Sigmund FreudPsychoanalytic Criticism

Overview

Definition

Origins

Interpretation of Dreams

Core Concepts

Experience, Consciousness, and Personality

Dreams

The Uncanny

Summary

What is Psychoanalytic Criticism?

Aims to discover and interpret art in terms of psychoanalytic concepts and processes

In literature, Freudian methodology analyzes characters in terms of their psychological reality – as real people

Significant issue relates to the conscious and the unconscious in character and action – what are unconscious motives?

The individual psychic drama is primary, not the socio-cultural or historical drama

Definitions and Origins

Psychoanalytic criticism aims to understand characters through the enigmatic association between the conscious and the unconscious – in literary characters.

The basis of Freud’s psychoanalytic approach emphasizes the unconscious and the key role it plays in a person or character’s life (Oedipus; Hamlet; Ahab, Moby-Dick; The Homecoming)

In the real world, such behaviors as jokes, slips of the tongue (Freudian slip), forgetfulness suggest unconscious wishes (in Freudian theory)

Core Concepts and Premises

Rationality does not motivate most human behavior

The conscious impulses over which a person attends are limited and self-directed only to the extent that a person or character understands them, accepts them, and integrates them

Incest and its prohibition – nature and culture (raw and cooked) – form inherent problems in the riddle of the unconscious

Core Concepts: Psychic Process

Freud conceived of the human psyche as structured in three levels of consciousness Consciousness – awareness or attention to something

immediate Preconscious – mental processes that are normal, but

latent. Most of a person’s mental processing is on this level.

Unconscious – mental processes are submerged, scrambled, often deeply repressed; Freud viewed the unconscious as a meaningful “riddle” to be decoded -- the unconscious can be the seat of complex pathology. It is usually not easily accessible.

Experience and Consciousness

Three personality sectors filter a person’s experience ID, EGO, and SUPEREGO. These three elements of a personality interact and govern how a

person or character will deal with experiences, including traumas.

ID – represents the libido and pleasure principle.

EGO – represents the conscious person – organized, integrated, and rational; the ego mediates between the id and the superego – the extent of organization and integration determines the strength of a character’s ego and balance (Ego Strength)

SUPEREGO – represents the conscience of a person or character – social and cultural totem and taboo.

Core Concepts: Trauma

Deep inner conflict lodged in the unconscious (struggle between id and superego) is the root of pathology, hysteria, and madness – disintegration (Ahab in Moby- Dick)

A character may or may not be aware of this conflict

Becoming aware of the conflict does not resolve it – as in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. After Oedipus finally becomes aware that he has killed his

father and married his mother, he blinds himself. In Freudian psychoanalytic terms, the burden of guilt was too devastating.

Core Concepts: Sexuality

Social taboos regarding human sexual impulses are powerful and fundamental; they often lead to conflicted feelings, guilt, trauma, and repression (submerged memory at the unconscious level)

The libido or human sexuality is the primary psychic impetus underneath personality development and behavior; its expression and conduct are socially and culturally monitored

Psychoanalytic Ideas & Literature

Freud’s conception of the enigmatic unconscious forms the basis for psychoanalytic methodology and interpretation

One interpretive technique involves dream analysis -- language and imagery of people’s dreams

Freud views dreams as “works of art born of a compromise between the conscious and the unconscious” (“Uncanny” p. ix)

E.T.A. Hoffman’s short story “The Sandman” exemplifies the way an unresolved trauma (death of Nathaniel’s father) is distorted in a dream

Freud discusses this story within the concept of “the uncanny” or something hidden, secret, and uncomfortable—repressed in the unconscious

The Uncanny & Delusions & Dreams

These works are Freud’s most developed thought in literary criticism

Believed that the psychological mechanisms operative in “dream-work” also operate in the process of imaginative writing

Believed psychoanalysis could offer an “intelligence” or visibility into the process of dreams and creative writing

“The Creative Writer and Daydreaming” was first interpretation of artistry built on day-dreaming (“Uncanny” 23)

The Uncanny

Relates to what is unsettling, frightening – what atmosphere, tone, setting, language “arouses dread and horror”

Opposite of the Sublime – what is beautiful, transcendent

Individual differences in the perception and sensitivity to “the uncanny”

Creative or imaginative writing of fantasy draws on inventing an aura of the fantastic or dichotomy of the uncanny

Elements of The Uncanny

Atmosphere or characters must lose a sense of poetic reality or material reality

Character feels attracted to and repelled by the same object or person – id vs. superego – creates ambivalence – cognitive dissonance.

Producing uncanny feelings: Creator needs to invent superstitious conditions with a sense

of balance to reality – then transgress or violate the reader’s “trust”

Uncanny or fearful feelings emerge from memories that have been surmounted (repressed feelings are difficult to arouse)

“The Birds”

Associated with the notion of the sandman – a creature that throws sand in children’s eyes when they won’t sleep

The eyes of children “jump out of their heads all bleeding”

The sandman then takes the eyes in a sack “to the half moon” to feed his children – the “children” sit in their nest with curled beaks; these “children” use their beaks to peck out “naughty girl’s and boy’s eyes”

The sandman is associated with evil – a terrifying unconscious fear

Dreams and Poetics

Dreams are viewed as a means of evading conscious awareness and understanding

In the “Interpretation of Dreams” Freud viewed dreams as cryptic texts – aesthetic works of everyday life

Lionel Trilling referred to Freudian psychology as a mental system “that makes poetry indigenous to the soul” (223)

Psychoanalysis aims to describe mechanisms of dreams and decipher them

Dream Analysis

In talking about dreams (or analyzing fantasy) a person or character builds up an associative network (language, imagery, symbolism) that “illuminates” the “dream thoughts” or unconscious desires – wishes.

These dream thoughts reveal the person or character’s trauma and the way the repressed, unresolved experience has unconsciously affected the character

Dreams elude consciousness and distort reality in four ways: Condensation, Displacement, Representation, Secondary Editing

Dreams: Eluding Consciousness

Condensation Compression of dream thought or experiences into brief,

cryptic “riddles” or unconscious messages

Displacement Transference of desires or wishes from one person or object to

another One is angry with a person and slams a door – rather than

confront the person (too threatening)

Means of Representation Entangled dream content and dream thought are combined

into a single event

Dreams: Accessing the Buried

Purpose of interpreting dream thought or analyzing character’s unconscious (as in “The Sandman”) is to restore realistic connections

Understand the motivations and language – revealed in imagery, symbolism

Screen Memories – essay on the dynamics of memories; what is recalled and what is screened off -- submerged memories

Summary

Psychoanalytic criticism analyzes and interprets literary characters as realistic persons

The central issues in psychoanalytic interpretation are the primacy of sexuality and unconscious desires – wishes.

The ego mediates between the id (suppressed primal drives) and the superego (socio-cultural morés)

Dreams are viewed as a means of evading conscious awareness and understanding – they are a reservoir of repressed conflicts or memories

Summary con’t

One psychoanalytic interpretive technique involves dream analysis -- language and imagery of people’s dreams or fantasies

Freud views dreams as “works of art borne of a compromise between the conscious and the unconscious”

Psychoanalytic theory aims to describe mechanisms of dreams and decipher them as expressions of unconscious conflicts and consequent action or behavior