M.K.Bhavnagar University Department of English

Topic:- Psychoanalytical literary criticism

Roll no. 14

Enrollment no.:- 14101026

Semester:- 2

Course:- Criticism 2

Email:- parmarmilan1994@gmail.com

Submitted to:- Department Of English

M.K.Bhavnagar university

What is psychoanalysis?

Method of mind investigation especially unconscious..

A system of structure of theories concerning the relation of conscious and unconscious psychological process

A technical procedure for investigating unconscious mental processes and for treating psychoneuroses

Psychoanalytic literary theory

It emerged in the 19th century.

In method, concept and form influenced by the tradition of psychoanalysis begun by Sigmund Freud.

In romantic period it was belief that the details and the form of literature are related with it’s author’s distinctive mind.

Three practices

1.reference to author’s personality in order to interpret or explain a literary work.

2. Reference to literary works in order to establish, biographically personality of the author.

3.Reading of literary work in order to experience distinctive subjectivity or consciousness of its own author…

Celine Suprenant “psychoanalytic literary criticism does not constitute a unified field. However, all variant endorse, at least to a certain degree, the idea that literature…is fundamentally entwined with the psyche”

The object of psychoanalytic criticism, can be the psychoanalysis of the author or a particular character in given work. In this directly therapeutic form, the criticism is very similar to psychoanalysis itself, closely following the analytic interpretive process discussed in Freud’s The Dream Interpretation. Critic may see fictional character as case study..

Poetry for Keble “ is the indirect expression …of some overpowering emotion or ruling taste or feeling the direct indulgence where of is somehow repressed..” “a sefty valve, preserving men from madness”

Developments in the theory and Freud’s role

Since 1920, psychological literary criticism has come to be psychoanalytical criticism whose premises and procedures were established by Sigmund Freud.

He developed the dynamic form of psychology that he called psychoanalysis, it also accounts literature as well as arts..

Introduction to psychoanalysis(1920) – brief comment on the working of the artists imagination.

Freud proposes that literature and other arts, like dramas and neurotic symptoms, consist of imagined or fantasized, fulfillment of wishes that are either denied by reality or prohibited by social standards of morality and propriety..”

Artist find satisfaction in distorted forms that serves to disguise their real motives and objects from the unconscious mind.

Condensation

Displacement

symbolism

The chief Mechanism that effect these disguises of

unconscious wishes

Literature and art therefore unlike dreams and neuroses may serve the artist as a mode of fantasy that opens the way back to reality.”

Freud 1920, theory later developed as the theory of mental structure of dynamics and processes..

He gave such concepts like, Oedipus complex, penis envy, Freudian slips, Id, ego and super ego..

He divides mind on the base of its functional aspects…

Thee functional aspects of mind

Psychoanalytical approach in practice

Freud applied psychoanalysis on the literary works of Shakespeare like Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, a mid summers night dreams..

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The brother Karamazcv..-Analysis..

After 1930 numbers of writers produced critical analysis, modeled on classical Freudian theory..of the lives of the author and their literary work/s..

Hamlet and Oedipus 1949- Earnest Jones

“Ego psychology”- literature and psychology-Frederick C. Crews..

Charles Mauron:- he suggest four phase of the method to interpret literary work via psychoanalysis..

1. innate desires expressed and revealed by metaphors and symbolically

2. the juxtaposition of the writer’s works lead the critic to define symbolic theme.

3.these metaphorical networks are significant of latent inner reality.

4.the last phase consist in linking the writer’s literary creation to his own personal life..

The psychobiography

This term designates an account of the life of an author that focuses on the subject’s psychological development, relying for evidence both on external sources and on the author’s own writings..

Eric H. Erikson’s – young man Luther

Leon Edel’s –Henry James

Justin Kalpan – Mark Twain and his world

Carl Jung and Jacques LacanCarl Jung comes up with the study related to archetype and the collective unconscious, his influential works combine with the work of Anthropologist such as Claude Levi- Strauss and Joseph Campbell, it led to mythocriticism and archetype analysis..

For Carl Jung all great literature are myths..

Jacques Lacan (French Freud) :- “ unconscious is structured like language…human mind is not preexisted to, but constituted by the language we use”

Conclusion

There is lots of criticism of Freud’s theory, such as for feminist critics attacked the male centered nature of Freud’s theory esp. Oedipus Complex..And penis envy..The danger is that the serious student may become theory ridden, forgetting that Freud’s is not the only approach to literary criticism.To see a great poem primarily as a psychological case study is often to miss wider significance and perhaps even the essential aesthetic experience it should provide..Later analysts would conclude that ‘clearly one cannot psychoanalyze a writer from his text; one can only appropriate him..’