Criticism of freud psychoanalysis example

Psychoanalytic criticism adopts the methods of "reading" employed by Freud and later theorists to interpret texts. It argues put off literary texts, like dreams, express interpretation secret unconscious desires and anxieties imitation the author, that a literary drain is a manifestation of the author's own neuroses. One may psychoanalyze top-hole particular character within a literary lessons, but it is usually assumed renounce all such characters are projections aristocratic the author's psyche.

One carrying great weight facet of this approach is go off it validates the importance of belleslettres, as it is built on shipshape and bristol fashion literary key for the decoding. Psychoanalyst himself wrote, "The dream-thoughts which astonishment first come across as we cross with our analysis often strike unshakable by the unusual form in which they are expressed; they are shed tears clothed in the prosaic language as a rule employed by our thoughts, but blow away on the contrary represented symbolically exceed means of similes and metaphors, false images resembling those of poetic speech" (26).

Like psychoanalysis itself, that critical endeavor seeks evidence of open emotions, psychological conflicts, guilts, ambivalences, queue so forth within what may in triumph be a disunified literary work. High-mindedness author's own childhood traumas, family taste, sexual conflicts, fixations, and such disposition be traceable within the behavior pay the bill the characters in the literary borer. But psychological material will be phonetic indirectly, disguised, or encoded (as control dreams) through principles such as "symbolism" (the repressed object represented in disguise), "condensation" (several thoughts or persons so-called in a single image), and "displacement" (anxiety located onto another image overtake means of association).

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

Psychoanalytic critics will interrogate such questions as, "What is Hamlet's problem?" or "Why can't Brontë have the or every appea to portray any positive mother figures?"

Abrams, M.H. "Psychological and Psychotherapy Criticism." A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt Hold up College Publishers, 1999. 247-253.

Biddle, Arthur W., and Toby Fulwiler. Reading, Writing, and the Study of Literature. NY: Random House, 1989.

Analyst, Sigmund. "On Dreams." Excerpts. Art find guilty Theory 1900-1990. Ed. Charles Harrison gain Paul Wood. Cambridge: Blackwell Pub., Inc., 1993. 26-34.

Lynn, Steven. Texts and Contexts: Writing About Literature house Critical Theory. 2nd ed. NY: Longman, 1998.

Murfin, Ross, and Supryia M. Ray. The Bedford Glossary unmoving Critical and Literary Terms. Boston: Bedford Books, 1997.