Psychoanalysis in literature

Psychoanalytic Criticism

As humans our behavior, our thoughts and actions, are the product of our psyche. In order to have an understanding of why we behave as we do, it is necessary to identify the formation and structure of the human psyche. Sigmund Freud’s work in the field of psychoanalysis was ground breaking because it answered questions about the human psyche in a way that no one else had before him.

If psychoanalysis can help us better understand human behaviour, then it must certainly be able to help us understand literary texts, which are about human behaviour. Psychoanalytical Criticism shows how human behaviour is relevant to our experience of literature.

I. Psychoanalysis:

Psychoanalysis is a specialty in psychology, the scientific study of the mind and behavior, that is distinguished from other specialties by its body of knowledge and its intensive treatment approaches. The primary assumption of psychoanalysis is the belief that all people possess unconscious thoughts, feelings, desires, and memories.

Psychoanalysis refers to the theory of personality, which is based on the notion that an individual gets motivated more by unseen forces that are controlled by the conscious and the rational thought. It suggests that people can experience catharsis and gain insight into their current state of mind by bringing the content of the unconscious awareness. Through this process, a person can find relief from psychological distress.

Called “the talking cure”, psychoanalysis is an attempt to unseat deeply-rooted memories bound to conflict, insecurity, trauma, and the like. Through dialogue, Freud and colleagues believed, the patient’s issues would “out” themselves and the patient could eventually live a life of what Freud called “ordinary misery”. In simple words, it is a type of therapy that aims to release pent-up or repressed emotions and memories in or to lead the client to catharsis, or healing, and to bring what exists at the unconscious or subconscious level up to consciousness.

The goal of psychoanalysis is to help us resolve our psychological problems (called disorders or dysfunctions). Psychoanalysts focus on correcting patterns of behaviour that are destructive.

II. Sigmund Freud's Theories:

1- Biography: Sigismund Schlomo Freud (1856-1939), was an Austrian neurologist usually credited with creating psychoanalytic theory and, by extension, psychiatric therapy. Freud believed that unconscious sexual drives were the basis for all human behavior, and that dreams were an important indicator for understanding human behavior.

2- Freud's three models of the psyche: Freud ‘s psychoanalytic theory of personality argues that human behavior is the result of the interactions among three component parts of the psyche: the id, ego, and superego. This “structural theory” of personality places great importance on how conflicts among the three parts of the mind shape behavior and personality. These conflicts are mostly unconscious.

A- the Id: According to Freud, id isone of the most important parts of the human personality based on primitive impulses like hunger, thirst, the desire for gratification and anger. Humans are born with their id, and it allows them to acquire their basic needs. The biological needs are the basic physical needs and while the instinctual needs are the natural or unlearned needs, such as hunger, thirst, sex, etc. Id is the unconscious part of the mind; that act instantaneously without giving much thought to what is right and what is wrong. Id is directly related to pleasure principal (It refers to the idea that all of our needs should be met immediately) and compels humans to seek anything that feels good at a particular time without considering any restrictions of the situation. Freud believed that id has a power to influence ego and can easily maneuver human’s behaviour to bring self-pleasure. (Id • I want this)

Example: If your Id passed through a boy playing with a ball, the immediate urge to get that ball will drive you to snatch it by any means, this is irrational and may lead to the conflict between the boys. Thus, Id is the source of psychic energy, a force that is behind all the mental forces.

B- Super-Ego: The Super-Ego is related to the social or the moral values that an individual inculcates as he matures. It acts as an ethical constraint on behaviour and helps an individual to develop his conscience. As the individual grows in the society, he learns the cultural values and the norms of the society which help him to differentiate between right and wrong. The superego is the moral part of human personality, representing conscience. The development of superego relies on ethical and moral restraints placed on every human being by his/her caregiver. Not only does it influence human personality, but also dictates his/her moral beliefs, (right or wrong). The superego is synonymous to the good angel sitting on the shoulder, telling people to control ego’s behaviour. (Super-Ego • This is not the way to get it)

Example: If the super-ego passed that boy playing with a ball, it would not snatch it, as it would know that snatching is bad and may lead to a quarrel. Thus, super ego act as a constraint on your behaviour and guides you to follow the right path. But if the Id is stronger than super-ego, you will definitely snatch the ball by any means.

