PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

Sigmund Freud's ideas

“For Freud, the unresolved conflicts that give rise to any neurosis are the stuff of literature. A work of literature, he believes, is the external expression of the author’s unconscious mind. Accordingly, the literary work must be treated like a dream.” (Bressler 153)

1) the unconscious--the big iceberg which contains the hidden, repressed desires of life can be released through lit

2) dreams--latent content is the real desire; manifest content is the remembered, reported dream--in lit the manifest is the plot; latent, the true meaning of the author--the unconscious which the reader, a psychoanalytic critic can uncover. Condensation is the grouping of all of one’s feeling (usually anger) into one content form, similar to metaphor. Displacement is the transference of the feeling (anger) to someone or something else, similar to metonymy, in which an associative term is used for the object or concept.

3) Tripartite model: id-ego-superego—in literature, sometimes characters can take these parts, sometimes settings can--always symbolic; id is irrational, instinctual, unknown, unconscious, containing secret desires, wishes, fears. It houses the libido, source of psychosexual desires and psychic energy; pleasure principle resides in id (Bressler 150); ego is rational, logical, waking part, corresponds to the reality principle; it regulates desires from id (Bressler 150-1); superego is the censor of inappropriate desires (according to social norms), working through punishment in form of guilt and fear (Bresssler 150)

4) Oedipal complex, penis envy, castration complex--all these can be used to interpret thematic elements in a story ; Freud sees the male as having the advantage, because the girl will never possess a penis and must, therefore, find fulfillment in relationship to a male in her adult life in order to make up for her lack.

Carl Jung's collective unconscious: man shares knowledge, experiences, images with entire human race, resulting in archetypes that affect how people respond to life--when certain images are in lit, they call up our archetypal feelings

Jacques Lacan:
1) human subjects enter a pre-existing system of signifiers which take on meanings only within a language system--people find a "subject" position within a relational system (based on differences--usually binary opposites)

2) the early pleasure principle of Freud is succeeded by the reality principle, which in our society (Freud would seem to say universally) privileges male roles, patriarchal laws, creates superego, etc--but desire remains--repressed in unconscious or is unconscious

3) the first would be imaginary stage, in which there are no clear distinction between subject and object--as child develops he creates an ideal self, the ego; the second, the symbolic, is that where phallus is dominate signifier and everything is binary

4) The "I" which discourses is not just the conscious "I" but the unconscious "I" which desires

5) His signifier/signified are the unconscious and the concept--the signifier "floats"; the signified "slides"--no stability--he sees all of Freud's work in dreams, defense mechanisms, etc. in our language--where things are not what they appear--where slips of tongue occur, where metaphor (condensation--several images combine) and metonymy (displacement--significance shifts from one image to a contiguous one) are used.

6) "For Lacan there never were any undistorted signifiers." His thinking "has encourage modern criticism to abandon faith in language's power to refer to things and to express ideas or feelings. Modernist literature often resembles dreams in its avoidance of a governing narrative position and its free play of meaning."

Julia Kristeva:
1) "Human beings are from the beginning a space across which physical and psychic impulses flow rhythmically." But as children grow, they become "regulated" (like Freud's stages) Before organization the stage is "semiotic," in which desire occurs (like Lacan's imaginary. She also calls second stage "symbolic," which she says allows people to have identities.

2) She believes that poetry, use of imaginative language, frees the semiotic: "Poetic language introduces the subversive openness of the semiotic 'across' society's 'closed' symbolic order." "Sometimes she considers that modernist poetry actually prefigures a social revolution which in the distant future will come about when society has evolved a more complex form."

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Schizoanalysis--a Marxist take on psychoanalytic theory. They do not want to see desire as based in lack or need, a "capitalist device that deforms the unconscious" They want "to release the libidinal flow from what they see as oppression rather than repression". The see literature as being able to subvert and free itself from the system--needs a "desire-liberating reader" In regarding the work not as 'text' but as essentially uncoded, the practice of the 'revolutionary' schizoanalytic reader/writer will 'deterritorialize' any given representation [offering a subversion of capitalist totalities]"