Psychoanalytic literary criticism
Autor: prof. Mário Eduardo | Publicado: 2012-10-01T16:12:00-07:00



     Psychoanalytic literary criticism

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Psychoanalytic literary criticism refers to literary criticism or literary theory which, in method, concept, or form, is influenced by the tradition of psychoanalysis begun by Sigmund Freud.
Psychoanalytic reading has been practiced since the early development  
of psychoanalysis itself, and has developed into a heterogeneous  
interpretive tradition. As Patricia Waugh
  writes, 'Psychoanalytic literary criticism does not constitute a  
unified field....However, all variants endorse, at least to a certain  
degree, the idea that literature...is fundamentally entwined with the  
psyche'.[1]
The object of psychoanalytic literary criticism, at its very simplest, can be the psychoanalysis of the author
  or of a particularly interesting character in a given work. In this  
directly therapeutic form, the criticism is very similar to  
psychoanalysis itself, closely following the analytic interpretive  
process discussed in Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams and other works. Critics may view the fictional characters as a psychological case study, attempting to identify such Freudian concepts as Oedipus complex, penis envy, Freudian slips, Id, ego and superego and so on, and demonstrate how they influenced the thoughts and behaviors of fictional characters.
However, more complex variations of psychoanalytic criticism are  
possible. The concepts of psychoanalysis can be deployed with reference 
 to the narrative or poetic structure itself, without requiring access 
to  the authorial psyche (an interpretation motivated by French  
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's
  remark that "the unconscious is structured like a language"). Or the  
founding texts of psychoanalysis may themselves be treated as  
literature, and re-read for the light cast by their formal qualities on 
 their theoretical content (Freud's texts frequently resemble detective stories, or the archaeological narratives of which he was so fond).
Like all forms of literary criticism, psychoanalytic criticism can  
yield useful clues to the sometime baffling symbols, actions, and  
settings in a literary work; however, like all forms of literary  
criticism, it has its limits. For one thing, some critics rely on  
psychocriticism as a "one size fits all" approach, when other literary  
scholars argue that no one approach can adequately illuminate or  
interpret a complex work of art. As Guerin, et al. put it in A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature,[2]

The danger is that the serious student may become 
theory-ridden,  forgetting that Freud's is not the only approach to 
literary criticism.  To see a great work of fiction or a great poem 
primarily as a  psychological case study is often to miss its wider 
significance and  perhaps even the essential aesthetic experience it 
should provide.

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Methods

Early applications
Freud
 wrote several important essays on literature, which he used to  explore
 the psyche of authors and characters, to explain narrative  mysteries, 
and to develop new concepts in psychoanalysis (for instance, Delusion and Dream in Jensen's Gradiva and his influential readings of the Oedipus myth and Shakespeare's Hamlet in The Interpretation of Dreams).
  The criticism has been made, however, that in his and his early  
followers' studies 'what calls for elucidation are not the artistic and 
 literary works themselves, but rather the psychopathology and biography
  of the artist, writer or fictional characters'.[3]
  Thus 'many psychoanalysts among Freud's earliest adherents did not  
resist the temptation to psychoanalyze poets and painters (sometimes to 
 Freud's chagrin'.[4] Later analysts would conclude that 'clearly one cannot psychoanalyse a writer from his text; one can only appropriate him'.[5]
Early psychoanalytic literary criticism would often treat the text as if it were a kind of dream.
  This means that the text represses its real (or latent) content behind
  obvious (manifest) content. The process of changing from latent to  
manifest content is known as the dream work, and involves operations of 
 concentration and displacement. The critic analyzes the language and symbolism
  of a text to reverse the process of the dream work and arrive at the  
underlying latent thoughts. The danger is that 'such criticism tends to 
 be reductive, explaining away the ambiguities of works of literature by
  reference to established psychoanalytic doctrine; and very little of  
this work retains much influence today'.[6]

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Jungians
Later readers, such as Carl Jung and another of Freud's disciples, Karen Horney,
  broke with Freud, and their work, especially Jung's, led to other rich
  branches of psychoanalytic criticism: Horney's to feminist approaches 
 including womb envy, and Jung's to the study of archetypes and the collective unconscious. Jung's work in particular was influential as, combined with the work of anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Joseph Campbell, it led to the entire fields of mythocriticism and archetype analysis.
Northrop Frye considered that 'the literary critic finds Freud most suggestive for the theory of comedy, and Jung for the theory of romance'.[7]