C- Ego: Ego is the logical and the conscious part of the mind which is associated with the reality principle. This means it balances the demands of Id and super-ego in the context of real life situations. Ego is conscious and hence keep a check on Id through a proper reasoning of an external environment. Ego is another significant part of the human’s personality that aims to maintain a balance between ideal (superego) and impulses (id). The ego scaffolds on the reality principle, and understands the desires and needs of other people. It knows that being impulsive is equal to being selfish and can hurt people sometimes. (Ego • Let's work on it)

Example: If you pass through the same boy playing with the ball, your ego will mediate the conflict between the Id and super-ego and will decide to buy a new ball for yourself. This may hurt you Id, but the ego would take this decision to reach to a compromise situation between the Id and super-ego by satisfying the desire of getting a ball without committing any unpleasant social behaviour.

_Defense mechanisms: Freud believed these three parts of the mind are in constant conflict because each part has a different primary goal. Sometimes, when the conflict is too much for a person to handle, his or her ego may engage in one or many defense mechanisms to protect the individual. These defense mechanisms include:

* Repression: The ego pushes disturbing or threatening thoughts out of one’s consciousness;

* Denial: The ego blocks upsetting or overwhelming experiences from awareness, causing the individual to refuse to acknowledge or believe what is happening;

* Projection: The ego attempts to solve discomfort by attributing the individual’s unacceptable thoughts, feelings, and motives to another person;

* Displacement: The individual satisfies an impulse by acting on a substitute object or person in a socially unacceptable way (e.g., releasing frustration directed toward your boss on your spouse instead);

* Regression: As a defense mechanism, the individual moves backward in development in order to cope with stress (e.g., an overwhelmed adult acting like a child);

* Sublimation: Similar to displacement, this defense mechanism involves satisfying an impulse by acting on a substitute but in a socially acceptable way (e.g., channeling energy into work or a constructive hobby).

3- Freud's three levels of the mind: Freud believed that behaviour and personality were derived from the constant and unique interaction of conflicting psychological forces that operate at three different levels of awareness: the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious. He believed that each of these levels of the mind plays an important role in influencing behaviour.

A- Conscious: The first level of consciousness is known as the conscious state, and this refers to our immediate awareness. We make use of our conscious mind when we take in input from our senses, analyze the information, and then make decisions based on this information. The conscious mind consists of what we are aware of at any given point in time. It includes the things that we are thinking about right now, whether it’s in the front of our minds or the back. If we’re aware of it, then it is in the conscious mind.

B- Subconscious: The next level of consciousness, the subconscious (or preconscious), is the stuff from which dreams are made. We can consider it as the storehouse of all remembered experiences, impressions that are left on the mind by such experiences, and tendencies that are awakened or reinforced by these impressions. Every experience you’ve ever had, every thought, every impression lives in the subconscious mind and influences our patterns of thought and behaviour far more than we realize. The subconscious holds information that is just below the surface of awareness. An individual can retrieve such information with relative ease, and we usually refer to these as memories.

C- Unconscious: The final level of consciousness is known as the unconscious. This is made up of thoughts, memories, and primitive/instinctual desires that are buried deep within ourselves, far below our conscious awareness. Even though we’re not aware of their existence, they have a significant influence on our behaviour. Although our behaviours tend to indicate the unconscious forces driving them, we can’t readily access the information which is stored in the unconscious mind. Throughout our childhood, we gathered many different memories and experiences that formed the beliefs, fears and insecurities that we carry today. However, we cannot recall most of these memories because we develop our unconscious mind at a very young age through the act of repression. Repression is the expunging/ removal of the conscious mind of all our unhappy psychological events. Our unhappy memories do not disappear in the unconscious mind; rather, they exist as a dynamic entity of unconscious forces that drive our behaviours. One of Freud’ s most radical insights was the notion that human beings are motivated by unconscious desires, fears, needs, and conflicts.

