Literary Theory - Week 6

Psychoanalytic Criticism

Focuses on the unconscious motives and desires of characters and authors.

Psychoanalytic Key Terms

Key terms in psychoanalytic criticism include id, ego, super-ego, repression, and sublimation.

Repression

A basic defense mechanism that removes painful or threatening thoughts from consciousness.

Sublimation

Channeling unacceptable impulses into socially acceptable activities.

Id

The part of the psyche that contains primitive impulses and desires.

Ego

The part of the psyche that mediates between the id and reality.

Super-ego

The part of the psyche that embodies moral standards and values.

Oedipus complex

A complex in which a child feels sexual desire for the opposite-sex parent and hostility toward the same-sex parent.

Libido

Psychic energy or drive associated with sexual instinct.

Freudian slip

An unintentional error regarded as revealing subconscious feelings.

Dream work

The process by which the unconscious mind reworks dream content to make it less threatening.

Displacement

Shifting emotions from an object to which it is attached to another.

Condensation

Combining multiple ideas or images into one.

Psychoanalytical Approaches to Literature

In literary interpretation, this approach emphasizes the distinction between conscious and unconscious mind.

Lacanian psychoanalysis

Associated with Jacques Lacan, suggests the unconscious is structured like a language.

Displacement

In Lacanian theory, the use of one thing to represent another; similar to metonymy.

Condensation

In Lacanian theory, the fusion of multiple things into one; similar to metaphor.

Psychoanalysis

A field of knowledge developed by Sigmund Freud in late nineteenth-century Vienna, focusing on the systematic study of anxiety, fear of persecution, and the fragmentation of the self.

Pleasure Principle

The instinctual seeking of pleasure and avoiding of pain to satisfy biological and psychological needs.

Reality Principle

The ability of the mind to assess the reality of the external world, and to act upon it accordingly.

Neurosis

A sickness caused by excessive repression of the pleasure principle by the reality principle.

Sublimation

A defense mechanism by which unacceptable sexual or aggressive drives are unconsciously transformed into socially acceptable and culturally valued behaviors.

The Unconscious

The place to which desires we are unable to fulfill are relegated.

Erotogenic Zone

An area of the body that is particularly sensitive and capable of generating sexual arousal when stimulated.

Libido

Sexual drive or energy.

Oedipus Complex

A psychoanalytic theory describing a child's feelings of desire for their opposite-sex parent and jealousy and anger towards their same-sex parent.

Ego

Individual identity.

Superego

The awesome, punitive voice of conscience within the child

Dreams

Symbolic fulfilments of unconscious wishes.

Parapraxes

Unaccountable slips of the tongue, failures of memory, bunglings, misreadings and mislayings which can be traced to unconscious wishes and intentions

Transference

A concept sometimes popularly confused with what Freud calls 'projection', or the ascribing to others of feelings and wishes which are actually our own.

Psychosis

Condition in which the ego, unable as in neurosis partly to repress the unconscious desire, actually comes under its sway.

Projection

Ascribing to others of feelings and wishes which are actually our own.

Thanatos

Death drive

Eros

Sexual energy

Imaginary

A condition in which we lack any defined centre of self, in which what 'self we have seems to pass into objects, and objects into it, in a ceaseless closed exchange

Mirror Stage

When a small child contemplates itself in a mirror and the child's first development of an ego, of an integrated self-image, begins to happen

Symbolic Order

The pre-given structure of social and sexual roles and relations which make up the family and society

Sub-text

A text which runs within it, visible at certain 'symptomatic' points of ambiguity, evasion or overemphasis, and which we as readers are able to 'write' even if the novel itself does not.

Semiotic

Pattern or play of forces which we can detect inside language, and which represents a sort of residue of the pre-Oedipal phase.

Phallogocentric

Combined term by Jacques Derrida of 'phallocentric' and 'logocentric'; which we might roughly translate as 'cocksure'.