This approach is based on Sigmund
Freud’s therapeutic practice and methodology called psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytical
literary critics analyze the piece of
art based on personality of an author which is an exact opposite of
Formalist method. They understood a
literary work as a manifestation of the author's own neuroses and
interpreted it accordingly. However, the problem is that they would take
seriously even texts written for fun (like Poe’s The Philosophy of Composition
on Raven).
In addition, they do not even
consider that work does not have to reflect the author. They strongly believed
that all characters are projections of the author's psyche. Unlike Formalists
who disregarded an author, psychoanalytical critics seek evidence of unresolved
emotions, psychological conflicts, guilt, author's own childhood traumas,
family life, sexual conflicts, and fixations in the work and the behaviour of
the characters.
Psychoanalysis is very controversial
but, surprisingly, still widely used, even though women are seen as creatures
that lack something and envy men their penis. You can even apply this theory of
Freud himself since he had a terrible complex with his father and was sexually
obsessed. Some of its key terms have now entered common parlance such as
repression, libido, superego and fetishism.
It took an idea from EDMUND BURKE who wrote an essay Philosophical
Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. For him, sublimation
was the way of releasing sexual pressure by art, either consuming or creating
it. SAMUEL
TAYLOR COLERIDGE
distinguished between imagination = magical power of thinking to
create something new and original and fancy (fantasy) = mechanical connection of associations.
Artists often smoked opium to unleash their imagination.
SIGMUND FREUD (1856 – 1939, Příbor) started
psychoanalysis with his book The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) where he
claimed that our mind contains a dimension that is only partially accessible to
consciousness though dreams and neurotic symptoms. The unconsciousness is a
depository of repressed desires, memories and instinctual drives, many of which
have to do with sexuality and violence. He claimed that our lives derive from
biological drives and civilization repress them, creating “a second self, a
stranger within” which explains why we compulsively repeat certain desires. We
cannot help it, they arise from somewhere beyond our control. He inspired
automatic writing used by Surrealists.
He studied patients with neurotic
symptoms which pointed towards unresolved conflicts and realized that they can
express in the form of dreams when the repressive ego is stilled. Dreams
distort the unconscious material to make it acceptable to consciousness.
Neurotic symptoms displace desires and anxieties into expressive/compulsive
behaviour and thoughts. Someone with a cold mother may convert a fantasy that
all women and hostile and unworthy of his love. According to Freud, there are
three stages of developing sources of pleasure: 1. Oral: A child is fed. 2.
Anal: A child enjoys emptying at toilet. 3. Sexual: Adults should be at this
stage.
He came up with the theory of three
layers of our mind:
Consciousness (vědomí) – normal rational thinking we are aware
of and brings reason, logic, order and social acceptability = superego.
Subconsciousness (předvědomí) – mixture of half-known content,
forgotten memories/idea we can bring back to consciousness if we try = ego.
Unconsciousness (nevědomí) – a place of instincts,
uncontrolled, irrational, creeping into consciousness mainly through dreams = ID.
ID is visible mainly in children who want to reach pleasure at any price and
avoid anything unpleasant. This instinctive uncontrolled behaviour will try to
satisfy itself until it is fully satisfied (babies starts screaming when
hungry).
How to satisfy pleasures that cannot
be reached? Displacement
– we push it into unconsciousness and dream of fulfilling it. A child gradually
realises it cannot get everything and to get rid of this pressure it moves to
daydreaming, religion or art which is also a kind of daydreaming about
unfulfilled desires. Anxiety about entry into adulthood may cause fixation
to early forms of emotional and sexual activity that should be surpassed. Splitting
deals with anxiety by dividing the object of anxiety in two, one bearing all
negative feelings, the other all positive (children may direct all hostility
towards one parent while idealizing the other).
Superego is a moral sensor, trying
to balance requirements of instincts with social norms. Main role of superego
is to create identification
with somebody else. According to Freud, the father figure has to be eaten as a
cannibalistic metaphor when a young boy has to overcome rivalry with his father
over mother and become an adult. If identification fails, young men rebels,
cannot accept authority which leads to neurosis and projection of frustration
into other people. Projection throws something from within
oneself and makes it seem as if it is a trait of someone else.