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Form
Waugh
 writes, 'The development of psychoanalytic approaches to  literature 
proceeds from the shift of emphasis from "content" to the  fabric of 
artistic and literary works'.[8] Thus for example Hayden White has explored how 'Freud's descriptions tally with nineteenth-century theories of tropes, which his work somehow reinvents'.[9]
Especially influential here has been the work of Jacques Lacan,
  an avid reader of literature who used literary examples as  
illustrations of important concepts in his work (for instance, Lacan  
argued with Jacques Derrida over the interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter").
'Lacan's theories have encouraged a criticism which focuses not on the author but on the linguistic processes of the text'.[10]
  Within this Lacanian emphasis, 'Freud's theories become a place from  
which to raise questions of interpretation, rhetoric, style, and  
figuration'.[11]
However, Lacanian scholars have noted that Lacan himself was not interested in literary criticism per se, but in how literature might illustrate a psychoanalytic method or concept.[12]

 Reader response
According to Ousby, 'Among modern critical uses of psychoanalysis is the development of "ego psychology" in the work of Norman Holland, who concentrates on the relations between reader and text'[13] - as with reader response criticism.
  Rollin writes that 'Holland's experiments in reader response theory  
suggest that we all read literature selectively, unconsciously  
projecting our own fantasies into it'.[14]
Thus in crime fiction, for example, 'Rycroft sees the criminal as personifying the reader's unavowed hostility to the parent'.[15]

 Charles Mauron: psychocriticism
In 1963, Charles Mauron[16] conceived a structured method to interpret literary works via psychoanalysis. The study implied four different phases:

The creative process is akin to dreaming awake: as such, it is a mimetic, and cathartic, representation of an unconscious impulse or desire that is best expressed and revealed by metaphors and symbols.
Then, the juxtaposition of a writer's works leads the critic to define symbolical themes.
These metaphorical networks are significant of a latent inner reality.
They point at an obsession just as dreams can do. The last phase  
consists in linking the writer's literary creation to his own personal  
life.

On Mauron's concept, the author cannot be reduced to a ratiocinating self: his own more or less traumatic biographical past, the cultural archetypes
  that have suffused his "soul" ironically contrast with the conscious  
self, The chiasmic relation between the two tales may be seen as a sane 
 and safe acting out. A basically unconscious sexual impulse is symbolically fulfilled in a positive and socially gratifying way, a process known as Sublimation.

 Anxiety of influence
'The American critic Harold Bloom has adopted the Freudian notion of the Oedipus Complex to his study of relationships of influence between poets...and his work has also inspired a feminist variant in the work of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar'.[17]
In similar vein, Shoshana Felman has asked with respect to what she calls "the guilt of poetry" the question: 'Could literary history be in any way considered as a repetitive unconscious transference of the guilt of poetry?'.[18]

 Cultural examples
In Small World: An Academic Romance, one of David Lodge's satires of academia, the naive hero Persse follows Angelica to a forum where she discourses on Romance: '"Roland Barthes
  has taught us the close connection between narrative and sexuality,  
between the pleasures of the body and the 'pleasure of the  
text'....Romance is a multiple orgasm." Persse listened to this stream  
of filth flowing from between Angelica's exquisite lips and pearly teeth
  with growing astonishment and burning cheeks, but no one else in the  
audience seemed to find anything remarkable or disturbing about her  
presentation'.[19]
In A.S. Byatt's novel Possession,
  the heroine/feminist scholar, while recognising that '"we live in the 
 truth of what Freud discovered"', concedes that '"the whole of our  
scholarship - the whole of our thought - we question everything except  
the centrality of sexuality"'.[20]

























prof. Mário Eduardo21 de março de 2012 14:03

see also: Oedipus complex, penis envy, Freudian slips, Id, ego and superego
ResponderExcluir





prof. Mário Eduardo21 de março de 2012 14:03

see also: Oedipus complex, penis envy, Freudian slips, Id, ego and superego
ResponderExcluir





prof. Mário Eduardo21 de março de 2012 14:05
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click on unconscious  and after in Sublimation.