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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