In his essay The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming,
Freud ponders how the artists attract people to their work. He looks for the
artistic activity in childhood in which a playful child creates its own world
and takes it seriously but distinguishes it from reality. An author does the
same, seriously creates fantasy worlds but distinguishes them from reality.
When a child grows up, playing is replaced by daydreaming. A child does not
hide its games but an adult hides the fantasies as something shameful. Only
really happy person does not daydream because the energy for such dreams are
unfulfilled desires. There are two kinds of desires: ambition and sexuality.
According to Freud, women have only sexual desires whereas men also ambitions.
Overuse of daydreaming creates conditions for neurosis or psychosis.
Is the work of authors also
daydreaming? Some strong feeling can awake a memory in an author, usually from
childhood, and that desire is trying to be fulfilled in the work. The artistic
creation is the continuation of a childish game like daydreaming. Whereas
adults are ashamed of talking about their fantasies, an author lessens en
egoistic nature by impersonalizing
their desires so that anybody can fit in and get satisfaction from reading or
watching movie. It is weird to talk about private desires but perfectly ok to
see it in the movie. People find perverted for instance a sex with a goat but
nobody is bothered by it in an artistic approach. These things are made
aesthetic in art => catharsis = get rid of emotions to feel
better, we can enjoy our hidden fantasies without feeling guilty if somebody
else is doing it.
The main follower of Freud was
French Post-structuralist JACQUES LACAN
but he is extremely vague and hard to understand even by other critics. He
believed that what is important when dealing with mental deceases is good
knowledge of culture which is more important than medicine. He changed Freud’s
idea that differences between man and woman are purely biological in absence of
penis and based on cultural stereotypes, not biologically given factors. We
learn how to behave as man or woman, what is expected of genders.
There are four stages of
development:
1. Imaginary: A child cannot distinguish between his mother
and itself, the main emotion is happy and unhappy.
2. Mirror stage: A child is able to recognise itself and
starts to imitate other people as a mirror image. 3. Symbolic phrase: A child
learns to speak.
4. Oedipus complex: A boy fights with father over attention of
mother but father puts taboo on physical relationship with mother. A girl
fights the mother for attention of father whom she seen as superior.
Identification is crucial in gender formation. Literary works are characterized
by images of fear in regard to powerful women since the mother is more
determining in men’s psychological identities than father who tends to be a
peripheral figure in literature.
Lacan also believed that a little
girl defines herself by absence but he does not say penis but falus,
a symbol of power and privilege and all women are trying to find the figure of
father/husband that would provide the missing piece. This concept is already in
the language where feminine forms have only secondary role. In Freud’s view,
women are driven by sexual desire but the modern stereotype is quite opposite
and mean are those lusty ones.
Psychoanalytic criticism of Young Goodman Brown
Brown should have moral ideas of
superego but the moral check provides
Faith, she is his superego. But this superego failed, was unstable from the
beginning, which led to neurosis and changes in Brown’s personality. If
superego is too strong, the person thinks that everybody is corrupt. The Devil represents ID, he is seducing and
manipulating. Ego is the whole
community but Devil = ID seduced them.
Brown follows the Devil in his
father’s footsteps and makes the same mistake. He tries to be a male figure
cannot but just follows the lead of others. Brown is repressing many desires banned by Puritans who considered the
nature corrupt, sex could happen only 14 days at year, women were not allowed
to enjoy intercourse, it must have been as fast as possible just to produce
children, people had to be fully dressed during sex, couples normally could not
sleep in the same bad and no masturbation.
In the end, Brown is not sure
whether it really happened or not, cannot
distinguish reality from dreams. But he thinks he is at least fighting it,
other in the community gave in and enjoy it so he projects his negative thoughts on them, considering them
corrupt. He expects Faith to obey him pure but want to be treated by her as
mother treats her protected child, thinking she will take him to Heaven. He is
a total failure – he does not think for himself, just followed others, still has his taboo desire for mother
and is not as masculine as he should be.
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