Psychoanalysis Approach
Psychoanalysis Approach
Psychological
Literary
Criticism
Objectives
understand the salient features
of the Psychological Literary Criticism;
Freud connected this idea to literature and literary criticism in a 1908 essay,
“Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,”
he links the motivating force behind creative writing with that of dreams and
fantasies. Just as children construct alternate worlds of fantasy to fulfi ll their
wishes and explore their fears, so do writers work out their latent desires in
fictional form. Because adults feel more shame about disturbing dreams,
fantasies, and impermissible secret wishes than children do, says Freud, adults
tend to bury or conceal them in unconscious ways.
Freud's Core
Contribution-
The Unconscius These desires and fears,
inexpressible because of social
norms and religious taboos,
hide away in our unconscious
only to emerge every now and In this way, the hero and the
then in masked forms such as love interest and the villain and
dreams, slips of the tongue, or the scary ogre can all be read
neurotic behavior. Or they can as unconscious manifestations
be transfi gured by creative of a writer’s desires and fears.
activity. The imaginative writer Even though the deeper
shapes repressed material into meanings are largely shielded
the acceptable form of a literary from the writer’s awareness, the
text in which the characters’ creative expression of these
issues are also the writer’s subconscious feelings offers
issues. In our dreams and life, much satisfaction to a writer.
Freud says, we sometimes
displace our anxieties onto the
image of another, which is
exactly what fiction writers do in
their art.
Psychoanalytic Theory and
Literature
Psychoanalytic
Theory
Psychoanalytical Theory
This theory applies the ideas of Freudian psychology to literature. Freud sees the component parts of the psyche as three groups of
functions: the id, directly related to the instinctual drives; the ego,
an agency which regulates and opposes the drives; and the
superego, another part of the ego with a critical judging function.
Psychoanalytical Theory
Freud provided a framework for us
to analyze both the author and the
effect of a work on its readers.
Followers of Freud
What do you think?