PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
Psychoanalysis: a system of theories concerning the relationship between the conscious and
and unconscious psychological mental processes
Psychological:
pertaining to the mind, pertaining to or affecting the mind
A concept that is part of our everyday lives, they include ideas such as sibling rivalry,
inferiority complexes, and defense mechanisms. They are key concepts about human
experiences that operate in our daily lives in profound ways, and help us understand human
behaviours. Most of the principles were established by Sigmund Freud (1859-1939) and his
ideas have evolved and changed over time.
Origins of the Unconscious
Unconscious: not perceived at the level of awareness, the part of the mind that functions on
a level that is not part of our “realized” awareness
- a storehouse of painful experiences and emotions, those wounds, fears,
guilty desires, and unresolved conflicts we do not want to know about because
we feel we will be overwhelmed.
-it represses unhappy memories and events but doesn’t eliminate them
The idea behind a psychological history is that it begins in childhood with experiences
that directly impact on adolescent and adult behaviour. These experiences can cause
psychological problems, disorders and dysfunctions. In essence it can be used to explain
repetitive and destructive behaviour that could be influencing someone for some time without
knowing it. Human beings are motivated by desires, fears, needs, and conflicts of which they
are often unaware (unconscious). Anything that happens to us involves the unconscious. That
being said, the unconscious engages us at the deepest level of our being often making us
behave in certain ways. Repressed wounds, fears, guilty desires and unresolved conflicts
impact on all aspects of our lives.
Family is also very important in the psychoanalytic theory as we are the products of the
role we are given in the family such as girl, sister, mother, youngest, eldest, middle child etc.
Sigmund Freud introduced the idea of the Oedipal Conflict in that a child is in competition with
the parent of the same gender for the attention and affection of the parent of the other gender.
Family conflicts and sibling rivalry are all developmental stages we all go through as a healthy
part of establishing our identity, but sometimes we fail to outgrow these conflicts and we then
have problems in our everyday lives.
Defenses
The processes by which the contents of our unconscious are kept in the unconscious
are called defenses, they keep the repressed…repressed. These include the following:
Selective perception: hearing only what we want to hear
Selective memory:
modifying memories so we aren’t overwhelmed by them, or forgetting
painful events completely
Denial: believing the problem doesn’t exist or never happened
Avoidance: staying away from people or situations that are liable to make us anxious
Displacement: “taking it out” on someone or something less threatening, who is not involved \
or related
Projection: blaming our fears, problem, or guilty desires on someone else and condemning
them for it
These defenses are used, and can manifest themselves into a fear of intimacy, fear of
emotional involvement, fear of abandonment, low self-esteem, fear of betrayal.
Defenses are meant to protect, and when they break down people experience all sorts
of anxiety and other problems. Our defenses keep us unaware of our unconscious experience,
but that does not mean that it doesn’t impact on our behaviour in some way.
Death
Trauma is the result of a painful experience that scars us psychologically. There are any
number of things and experiences that can create trauma in an individual. Death is the principle
organizer of our psychological experience and usually causes the most trauma. Freud said that
human beings have a “death drive” accounting for an alarming degree of self-destructive
behaviour in individuals (physically and psychologically). He concluded that there is something
in our biological make-up that explains this. Death can be interpreted to represent many
different things psychologically:
Death = fear, fear of abandonment, fear of being alone, ultimate abandonment, guilt,
Inadequacy, fear of intimacy, fear of life, fear of risk, desire not to feel,
Death may not be a biological death but a loss in general – of a mate’s attention, loss of love,
health, job, money, or the psychological death we all experience when we feel abandoned by a
parent.
Sexuality
Freud called a human’s sex drive Eros. He stated that there is always an unconscious
sexual reaction to anything. He stated that it relates directly to our identity in how it relates to our
capacity to feel pleasure. Sexuality is inescapable, and has both conscious and unconscious
meanings. Sexual behaviour sets the rules for proper sexual conduct and the definition of
normal an abnormal. Freud divided it up three ways:
Superego: society’s rules and definition concerning sexuality. We therefore internalize what is
right and wrong and we feel guilty when we think differently than the superego.
Id: is the opposite of the superego, it is the psychological part of our sexual energy. It is
devoted solely to the gratification of prohibited desires such as power, sex, amusement, food –
all without consideration of the consequences. The Id consists of desires that are forbidden, the
superego (cultural taboos) determine the desires of the id.
The ego: is the conscious self that plays between the id and the superego. The product of
conflict between society saying what we can’t have but what we want
All three are defined by each other.
Questions for Psychoanalysis and Literature
Using the psychoanalytical theory with a piece of literature will mean that you won’t find
every principle or concept explained above. It is more of a process of seeing how the concepts
are operating in the text in such a way as to enrich our understanding of the work. It could take
the form of showing the text’s representation of Oedipal dynamics or family dynamics, death or
sexuality. It could analyze the way the narrator’s unconscious problems keep asserting
themselves over the course of the novel. It can be used to better understand the behaviour of
literary characters by analyzing their psyches. A psychoanalytic literary criticism can focus on
one or more of the following:
The author: the theory is used to analyze the author and his/her life, and the literary work is
seen to supply evidence for this analysis.
The characters: the theory is used to analyze one or more of the characters; the psychological
theory becomes a tool that explains the characters’ behaviours and motivations.
The audience: the theory is used to explain the appeal of the work for those who read it; the
work is seen to embody universal human psychological processes and motivators, to which the
readers respond more or less unconsciously.
Some questions you can ask while reading your novels:
 What unconscious motives are operating in the (main) characters?
 What core issues are being illustrated and where did they stem from for the
characters?(Remember unconscious consists of repressed wounds, fears, unresolved
conflicts, and guilty desires.)
 Are there any Oedipal dynamics, or any other dynamics at work? Is it possible to relate
one character’s behaviour to early experiences with family in the story?
 How can the characters’ behaviours be explained in terms of psychoanalytic concepts
(regression, crisis, projection, fear or fascination with death, sexuality)?
 How might recurrent, or striking dream symbols reveal the way in which the character is
projecting his or her unconscious desires, fears, wounds, unresolved conflicts onto other
characters, onto the setting, or onto events? Are there any relevant symbols to death,
sexuality, or the unconscious?
An example of a paper written using this theory of criticism is an essay on the fear of intimacy in
the novel The Great Gatsby. The person would analyze characters explaining their fear of
intimacy and why and how it impacted on other characters in the story, and the story itself.
“Gatsby’s lonely pursuit of Daisy replays the loneliness of his youth. Whether it intended to or
not, the novel shows how effectively romantic relationships can facilitate repression of
psychological wounds and thereby bring someone ceaselessly into the past.”