III. Psychoanalysis in Literature:

1- Definition:

Psychoanalytic criticism adopts the methods of "reading" employed by Freud and later theorists to interpret texts. One interesting facet of this approach is that it validates the importance of literature, as it is built on a literary key for the decoding. Freud himself wrote, "The dream-thoughts which we first come across as we proceed with our analysis often strike us by the unusual form in which they are expressed; they are not clothed in the prosaic language usually employed by our thoughts, but are on the contrary represented symbolically by means of similes and metaphors, in images resembling those of poetic speech".

Like psychoanalysis itself, this critical endeavor seeks evidence of unresolved emotions, psychological conflicts, guilts, ambivalences, and so forth within what may well be a disunified literary work. The author's own childhood traumas, family life, sexual conflicts, fixations, and such will be traceable within the behaviour of the characters in the literary work. But psychological material will be expressed indirectly, disguised, or encoded (as in dreams) through principles such as "symbolism" (the repressed object represented in disguise), "condensation" (several thoughts or persons represented in a single image), and "displacement" (anxiety located onto another image by means of association). 

2- The Psychoanalytic/ Freudian Theory:

The psychoanalytic theory encompasses two almost contradictory critical theories: 1. The first focuses on the literary text itself, with no regard to outside influences; 2. The second focuses on the author of the text.

A- Application of the theory in the text/ Tools of the practical reading:

According to the first view, reading and interpretation are limited to the work itself. One will understand the work by examining conflicts, characters, dream sequences, and symbols. One will further understand that a character’s outward behaviour might conflict with inner desires or might reflect as-yet-undiscovered inner desires.

The theory is used, here, to analyse one or more of the characters' psyches; the psychological theory becomes a tool to explain the characters' behaviour and motivations and unveil their secret lives. The more closely the theory seems to apply to the characters, the more realistic the work appears.

_ Main areas of study/points of criticism of the first view: To study the literary work's characters from a psychoanalytical perspectives, the following theories of psychoanalysis can be used:

* Family Conflicts (The Oedipus Complex, the Electra Complex):

The Oedipus Complex: it is a normal childhood stage of psychosexual development; young boys between the ages of 3-6 develop a sexual attachment to their mothers and a desire to exclude the father. The young boy competes with his father for his mother’s attention until he passes through the castration complex, which is when he abandons his desire for his mother out of fear of castration by his father.

The following are some examples that could be a sign of the complex: a boy who acts possessive of his mother and tells the father not to touch her, a child who insists on sleeping between parents.

The Electra Complex: it is a non-Freudian concept that describes young girls' adoration and attraction to their fathers and resentment, hostility and rivalry towards their mothers, with whom they compete for the affection of their fathers. Eg: a girl who declares she wants to marry her father when she grows up.

_ Freud believed all children must successfully pass through these stages in order to develop normally. Of course, these all operate on a subconscious level to avoid violating serious social mores. Freud also believed that a child’s moral sensibility and conscious appear for the first time during this stage.

However, there are signs you may be experiencing Oedipus or Electra complex as an adult could include: unexplainable sense of dislike toward the rival parent. preoccupation with the desired parent's activities, wardrobe, or lifestyle. strong sense of possessiveness or protectiveness toward the desired parent.

* The Interpretation of Dreams: There is an emphasis on the meaning of dreams. It is in dreams that a person’s subconscious desires are revealed. What a person cannot express or do because of social rules will be expressed and accomplished in dreams, where there are no social rules. Most of the time, people are not even aware what they secretly desire until their subconscious goes unchecked in sleep because

our defense mechanisms do not operate in the same way while we are asleep as they do when we are awake.

Freud asserted that dreams contain symbolic texts that everyone needs to decipher when his/her watchful ego is alert and at work, even when a person is dreaming. However, deciphering ego’s message is not easy as it censors or scrambles the messages due to the peculiar functioning modes of the unconscious to increase the obscurity.

As a result, we need to distinguish between the manifest content and the latent content of a dream. The former is what we actually remember. The latter is what it really means. Freud believed that very often the real meaning of a dream had a sexual significance and in his theory of sexual symbolism he speculates on the underlying meaning of common dream themes.

