2. Psychoanalytical criticism is a type of
criticism that uses theories of psychology
to analyze literature. It focuses on the
author’s state of mind or the state of the
mind of fictional characters.
3. Sigmund Freud
Psychoanalytical criticism originated in the work
of Sigmund Freud. Freud’s theories are
concerned with the nature of the unconscious
mind. According to Freud, the human mind
consists of three parts: the id, the ego and
superego.
The id is source of our instinctual and
physical desires.
The superego is the part of the psyche that
has internalized the norms and mores of
society.
The ego is keeps mediating between the
demands of the id and the superego. It is
rational, logical, and conscious.
4. Repression
We often repress what the id encourages us to
think and do because the ego and superego tell us not
to think and do, therefore forcing these unacceptable
wishes into the unconscious. All of us have repressed
wishes and fears.
Repressed desires emerge in disguised forms:
dreams and language (slips). They emerge in symbolic
form that require analysis to reveal their meaning.
Many elements of psychology that Freud described
appear in literary works.
5. Freudian Literary Criticism
Freudian critics try to understand how the
operations of repression structure or
inform the work?
They pay close attention to unconscious
motives and feelings, whether these be
those of the author, or of the characters
depicted in the work.
They demonstrate the presence in the
literary work of classic psychoanalytic
symptoms or conditions.
6. Carl Gustav Jung and Jungian
literary Criticism
Jung developed the theory of the collective unconscious, a
collection of shared unconscious memories dating back to the
origins of human experience and manifested in dreams,
myths, and literature.
A great work of literature is not a disguised expression of
repressed wishes, but a manifestation of the desires one held
by the whole human race, and now repressed because of the
advent of civilization.
Jungian analysis of literature tries to discover the images in a
work of literature that a permanent and universal significance.
7. Harold Bloom and the anxiety of
Influence
The most important contemporary psychological critic
is Harold Bloom. Bloom uses the Freudian concept of
repression to apply it to literary history in general. No
poet creates in isolation from his predecessors. In The
Anxiety of Influence, he argues that poets
unconsciously misread the poems of their great
predecessors. The new poems are essentially
rewritings of poems by a father-figure predecessor.
Poets keep struggling to free themselves from this
influence of father-figure poets.
