Psychoanalytic Criticism and Theory

Fundamental Principles of Psychoanalytic Criticism

• Definition and Influence: Psychoanalytic criticism is a form of literary criticism influenced by the tradition of psychoanalysis initiated by Sigmund Freud. It entails a psychoanalytic "reading" of both the author and the characters, treating these human subjects essentially as texts to be decoded.

• Analytical Framework: Concepts of psychoanalysis are deployed with reference to the narrative structure of the text itself. Literary texts are viewed similarly to dreams; they express the unconscious desires or neuroses of the author.

• The Unconscious at the Center: This critical approach understands the unconscious as the ultimate source and primary reason for all human thought and behavior. This perspective problematizes the foundational notions of philosophy, theology, and traditional literary criticism, which often assume a rational, centered subject.

• The Text as a Dream: To analyze a text psychoanalytically, it is read as if it were a dream. This assumes the text represses its real, latent content behind obvious, manifest content.

• The Dream Work: The process of converting latent content into manifest content is termed "Dream Work." This involves two primary operations:

  • Condensation: Multiple latent elements are combined into a single manifest image.

  • Displacement: Emotional significance is shifted from its real object to a seemingly trivial one.

• Role of the Critic: The critic’s task is to analyze the language and symbolism of the text to reverse the Dream Work, thereby arriving at the underlying latent thoughts.

Sigmund Freud: Life and Influences

• Biographical Details: Sigmund Freud ($1856-1939$) was an Austrian neurologist born to Jewish parents in Moravia (present-day Czech Republic). His family dynamics included an authoritarian father and a friendly mother. He received his education in Vienna.

• Intellectual Influences: His thought was shaped by the Bible and Darwin's theories on evolution. His interest in nature eventually led him to the study of medicine at the University of Vienna, where he often felt ostracized.

• Founders of Psychotherapy: Important professional influences included Josef Breuer, who laid the foundations of psychotherapy, and Jean-Martin Charcot, through his studies on hysteria. Freud realized that neuroses could have psychological, rather than purely physical, origins.

• Literary and Clinical Legacy: In $1895$, Freud and Breuer published Studies on Hysteria. Freud married Martha Bernays and had six children, including the psychoanalyst Anna Freud. He is widely recognized as the "Father of Psychoanalysis" and a structuralist thinker.

Freud's Major Works and Subversion of the Enlightenment

• Key Publications:

  • The Interpretation of Dreams ($1900$)

  • Totem and Taboo ($1913$)

  • On Narcissism ($1914$)

  • Beyond the Pleasure Principle ($1920$)

  • The Ego and the Id ($1923$)

  • Civilization and Its Discontents ($1929$)

• Challenging the Enlightenment: Freud's work subverted the central tenets of the Enlightenment and the $19\text{th}$ century, including:

  • The Cartesian View: He rejected the idea of the human subject as a completely autonomous and rational being.

  • Human Progress: He challenged the linear idea of human progress.

  • Positivism: He questioned the belief that the external world and nature can be fully subjugated intellectually and materially, or that human beings can truly understand themselves and their environment through purely rational means.

The Mechanics of the Unconscious Mind and Dream Work

• The Royal Road: Freud famously stated that dreams are the "royal road to the unconscious." He observed that the logic of dreams differs significantly from the logic of the conscious mind.

• Dream Distortion: This refers to the difference between the manifest content (the dream as remembered) and the latent dream thoughts (the actual meaning).

• The Three Mechanisms of Dream Work:

  • Condensation: One aspect of manifest content represents multiple latent elements. For example, a single face in a dream might resemble two different people at once, or a feature common to two entities (like Hitler and Gandhi both being vegetarians) identifies them as one. It also appears in language as portmanteaus (e.g., "slad" meaning sad and glad).

  • Displacement: Emotions toward one person or object are detached and reattached to another to bypass psychic censorship.

  • Dramatization: Repressed emotions are represented in visual images to "cheat" the ego.

• Secondary Elaboration: When an individual wakes and attempts to recollect a dream, they often inaccurately reorganize it to make it meaningful or rational. This is an attempt to impose order on the chaotic dream imagery.

• Repression: This is the mechanism by which painful thoughts and experiences are banished from consciousness. Freud viewed the unconscious as both the cause and the effect of repression.

The Structural Model of the Psyche (The Iceberg Model)

• Components of the Mind:

  • Id (Fully Unconscious): The source of drives and natural impulses. It is governed by the Pleasure Principle.

