbal surface, in favour of the Freudian motifs supposedly encrypted in their depths.” (Ellman) When we consider a Freudian analysis, we look at the detail of what is written. “Traditional psychoanalytic criticism tends to fall into three general categories, depending on the object of analysis: the author, the reader, or the fictive persons of the text.” (Brooks, p334) These are our focal points of study.

Many of Freud’s ideas focused on the idea of the subconscious and conscious self. However, it is important to note that Freud later abandoned - as did many psychoanalysis - the use of ‘subconscious’ in their work, instead describing the state as the ‘unconscious mind’. 

Freud states the psyche (unconscious mind) is split into three parts:  

The Ego:The conscious self 

The Superego: The regulating conscience; the part of the mind that provides moral instructions and prohibitions; the ‘Jiminy Cricket’. 

And The Id (Animal Instinct): The instinctual, pleasure-seeking part of the psyche; where forbidden feelings, emotions and desires are “repressed”.

It is thought that in the Id, we experience repression and in some cases a sublimation. Repression is defined as the ‘forgetting’ or ignoring of unresolved conflicts, whereas sublimation is the promotion of repressed material that forms into something larger or nobler.  “For instance, sexual urges may be given sublimated expression in the form of intense religious experiences or longings” (Barry, p97). Repression is often something we experience within society itself. However, Freud states that what is repressed isn’t locked away forever, that “There is always a return of the repressed” (Freud) and when this is brought to a societal scale “It goes without saying, that a civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.” (Freud)

Freud also focused heavily on psychosexual development, which is an area of his theories that is heavily disputed among psychoanalytic critics. He proposed the notion of infantile sexuality; “that sexuality begins not at puberty, but in infancy, especially through the infant’s relationship with the mother.” (Barry, page 97) This was then tied to the Oedipus Complex, which is the desire for sexual involvement with a parent of the opposite sex and a sense of rivalry with a parent of the same sex. Freud hypothesised that this was a natural occurrence, however this has since been disproven and disputed by modern critics. It’s name is derived from Greek legend from the story of Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother. There have been multiple retellings and rewritings of the legend, such as the work, Everything Under, by Daisy Johnson, and is one of the reasons psychoanalytic criticisms hold a bit of a bad rap in the literary community. 

“Another key idea is that of the libido, which is the energy drive associated with sexual desire. In classic Freudian theory it has three stages of focus, the oral, the anal, and the phallic. The libido in the individual is part of more generalised drive which the later Freud called Eros (the Greek word for ‘love’), which roughly means the life instinct, the oppose of which is Thanatos (the Greek word for ‘death’), which roughly means the death instinct, a conterversional notion, of course.” (Barry, p98) Although this is one of his theories that has held throughout the years, it is important to mention, especially on the topic of sexual desire, that Freud has been heavily distrusted on these views “ since the 1980s, partly as a result of his mainly negative views on women, as seen in the notion that women’s sexuality is based upon feelings of narcissism, masochism, and passivity, and the idea that they suffer from an innate form of inferiority complex known as ‘penis envy’. Influential work seems to show that these views were maintained by misreading, or even misrepresenting the evidence presented to him by his patients; for instance by taking accounts of sexual abuse in childhood as fantasies rather than reality.” (Barry, p105)

Some final mentions of Freud’s studies include: “ projection, when aspects of ourselves (usually negative ones) are not recognised as part of ourselves but are perceived in or attributed to another; our own desires or antagonisms, for instance, may be ‘disowned’ in this way.” (Barry, p98)

“the screen memory, which is a trivial or inconsequential memory whose function is to obliterate a more significant one. A well-known example of these mechanisms is the Freudian slip, which Freud himself called the ‘parapraxis’, whereby repressed material in the unconscious finds an outlet through such everyday phenomena as slips of the tongue, slips of the pen, or unintended actions.” (Barry, p99)

“A final example of important Freudian terminology is the dream work, the process by which real events or desires are transformed into dream images. These include: displacement, whereby one person or event is represented by another which is in some way linked or associated with it, perhaps because of a similar-sounding word, or by some form of symbolic substitution; and condensation, whereby a number of people, or events, or meanings are combined and represented by a single image in the dream.” (Barry, p99)

Like Literature, Freudian theory and interpretation works by making educated deductions based on symbolism and general associations from culture. Though his theories weren’t always correct, Freud has been the inspiration for many psychoanalysts, including Jacques Lacan. 

Lacan is responsible for challenging the orthodoxies within his field. “In 1955 at a conference in Vienna he called for a new ‘back-to-basics’ Freudianism. But he meant, not a new attempt to understand the ‘conscious personality’ (the ‘ego’) and interpret its behaviour in the light of an understanding of the working of the unconscious (which many would take to be the whole point of Freudianism), but rather a new emphasis on the unconscious itself, as ‘the nucleus of our being’.” (Barry p118) “In Western philosophy the conscious mind has long been regarded as the essence of selfhood. This view is encapsulated in the proclamation by the philosopher Descartes, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Lacan lays down a dramatic challenge to this philosophical consensus… when he reverses this into ‘I am where I think not’, that is, in the unconscious, where my true selfhood lies.” (Barry, p114)  Many of Lacan’s studies focus on the unconscious; how it forms, and how it affects the conscious. 

