Gwendolyn Brooks Psychoanalytic CriticismKey Idea’s and Terms

FreudianYou give central importance, in literary interpretation, to the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious mind. They associate the literary work’s “overt” content with the former, and the “covert” content with the latter, privileging the latter as being what the work is “really” about, and aiming to disentangle the two.LucanianLike Freudian critics they pay close attention to unconscious motives of feelings, but instead of excavating for those of the author or the characters, they search out the text itself, uncovering contradictory undercurrents of meaning, which lie like a subconscious beneath the “conscious” of the text. This is another way of defining they process of deconstruction. Key Words: Association, Remain alive in the unconscious, sequence of association, unconscious protects.

Student Examples:1. Gwendolyn Brooks highlights the mindset of a confined young girl who confuses the life of a “bad women” with the life of freedom. 2. The mother being strict caused this little girl not to understand the bad of what was around her. This made her feel and want to be like the prostitutes she saw in the back yard. 3. Brooks conveys the loss of freedom of youth when placed in a situation of confinement and restraint.

Freudian interpretation is popularly thought to be a matter of attributing sexual connotations to objects, so the towers and latters, for instance, are seen as phallic symbols. This kind of thinking had become a joke even in Freud’s own lifetime, and we should remember that he once said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” (Freud was a heavy cigar smoker, mind you, so he vested interest in saying that.)