Thursday 18 November 2021

PSYCHOANALYSIS - PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

 


          PSYCHOANALYSIS - PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

 

            Psychology is the scientific study of the mind and behavior.  Psycho analysis is a form of therapy that aims to cure mental diseases by investigating the interaction of conscious and unconscious elements in the mind.  In it the repressed fears and conflicts that cause the problems are brought into the conscious mind rather than remaining ‘buried’ in the unconscious through the free talk with the patients.  This theory was developed by Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939) the well known Austrian neurologists.  Many of Freud’s ideas concern aspects of sexuality.  According to him sexuality begins not at puberty, with physical maturing, but in infancy through the infants relationship with the mother.  Connected with this, is the Oedipus complex, whereby, the male infant conceives the desire to eliminate the father and become the sexual partner of the mother.  Moreover he divides the psyche into the ego, the super ego, and the id and correspond them to the consciousness the conscience and the unconscious or conscious preconscious and unconscious. 

One of the important Freudian terminologies is the dream work, the process by which real events or desires are transformed into dream images.  Dreams, just like literature do not usually make explicit statements.  Both communicate indirectly, avoiding direct or open statement and representing meanings through concrete embodiments of time, place or persons.  Freud believes that a dream is an escape-hatch or safety-valve through which repressed desires, fears, or memories seek an outlet into the conscious mind.  As dreams have images, symbols and metaphors, they don’t say things but show things.  In this way dreams are very much like literature.

            Psychoanalytic criticism is a form of literary criticism which uses some of the techniques of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of literature.  Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), the French psychoanalyst has had his influence upon many aspects of recent literary theory.  The psychoanalytic critics pay close attention to unconscious motives and feelings of both the authors and the characters depicted in the work.  They identify ‘Psychic’ context of the literary work at the expense of social and historical context.

            In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Hamlet’s father is murdered by his own brother, who then marries Hamlet’s mother.  The ghost of Hamlet’s father appears to Hamlet and tells him to avenge the murder by killing his uncle.  Though there is no any difficulty in doing this, Hamlet spends most of the play delaying and making excuses.  Critics have long debated the question without coming to any generally accepted conclusions.  Here psychoanalytic criticism comes with the answer saying that Hamlet cannot avenge this crime and commit the same crime.  He has an Oedipus complex, a repressed sexual desire for his own mother and a consequent wish to do away with his father.  That is why his avenge is replaced by self-reproaches and by scruples of conscience that remind him that he is no better than the sinner he is to punish.

            Another example where the psychoanalytic critics offer help is Harold Pinter’s ‘The Home Coming’.  It centers round an all-male house hold consisting of an autocratic father and two grown up sons.  Since the mother is no more, her memories worshipped by the widower and her sons.  There is a third son who has immigrated to America where he is a college professor.  He comes back on a visit to his family, bringing his wife.  During the visit, the father and the sons have the idea o f setting their brother’s wife up a prostitute in a Solo-flat and living off the proceeds.  Their brother agrees to this and the wife accepts it calmly when it is put to her, having first extracted the best possible financial terms and made it clear that she will be in many ways the boss of this new house hold.  He goes back to America without his wife.

            As the incidents in the ‘Home Coming’ is so bizarre, the psychoanalytic critics have come to say that the all male family shown in the play suffers from a classic condition known as a mother fixation, in which there is an exaggerated reverence for the mother.  Such people are attracted only to women who resemble the mother.  So such women will have to be polarized into idealized maternal figures on the one hand and prostitute figures on the other.  Here, when the brothers propose the prostitute plan, the husband accepts it because that is how he himself has thought about or fantasized about his wife in order to make a sexual relationship with her possible. 

            According to Freud, the longingness to gratify desires inspire authors to produce literature.  That is why a psychoanalytic critic argues that the phenomenon described in odyssey is exactly the manifestations of the Homer’s neurosis.  The endless journey of odysseus and his men, their battle against monsters and witches in the forms of queens and princess and at the end their going back to Ithaca actually echo the repressed desires and emotions of Homer. 

            Freud believed that the content of dreams is related to wish fulfillment.  The very content of dreams are of two types: the latent content and manifested content.  When a woman has a dream where she is being chased by a snake, the actual event is manifested content and the interpretation that’s given to it is the latent content.  Like the process of a gas change to a liquid, the dream objects have its association with memories and thoughts, which is called the condensation.  As the mind has a defense mechanism it displaces many unacceptables and has substitutes in dreams.  Thus dreams have displacements in it.  Moreover, psychoanalysis also talks about Jouissanc, a physical or intellecutal pleasure, enjoyment or ecstasy which has recently been designed by Lacan and others to mean the pain and discomfort because of the surplus-enjoyment or excessive pleasure and delight.  These are all effectively used by the psychoanalytic critics now a days to have a better understanding of the literary works.

Like Freudian critics the Lacanian critics pay close attention to unconscious motives and feelings, but instead of excavating for those of the author or characters, they search out those of the text itself.  They uncover the contradictory undercurrents of meaning that lie like a ‘subconscious’ beneath the ‘conscious’ of the text.  Thus psychoanalytic criticism has become not only a psychological case study of a piece of literature that deals with the author and characters but also a way of defining the process of ‘deconstruction' and thereby helping us not to miss its wider significance and the aesthetic experiences.

 

---Thulasidharan V

 

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