Everything about Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism totally explained
Psychoanalytic literary criticism is
literary criticism which, in method, concept,
theory 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 rich and heterogeneous interpretive tradition.
It is a literary approach where critics see 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.
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). His followers and later readers, such as
Carl Jung and
Jacques Lacan, were avid readers of literature as well, and used literary examples as illustrations of important concepts in their work (for instance, Lacan argued with
Jacques Derrida over the interpretation of
Edgar Allan Poe's "
The Purloined Letter").
The object of psychoanalytic literary criticism, at its very simplest, can be the psychoanalysis of the
author or of a particularly interesting character. In this directly therapeutic form, it's very similar to psychoanalysis itself, closely following the analytic interpretive process discussed in Freud's
The Interpretation of Dreams. But many more complex variations 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 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).
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