Psychoanalytic Criticism

Freud's interest in the unconscious and his attempt to analyse scientifically the relationship between the unconscious impulses and the conscious mind led him to literature. Great writers in their imaginative writings found an outlet to their repressed erotic impulses and great literature presents the desire of their unconscious mind transformed and distanced.

According to him the most powerful impulse in man was his tendency to make love to his mother (and in woman her tendency to love her father) and kill his father - a rival to this erotic drive in him. The man or the woman may not be aware of his or her impulse - as Oedipus himself was not, but literature is attractive because it deals with such patterns of emotional experience which are common to all of us."

Freud was concerned with the content of literature and not with the style, form or technique though he granted that the language used by an artist may be symbolic in the sense that it may embody key beliefs, ideas or concepts about reality. Above all Freud was impressed by the fact that a creative artist had intuition and so insights into the human mind whereas others had no access to it. He had of course no explanation to offer as to why some works of art were more powerful than others. Also his concern was to bring out universal psychological truths rather than the individual qualities of a work of art."

Adler and Jung also followed the same principles. Adler, however, felt that the 'struggle for power', rather than 'sex' should be considered the principal motivating force in man's make-up and he brought the superiority and inferiority complexes in place of the Oedipal or Electra complex. Jung became in some ways more influential than even Freud in view of his idea of a racial collective unconscious which he derived from his study of myths and dreams.

His notion that a literary artist might be looked upon as a priest speaking the language of the particular tribe of civilisation brought him close to social anthropologists and we have many critics who have been influenced by jung." With the change in literary theory (the advent of the New Criticism and the later shift in the emphasis from the author to the reader etc.) a change has also come about in the psycho-analytic school.

Freud saw the work of art as analogous to fantasy which may be treated as a symptom for the psycho- analysis of the author or that of the characters in the play of the novel. But Norman Holland started examining the text not as evidence of the author's psychology but as a scene of the collusion between the author and the reader. The reader discovers in the text a secret expression of what he desires to hear.

The turn given to psycho-analytical criticism by the post-structuralist tendency is best seen in Jacques Lacan. He sees the unconscious as coming into existence simultaneously with language. Language may be inadequate to express the unconscious clearly but it invariably aims at structuring desire. He is deeply interested in the study of this language and its uncertainty." - (V. S. Seturaman)

The discoveries of psychoanalysis have turned out to be of great significance to literary criticism. Psychoanalysis insists upon primaeval human emotions. It devotes itself to the buried drama of individual life - a major theme in modern literature. A psychoanalyst regards human personality as a vital and dynamic phenomenon in which the self becomes a kind of a battle-field where different instincts and impulses are always raging war against conventions and regulations.

A psychoanalytic critic is confronted with the task of exploring the hidden motives or unconscious urges behind work of art. There is a common notion that a poem or a picture is a 'substitute gratification', that a work of art enshrines the unfulfilled desires and repressed instincts of the writer, and that it is a sort of dream fulfilment.

If this possibility is granted, it may safely be said that the Freudian approach to literature definitely helps us in understanding a particular work of art. It enables us to grasp the dominant outlook of a particular writer to discover why we react as we do to various poems and novels. The psychoanalytical criticism thus aims at 'the search for realities of the self-behind social marks." It breaks the personality of the writer and tries to penetrate straight into the inner motives." - (A critic)

The psychological school aspires to render criticism more 'scientific' by an increased application of psychological knowledge to its problems. And this school is itself divided into two groups, one of which would explain works of art from a complete knowledge of the psychology of the artist, while the other finds more attractive psychological investigation of the processes of appreciation.

It is argued that the Freudian approach of criticism enables a deeper and better understanding. But the study of human psychology is something different from the assessment of artistic excellence which is the ultimate end of literary criticism. The study of what takes place in the mind of an artist during the creation of a work is certainly an interesting branch of psychology.

But it can become helpful for criticism only if it facilitates the critic to discriminate good from bad work of art. Freud has said that psychoanalysis 'can do nothing towards elucidating the nature of the artistic gin, nor can it explain the means by which the artist works artistic technique. And Jung asserts: 'Any reaction to stimulus may be casually explained, but the creative, which is the absolute antithesis of mere reaction, will forever elude the human understanding.

If this be the case, there is no psychological difference between the mental processes attendant on a good or a bad work of art psychological research into the origins of literary works cannot offer much to criticism which is primarily concerned to differentiate good works of art from bad." The psychoanalytic criticism of literature began with the publication of Freud's 'The Interpretation of Dreams' in 1900. Mand Bodkin has made the best use of psycho-analysis in literary criticism in her book 'Archetypal Patterns in Poetry' or psychological studies of imagination. There are other attempts in psychoanalytic criticism.

They are scepticism: Notes on contemporary poetry (Conrad Aiken) On English Poetry (Robert Graves) The Meaning of Dreams and poetic unreason (Herbert Read). There are other critics also-lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, Van Wyak Brooks and Kenneth Burke I. A. Richards' 'The Fountain of Aesthetics, The Principles of Literary Criticism and practical criticism made the greatest impact upon literary criticism.

Richard's greatest contribution lies in the evaluation of various psychological views of art and in his rejection of hedonism of the specifically 'aesthetic' emotion of empathy etc. in favour of synaesthesis. Moreover he has tried to improve upon Freud. From the very beginning he has focussed his attention upon the problem of discriminating good art from bad, which most of the Freudians do not do.

Ezra Pound once asserted: you can spot the bad critic when he starts discussing the poet and not the poem. "Anyone who claims that knowledge of an ice artist's psychology is essential to criticism would have to admit that there can be no criticism of works of art whose author is unknown. But this is not the case in actual practice. Even anonymous works of literature have been and can be critically assessed.

Criticism of most of the folk literature would bear us out." Bringing together structuralism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Hegelian In Marxism, Lacan's psychoanalytic operations have been instrumental in simultaneously describing the importance of language/linguistic structures in the formation of interpellation of the subject as well as the interdiction or repudiation of otherness.

Lacan's emphasis is upon language as the means through which subjective identity, social reality and more radically, the Freudian unconscious are structured and negotiated. Moreover, although classical psychoanalytic discourse tends to emphasise sexual difference over and above other varieties of difference or dialectics of 'otherness', it maintains a significant, if equivocal, relation to post colonial theory and practice.

Regarding more recent implications concerning psychoanalysis and post colonialism, Emily Apter observes that it provides 'indispensable paradigms for rethinking colonial paternalism, transference, fetishism, negation, sadism masochism, non racist shame and guilt psychic form and performative visibility." -(Encyclopedia of PostColonial Studies).

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Psychoanalytic Criticism