8 August 2014

Psychoanalytical criticism

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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