  • Ego (Mostly Conscious): Deals with external reality and is governed by the Reality Principle. It mediates between the demands of the Id and the Super-ego.

  • Super-ego (Partly Conscious): Acts as the conscience or internal moral judge; it represents the moral principle and the ideal self.

• The Iceberg Metaphor:

  • Conscious Mind: Represents approximately $10\%$ of the psyche.

  • Subconscious/Preconscious: Represents approximately $50-60\%$.

  • Unconscious Mind: Represents approximately $30-40\%$.

• Defense Mechanisms: These are the methods used by the ego to resolve conflicts between the super-ego and the id. Unresolved conflicts can lead to psychological "fixation."

Freud’s Theory of Psychosexual Development

• Overview: Freud argued that the seeds of nervous disorders are laid in childhood. He used mythology and contemporary ethnography to support the universal validity of his theory, focusing on the conflict between sexual impulses and resistance to them.

• Five Stages of Development:

  1. Oral Stage ($0-1$ year): Focus on the mouth (sucking, swallowing). Only the Id is present. Fixation can lead to smoking, overeating, or a manipulative personality.

  2. Anal Stage ($1-3$ years): Focus on the anus (toilet training). Conflict occurs between the Id (desire to defecate) and the Ego/Super-ego (shame/control). Fixation leads to anal-retentive (orderly) or anal-expulsive (messy) traits.

  3. Phallic Stage ($3-6$ years): Focus on the genitals. Boys experience the Oedipus Complex (competition with father for mother's affection) and Castration Anxiety. Girls experience the Electra Complex and the controversial idea of Penis Envy. These complexes are typically repressed.

  4. Latency Stage ($6$ years to Puberty): No sexual conflicts; focus is on hobbies and friendships.

  5. Genital Stage (Puberty to Adulthood): Focus on sexual intercourse and psychological detachment from parents. This stage involves attempts to resolve earlier conflicts.

• Basic Concepts:

  • Sublimation: The defense mechanism where libido (sexual desire) is redirected toward non-sexual outlets like art or work.

  • Phallocentrism: Freud’s theory posits that the unconscious always desires the phallus (penis). Men fear its loss, and women desire to possess it.

Later Freudian Concepts: Drives and the Uncanny

• Eros and Thanatos: Humans are driven by two conflicting central desires:

  • Eros (The Life Drive): Includes self-preservation, sex drive, and all creative, life-producing impulses (Libido).

  • Thanatos (The Death Drive): An urge inherent in living things to return to a state of calm or non-existence.

• The Uncanny: A feeling of discomfort that arises when something is both familiar and foreign at the same time.

• Psychic Determinism and Parapraxes: Freud believed nothing in the psyche happens by chance. Mental/physical behavior is determined by prior causes. Erroneous actions like "Freudian slips" (forgetting words, writing wrong words) are called Parapraxes and reveal unconscious causes.

Psychoanalytic Readings of Literature

• Oedipus Rex: Freud used Sophocles' play to illustrate a universal law of mental life. He argued that fate in the play represents internal necessity.

• Hamlet: Freud interpreted Hamlet’s hesitation not as a lack of resolve, but as a result of the man he must kill (Claudius) having realized Hamlet's own repressed childhood desires (killing the father, marrying the mother). The loathing he feels toward Claudius is replaced by self-reproach.

• Da Vinci: Freud also analyzed Leonardo da Vinci's Madonna through this lens.

Carl Jung and Archetypal Criticism

• Departure from Freud: Carl Jung ($1875-1961$), a Swiss psychiatrist, broke with Freud after criticizing the theories of infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex.

• Jung’s Views on Dreams: Unlike Freud, Jung saw dreams as compensatory rather than just hiding repressed wishes; they bring things to attention to create and express meaning.

• The Collective Unconscious: Jung distinguished the Personal Unconscious (particular to an individual) from the Collective Unconscious (a universal reservoir of experience common to all humanity, inherited at birth).

• Archetypes: These are universal models of people or behaviors. Four basic archetypes in all humans include:

  • The Self: The unified center of the psyche.

  • The Persona: The social mask.

  • The Shadow: The hidden or repressed parts of the self.

  • Anima/Animus: The Anima is the unconscious feminine component in men; the Animus is the masculine component in women.