In terms of how his theories apply to literary study, Lacan is heavily orientated on language in general, stating that psychoanalysis is based in language. “ [He begans The Insistence of the Letter] by paying allegiance to the intellectual dominance of language studies: he asks (rhetorically) ‘how could a psychoanalyst of today not realise that his realm of truth is in fact the word.’ Language, then, is central, and this is so because in investigating the unconscious the analyst is always both using and examining language - in effect, Freudian psychiatry is entirely a verbal science.” (Barry, p112).  As a language lover myself, I love this idea that Lacan pursues. Essential, our language is formed unconsciously and consciously. What is unconscious can be inferred through the study of the language used. Which when applied to literature allows for close analysis of texts in reference to psychoanalytic criticisms. 

However,  “a major consequence of accepting the Lacanian position would be to reject the conventional views of characterisation in literature. Since Lacan deconstructs the idea of the subject as a stable amalgam of consciousness, we can hardly accept novelistic characters as people but must hold them in abeyance, as it were, and see them as assemblages of signifiers clustering round a proper name. Hence, a wholly different reading strategy is demanded.” (Barry, p115) This means when we approach psychoanalytic analysis through a Lacanian lens, we must approach a text as a whole. The characters are no individual characters but elements of the text that exist for unconscious or conscious reasoning.

 

“Lacan’s foregrounding of the unconscious  [also] leads him to speculate about the mechanism whereby we emerge into consciousness. Before the sense of self emerges the young child exists in a realm which Lacan calls the Imaginary, in which there is no distinction between self and Other and there us a kind of idealised identification with the mother. Then, between six months and eighteen months comes what he calls the ‘mirror-stage’, when the child sees its own reflection in the mirror and begins to conceive of itself as a unified being, separate from the rest of the world… This stage also marks the beginning of socialisation, with its prohibitions and restraints, associated with the figure of the father. The new order which the child now enters is called by Lacan the Symbolic.” (Barry, p115-p116) 

Obviously this is an awful lot to take in at once don’t worry. But to make it a little easier I have comprised a table of how Freudian and Lacanian critics usually approach texts, based on the quotes from Peter Barry. 

Freudian Literary Critics	Lacanian Literary Critics
“They give central importance, in literary interpretation, to the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious mind. They associate the literary works ‘overt’ context with the former as being what the work is ‘really’ about, and aiming to disentangle the two.”(Barry, p107)	“Like Freudian critics, they pay close attention to unconscious motives and feelings, but instead of excavating for those of the author or characters, they search out those of the text itself, uncovering contradictory undercurrents of meaning, which lie like a subconscious beneath the conscious of the text. This is another way of defining the process of ‘deconstruction.’”(Barry p116-p117)
“Hence, they pay close attention to unconscious motives and feelings, whether these be (a) those of the author, or (b) those of the characters depicted in the work.”(Barry, p107)	“They demonstrate the presence in the literary work of Lacanian psychoanalytic symptoms of phrases, such as the mirror-stage or the sovereignty of the unconscious.”(Barry p116-p117)
“They demonstrate the presence in the literary work of classic psychoanalytic symptoms, conditions, or phases, such as the oral, anal, and phallic stages of emotional and sexual development in infants.” (Barry, p107)	“They treat the literary text in terms of a series of broader Lacanian orientations, towards such concepts as lack of desire, for instance. “(Barry p116-p117)
“They make large-scale applications of psychoanalytic concepts to literary history in general; for example, Harold Bloom’s book The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 1997) sees the struggle for identity by each generation of poets, under the ‘threat’ of the greatness of its predecessor, as an enactment of the Oedipus complex.” (Barry, p107)	“They see the literary as an enacting or demonstration of Lacanian views about language and the unconscious, particularly the endemic elusiveness of the signified, and the centrality of the unconscious. In practice, this results in favouring the anti-realist text which challenges the conventions of literary representation.” (Barry p116-p117)
“They identify a ‘psychic’ context for the literary work, at the expense of social or historical context, privileging the individual ‘psycho-drama’ above the ‘social drama’ of class conflict. The conflict between generations or siblings, or between competing desires within the same individual, looms much larger than conflict between social classes, for instance.” (Barry, p107)

Hopefully this gives you a nice basis for Psychoanalytic literary criticism and theory. There is a lot to unravel here, and I understand it’s long winded. However, I hope to use this theory in a post soon to demonstrate how you may utilise this information. (Though I may also need a break first after all of that!😴)

Thank you so much for reading. I hope you’ve learned something new and develop your own studies on literary criticisms. 

See you soon!😁

 

Bibliography

• Maud Ellman, Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism. 

• Peter Brooks, Critical Inquiry, Vol 13, Number 2, Winter, 1987, The Trial(s) of Psychoanalysis, p334

• Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, “Psychoanalytic criticism”, 4th edition, 2017, Manchester University Press, 1824, Pages 97-122.

• Freud, Sigmund. The Future of an Illusion, 1927.