The purpose of dreams is to translate forbidden wishes and taboo desires into a non-threatening form through condensation (the joining of two or more ideas), displacement (transformation of the person or object we are concerned about into something or someone else), and secondary elaboration (the unconscious process of turning the wish fulfillment images or events into a logical narrative).

* The Pleasure Principle: Freud conceived of the libido as a quantitative (or economic) concept; it is an energy which can increase or decrease, and which can be displaced. Freud insisted on the sexual nature of this energy (life/ sexual energy/drives), and throughout his work he maintained a dualism in which the libido is opposed to another (non-sexual) form of energy (death drives).

The “ death drive ” theory accounted for the alarming degree of self-destructive behavior Freud observed in individuals. Our fear of death is closely tied to our fear of intimacy.

B- Application of the theory of the author of the literary text:

Psychoanalytic criticism argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the author, that a literary work is a manifestation of the author's own neuroses. One may psychoanalyze a particular character within a literary work, but it is usually assumed that all such characters are projections of the author's psyche.

Thus, the psychoanalytical theory is used to analyse the author and his/her life. The literary work is seen to supply evidence for this analysis. The author's own childhood traumas, family life, sexual conflicts, fixations, and such will be traceable within the behavior of the characters in the literary work. This is often called "psychobiography".

_ Main areas of study/points of criticism of the second view:

* An essential relationship exists between the author of the work and the work itself, which can be a portrayal of his "hidden life". In order to understand a work, one must fully understand the author’s life and values. Although a work might not be blatantly autobiographical, psychoanalysts argue that there is always something of the author in the work, whether it be a character, character trait, theme, or motif.

* Often, authors will satirize characters they dislike or will be overtly sympathetic to those they do like. The author’s bias often has an effect on the reader, which is exactly what the author wants. When reading, people are extremely vulnerable to the author’s chosen point of view (the only way they hear the story is through the author’s narrator).

* Reference to what is known or surmised about the author’s personality is used to explain and interpret a literary work. For example, Charles Dickens grew up poor and later wrote books sympathetic to boys growing up poor.

* Reference to a literary work (intertextuality) is made in order to establish an understanding of the mind of the author.

* Studying the literary work of an author is a means of knowing the author as a person. The more novels by Charles Dickens one reads, the more one can infer about the author’s beliefs, values, hopes, fears, etc.

* An artist may put his or her repressed desires on the page in the form of actions performed by characters. For example, an author who consistently writes stories in which his female characters are weak, dependent, or unintelligent might be expressing latent misogynist tendencies. Likewise, a female author might express her latent misandry through weak, blatantly evil, or thoroughly inconsequential male characters.

3- Essential questions for a Psychoanalytical literary analysis:

* How do the operations of repression structure or inform the work?

* Are there any Oedipal dynamics - or any other family dynamics - at work here?

* What are the traits of the main character? How does the author reveal those traits? What do you learn about the character through the narrator? What do you learn about the character from the way other characters relate to him or her?

* Is the main character a dynamic character (does he or she change throughout the course of the story)? If so, how and why? How does the character view him or herself?

* How can characters' behaviour, narrative events, and/or images be explained in terms of psychoanalytic concepts of any kind (for example, fear or fascination with death, sexuality - which includes love and romance as well as sexual behaviour - as a primary indicator of psychological identity or the operations of ego-id-superego)?

* What does the work suggest about the psychological being of its author?

* What might a given interpretation of a literary work suggest about the psychological motives of the reader?

* Are there prominent words in the piece that could have different or hidden meanings? Could there be a subconscious reason for the author using these "problem words"?

* What types of images are used in conjunction with the character? What do they symbolize? What symbols are used in the course of the story? What do they symbolize? Do any characters have dreams or inner monologues? What is revealed about a character through dreams that would not otherwise be revealed?

* Are there any inner conflicts within the character? How are these conflicts revealed? How are they dealt with? Are they ever resolved? How?

* Are there in the narrative Freudian slips, slips of the tongue? what is their significance?

Conclusion:

Despite the importance of the author here, psychoanalytic criticism is similar to New Criticism in not concerning itself with "what the author intended." But what the author never intended (that is, repressed) is sought. The unconscious material has been distorted by the censoring conscious mind.