PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

Important Points: Attribute latent or hidden meaning to unacknowledged desires in some person, usually the author or source behind the character in the narrative or drama. Can also focus on the response of the readers and usually accepts the influence of changing social history on the structures of sexual desire represented in a work.

Freudian Criticism: Dominant school of Psychoanalytic Criticism. Asserts that the meaning of a literary work is found in the psyche of the author rather than on the surface of the text. In the text look for: 1. Empty spaces, bodies of water, or containers. These represent female. 2. Tools, weapons, towers, trees, trains, planes. These represent male. 3. Possible Oedipus Complex (son unconsciously in love with mother, daughter unconsciously in love with father)

Jungian and Myth Criticism: Assumes we all share a universal or collective unconscious. The unconscious harbors universal patterns and forms human experiences or archetypes. Attempt is to compare and unite the ages and people of the world in order to reveal fundamental things. In the text look for: 1. The hero that struggles to free himself from Great Mother (mother earth), surviving trials to gain reward of union with ideal other, the feminine anima (feminine inner personality in males) (Animus – male characteristics in women) 2. Archetype stories (proposed by Northrop Frye) that follow cycle of death and rebirth

Lacanian Criticism: The focus shifts from author and reader to the interpretation of the critic, and substitutes Freud’s Oedipal stage with the mirror stage. Aligns the development and structure of individual human subject with the development and structure of language.

Lacanian Stages of Development: 1. Infant inhabits imaginary realm. Defined as being in union with mother. 2. Mirror stage – recognizes self in mirror, identity forms, and union with mother is severed. Ironically self forms through disruption of oneness. Recognizes the difference between one’s body and image in the mirror. Recognizes that object of desire is Other and distinct from subject. 3. Language forms to summon back object of desire. Symbolic order forms. 4. Language signifies a lack of an object.

While reading a text, remember: 1. In Lacanian Theory the Father governs language of symbolic order. Learning language (the word) ends the sense of oneness with the Mother. Language is, therefore, masculine. 2. Language generates differences and inequalities between the sexes. The Gaze – man looks, women get looked at.

Julia Kristeva’s Theory of Abjection: Expands on Lacanian Theory. To return to the mother’s body would be death. We are buried in Mother Earth. We spend our entire lives trying to fight our eventual return to Mother Earth. Fear of the dark side of Mother Earth explains negative cultural images of women.

Kristeva’s stages of development: 1. Mirror Stage 2. Symbolic order 3. Real stage: death. Things that cannot be imagined, symbolized, or known directly