Ady
ENG 220WE Approaches to Reading and Interpretation

PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

Using the theories of a particular psychoanalytic thinker (Freud, Adler, Jung, Lacan), these critics see the text as if it were a kind of dream. This means that the text hides, represses its real content behind manifest content. Dream work involves (Freud) condensation, displacement. The interpreter must make his or her way through the literal level to the symbolic import, the meaning the writer cannot say overtly because it would be too painful. As one critic puts it, "a psychological criticism notices patterns of language beneath the surface and understands the verbal play as if the text were a patient recalling more than she/he realizes." (Schwarz 116)

Such a critic may:

• See the text as an expression of the secret, repressed life of its author, explaining the textual features as symbolic of psychological struggles in the writer. This was popular before 1950 and is termed psychobiography. Such a critic more often used Freudian theory as a theoretical templates.
• Look not to the author but to characters in the text, applying psychoanalytical theory to explain their hidden motives or psychological makeup. Such a critic might use theoretical templates such as Freudian, Adlerian, Lacanian psychoanalysis, among others.
• Look at ways in which specific readers reveal their own obsessions, neuroses, etc. as they read a particular text. Holland's Five Readers Reading exemplifies this approach. This would be an example in which Reader-Response (subjective type) critics use psycholanalysis in their interpretations.

When the psychoanalytical critic looks closely at the text s/he usually:

• treats the text like a dream, looking carefully at images to uncover latent content, expressions of repressed fears or desires either on the part of the author or character(s).
  • So, for example, the coldness imagery in Glaspell's Trifles suggests the psychological coldness of the Wright marriage. Minnie's continual pleating of the apron suggests her concern for her barren womb. Her strangling of her husband is a form of castration, taking the power from him that he had denied her in the marriage. Etc.
• following Freud, looks for evidence of Oedipal conflicts in characters
• following Freud, looks for libidinal imagery: yonic or phallic images

You may encounter a psychoanalytic critic who interprets a text to accomodate a particular theoretical grid (e.g. Freudian or Lacanian psychoanalytical theory). You may also encounter Feminist, Marxist, Deconstructionist critics, among others, who use psychoanalitical theory in support of these other approaches.

Brief (all too brief) Primer on Freudian terms

Freud's famous tripartite model of the mind:

• id = irrational, instinctual, vital, unconscious (contains our secret desires, darkest wishes, intense fears). Driven to fulfill wishes of pleasure principle
• superego = internal censor but derived from societal control. Driven to fulfill demands of morality principle
• ego = rational, logical, mostly conscious part of mind. Regulates id and comes to terms with super ego. Driven by reality principle.

The Ego is the battleground for forces of the superego and the id:

Oedipus complex

• Formative, developmental principle. In working out instinctual desire to possess mother, leading to inevitable conflict with father, the child forms a personality.

Repression

• the suppression from consciousness of painful or disagreeable ideas, memories, feelings, impulses

Dream Work:

• Displacement: the transfer of an emotion from the object about which it was originally experienced to another object
• Condensation: the representation of two or more ideas, memories, feelings, or impulses by one word or image, as in wit, puns, Freudian slips of tongue, allegories, and, of course, dreams.

Neo-Freudian: Jacques Lacan

• The unconscious is structured like a language (contrasts Freud's view that the unconscious is chaotic)
• From Saussure, Lacan collects the idea that language is determined by difference. So too, is the unconscious. The idea of wholeness is illusory. Individuals are fragmented.
• Language conditions our unconscious, conscious minds. It constructs our sense of self.
• Tri Partite Model of Human Psyche:
  1. the Imaginary. From birth to around 6 months we live in a world of wishes, images, united with the mother. Self image in flux because we don't yet differentiate. Between age of 6 to 18 months we enter a transitional stage, the mirror stage. We literally or metaphorically begin to see ourselves in the mirror, as a differentiated being. We recognize the separation of objects from ourselves, leading to a feeling of lack (lost harmony). As we pass through the Imaginary order we long for the Mother, as a representation of total unity and wholeness.
  2. the Symbolic Order is the next phase in our development. We are conscious of separation, of difference. Males vs females. Right vs. wrong. We learn language. Really, language masters us, shapes us as individuals. The father figure dominates in this phase. He represents the rules, the laws, norms. The symbolic represents a further remove from the mother. Entering the Symbolic order means a form of metaphorical castration for either sex. We are all cut off from the Imaginary, primordial state. The longing for that original order prompts us to build, paint, write. Literature is powerful because it can give us moments of joy, desire, or terror; moments that derive their power from our memory of the lost imaginary stage.
  3. the final order is the Real. It includes the physical world; it includes everything the person is not. In the Real Order we are conscious of our perennial lack.

  What does a Lacanian critic do with texts?

  • a Feminist literary critic might seek to uncover a mode of language more closely resembling the Imaginary Order, when the Mother dominates. Is the Mother's voice (less structured, more associational, more fluid) suppressed by the phallocentric Symbolic Order? Are there moments (e.g. in Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" or Virginia Woolf's "The Mark on the Wall) when the feminine voice is allowed to speak?
  • a Lacanian critic might look for parts in the text which represent elements of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real Orders. Often this leads to the same place: an awareness of the splintered, constructed nature of the self.