• Archetypal Stage Examples:

  • Animus: Progresses from the Seven Dwarfs (incarnations) to spiritual figures like Christ, Muhammad, or Buddha.

  • Anima: Progresses from Shirley Temple (pre-sexual) to Marilyn Monroe (sexual diva) to Mother Teresa (spiritual transcendence) to the Virgin Mary (transcendent icon).

• Personality Types: Based on rational functions (Thinking/Feeling) and irrational functions (Sensation/Intuition), combined with Introversion/Extroversion, leading to $8$ personality types.

• Archetypal Criticism in Literature: Interprets texts via recurring myths. Examples include the Hero in Beowulf or the Innocent Youth (Pip in Great Expectations, Emma in Emma).

Other Developments: Gestalt and Object-Relations

• Gestalt Theory: Developed in Austria and Germany, it emphasizes the whole over the parts ("The whole is more than the sum of its parts"). Organisms perceive patterns. In therapy, patients may "play the part" of characters in their dreams, which are treated as existential messages.

• Object-Relations Theory: Focuses on child development in relation to "objects" (people) they grow up with. It initially suggested a harmonious relationship between a subject's needs and the objects that satisfy them.

Jacques Lacan: The Language of the Unconscious

• Background: Jacques Lacan ($1901-1981$) was a French psychoanalyst who urged a "Return to Freud." He was associated with Surrealist and Dadaist movements and published his magnum opus, Écrits, in $1966$.

• Core Thesis: "The unconscious is structured like a language." It is not a primitive part of the mind but a continually formed chain of signification.

• The Signifier and the Signified: Lacan modified Saussure's linguistic model as $\frac{S}{s}$ (Signifier over signified). The bar represents how the signified inevitably slides beneath the signifier, making signification incomplete. This leads to the concept of the Floating Signifier (a signifier without fixed meaning, like "race" or "gender").

• The Mirror Stage: The point ($6-18$ months) when an infant identifies with their mirror image. This is a "misrecognition" (méconnaissance) because the image is a stable, whole version of themselves that does not match their internal experience of being "in bits and pieces." This creates a lifelong quest for a never-attainable perfection.

• The Triadic Structure of the Psyche:

  1. The Real: The state of nature before language mediation. It resists representation and cannot be truly grasped.

  2. The Imaginary: The realm of the ego and narcissistic identity starting with the Mirror Stage. It is based on "demand."

  3. The Symbolic: The ordering structure of language and the law. It is the realm of "desire" and is governed by the "Big Other."

• The Other:

  • Little other (a): A reflection of the ego (the image in the mirror).

  • Big Other (A): The Symbolic order itself (language, law). It is later realized as the "barred Other" ($\cancel{A}$) because it too contains a Lack (manque).

• Lacan on "The Purloined Letter": Lacan used Edgar Allan Poe’s story to illustrate the signifying chain. The letter itself is a signifier that determines the characters' relationships, regardless of its content. Jacques Derrida famously critiqued this in his essay "The Purveyor of Truth."

Deleuze and Guattari: Schizoanalysis and the Rhizome

• Major Works: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari co-authored Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which includes Anti-Oedipus ($1972$) and A Thousand Plateaus ($1980$).

• Schizoanalysis: Developed as a critique of psychoanalysis and Marxism. It shifts focus from identity and meaning to "becoming" and experimentation. It argues that traditional psychiatry often causes mental illness through its authoritarian explanations. It aims to liberate the patient's subjectivity.

• The Rhizome vs. The Tree:

  • The Tree model represents traditional Western knowledge: hierarchical and centered.

  • The Rhizome model represents non-hierarchical, horizontal growth with no center (e.g., the Internet or Postmodern culture). It allows for multiple representations.

• Minor Literature: A term used regarding Franz Kafka. It refers to literature created by a marginalized group within a dominant language. It is a literature of "becoming" that creates meaning and identity rather than just expressing it.

Questions & Discussion

• Human Subject vs. Individual: The term "subject" is preferred in psychoanalysis because it highlights that the individual is not a centered, unified "I" (the Cartesian view), but a divided entity split between the Id, Ego, and Super-ego.

• The "Omelette": Lacan wittily referred to the child in the Imaginary stage as a "homelette"—a pun on homme (man) and omelette—reflecting the fluid, unstructured state of the subject.

• Lacan’s Expulsion: Lacan was expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) in $1963$ due to his unconventional approaches, which eventually led him to develop his own independent school of thought.