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    Psychoanalytic Criticism

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    Psychoanalytic criticism analyzes literary texts using the methods of psychoanalysis developed by Freud to interpret unconscious desires, anxieties, and neuroses expressed symbolically in the text. It views characters as projections of the author's own psyche and childhood experiences. Psychoanalytic critics seek evidence of unresolved emotions and psychological conflicts in the text by examining symbols, condensation of ideas, and displaced anxiety to understand what the author repressed or did not intend.

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    Psychoanalytic Criticism

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    Psychoanalytic criticism analyzes literary texts using the methods of psychoanalysis developed by Freud to interpret unconscious desires, anxieties, and neuroses expressed symbolically in the text. It views characters as projections of the author's own psyche and childhood experiences. Psychoanalytic critics seek evidence of unresolved emotions and psychological conflicts in the text by examining symbols, condensation of ideas, and displaced anxiety to understand what the author repressed or did not intend.

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    Psychoanalytic criticism analyzes literary texts using the methods of psychoanalysis developed by Freud to interpret unconscious desires, anxieties, and neuroses expressed symbolically in the text. It views characters as projections of the author's own psyche and childhood experiences. Psychoanalytic critics seek evidence of unresolved emotions and psychological conflicts in the text by examining symbols, condensation of ideas, and displaced anxiety to understand what the author repressed or did not intend.

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    92 views1 page

    Psychoanalytic Criticism

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    nahla saad
    Psychoanalytic criticism analyzes literary texts using the methods of psychoanalysis developed by Freud to interpret unconscious desires, anxieties, and neuroses expressed symbolically in the text. It views characters as projections of the author's own psyche and childhood experiences. Psychoanalytic critics seek evidence of unresolved emotions and psychological conflicts in the text by examining symbols, condensation of ideas, and displaced anxiety to understand what the author repressed or did not intend.

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    of 1

    4/14/22, 2:33 PM Psychoanalytic Criticism

    Introduction to Literature

    Michael Delahoyde

    Psychoanalytic Criticism

    Psychoanalytic criticism adopts the methods of "reading" employed by


    Freud and later theorists to interpret
    texts. It argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the author,
    that a literary work is a manifestation of the author's own neuroses. One may psychoanalyze a particular
    character within a literary work, but it is usually assumed that all such characters are projections of the author's
    psyche.

    One interesting facet of this approach is that it validates the importance of literature, as it is built on a literary
    key for the decoding. Freud himself wrote, "The dream-thoughts which we first come across as we proceed with
    our analysis often strike us by the unusual form in which they are expressed; they are not clothed in the prosaic
    language usually employed by our thoughts, but are on the contrary represented symbolically by means of
    similes and metaphors, in images resembling those of poetic speech" (26).

    Like psychoanalysis itself, this critical endeavor seeks evidence of unresolved emotions, psychological conflicts,
    guilts, ambivalences, and so forth within what may well be a disunified
    literary work. The author's own
    childhood traumas, family life, sexual conflicts, fixations, and such will be traceable within the behavior of the
    characters in the literary work. But psychological
    material will be expressed indirectly, disguised, or encoded (as
    in dreams) through principles such as "symbolism" (the repressed object represented in disguise),
    "condensation" (several thoughts or persons represented in a single image), and "displacement" (anxiety located
    onto another image by means of association).

    Despite the importance of the author here, psychoanalytic criticism is similar to New Criticism in not concerning
    itself with "what the author intended." But what the author never intended (that is, repressed) is sought. The
    unconscious material has been distorted by the censoring conscious mind.

    Psychoanalytic critics will ask such questions as, "What is Hamlet's problem?" or "Why can't Brontë seem to
    portray any positive mother figures?"

    Works Consulted

    Abrams, M.H. "Psychological and Psychoanalytic Criticism." A Glossary of Literary Terms.


    7th ed. Fort Worth:
    Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1999. 247-253.

    Biddle, Arthur W., and Toby Fulwiler. Reading,


    Writing, and the Study of Literature. NY: Random House, 1989.

    Freud, Sigmund. "On Dreams." Excerpts. Art in Theory 1900-1990. Ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood.
    Cambridge: Blackwell Pub., Inc., 1993. 26-34.

    Lynn, Steven. Texts and Contexts: Writing


    About Literature with Critical Theory. 2nd ed. NY: Longman,
    1998.

    Murfin, Ross, and Supryia M. Ray. The Bedford


    Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. Boston: Bedford
    Books,
    1997.

    Critical Theory
    Introduction to Literature

    https://public.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/psycho.crit.html#:~:text=Psychoanalytic criticism adopts the methods,of the author's own neuroses. 1/1

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