POSTMODERNISM-
PSYCHOANALYSIS

• Postmodernism is a set of ideas and has only emerged as an area of academic study since the mid1980s although it’s not clear exactly when postmodernism begins
• Thinking about postmodernism is thinking about modernism, the movement from which postmodernism seems to grow or emerge.

• Postmodernism, like modernism, follows most of those same ideas, rejecting boundaries between high and low forms of art, rejecting rigid genre distinctions, emphasizing pastiche, parody, bricolage, irony, and playfulness.

• Post modern art (and thought) favors reflexivity and self-consciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity (especially in narrative structures), ambiguity, simultaneity, and an emphasis on the destructured, decentered, dehumanized subject

• As a reading method
• It tries to read unconscious symptoms in a text
• While reading the text, the reader tries to find the contradiction, repetition

• Supremacy unconsciousness over consciousness
• Dynamic relationship Id-Ego-Superego
• Oedipus phase, penis-envy, displacement, repression
• Life instinct and death instinct (death wish)

• Id works with pleasure principle
• Ego works with reality principle , trying to meet Id’s need.
• Superego works with morality principle

• Literary text is assumed to be like hysteria which reveal or hide trauma of the author’s psyche
• The analysis can only rely on the symptoms in the text

• Character can be viewed as symbolic manifestation of certain psyche element
(Id, Ego, Superego) the relation dynamic of which with other character is seen in conflict
• The other textual elements which can be analyzed using psychoanalysis are : theme, title, point of view, figurative language, etc.