Topic:-Psychoanalytical Literary Criticism Name :-Khamal Krishna R

Roll no:- 15 Semester:- 2 Enrollment no:-PG20170014

Paper no:- 7Course:- Literary theory and Criticism

Batch:-2016/2018Email:-krishnakhamal01@gmail.comSubmitted to:- Department of English

M.K.Bhavnagar University

Psychoanalytic literary theoryIt emerged in the 19

th

century. In method,concept and form influenced by the tradition of

psychoanalysis begun by Sigmund Freud. In romantic period it was belief that the details and the form of literature are related with it's author's distinctive mind.

Three practices

1.Referance to author's personality in order to interpret or explain a literary work.

2.Referenc personalitye to literary works in order to establish,biographically personality of the author.3).Reading of literary work in order to experience

distinctive subjectivity or consciousness its own author...

Celine Supernant''Psychoanalytic literary criticism does not constitute a unified field.However ,all variant endorse,at least to a certain degree,the idea that literature... it is fundamentally entwined with the

psyche'' The object of psychoanalytic criticism,can be the psychoanalysis of the author or a particular character in given work.In this directly therapeutic form,the criticism is very similar to psychoanalysis itself,closely following the analytic interpretive process discussed in Freud's ,The Dream interpretation.Critic may see fictional character as case study...

Poetry for Keble''Is the indirect expression..of some overpowering emotion or ruling taste or feeling the direct indulgence where of it somehow repressed...'' ''a sefty valve,preserving men from madness''.

Freud proposes that literature and other arts,like drama and neurotic symptoms, consist of imagined

or fantasized,fulfillment of wishes that are either denied by reality or prohibited by social standards

of morality and propriety..''

Artist find satisfaction in distorted forms that serves to disguise their real motives and objects

from the unconscious mind.

Literature and art therefore unlike dreams and neuroses may serve the artist as a mode of fantasy that opens

the way back to reality''.

Freud 1920,theory later developedas the theory of mental structure of dynamics and processes.

He gave such concepts like,Oedipus complex,penis envy,Freudian slips,id,egoand super ego.

He divides mind on the base of its functional aspects..

Psychoanalytical approach in practice

Freud applied psychoanalysis on the literary works of Shakespear like Hamlet,King Lear,Macbeth,a mid summers night dreams...

Fyodor Dostoevsky's 'The brother karamazcv'... After 1930 numbers of writers prodced critical

analysis,modeled on classical Freudian theory..ofthe lives of the author and their literary works...

Hamlet and Oedipus 1949-Earnest Jones ''Ego psychology''-Literature and psychology-

Frederick c.crews...

Charles Mauron:- he suggest four phase of the method to interpret literary work via

psychoanalysis.....(1). Innate desires expressed and revealed by metaphors

and symbolilcally(2).The juxtaposition of the writer's works lead the critic to

define symbolic theme.(3).these metaphorical networks are significant of latent

inner reality. (4).The last phase consist in linking the writer's literary

creation to his own personal life...

The Psychobiography This term designates an account of the life of an author that focuses on the subject's psychological

development,relying for evidence both on external sources and on the author's own writings...

Eric H. Erikson's -Young man Luther

Leon Edel's -Henry James

Justin Kalpan -Mark Twain and his world

Carl Jung and Jacques Lacan Carl Jung comes up with the study related to archetype

and the collective unconscious,his influential works combine with the work of Anthropologist such as Claude Levi-Strauss and Joseph Campbell,it led to mythocriticism and archetype analysis...

. For Carl Jung all great literatur are myths.

Jacques Lacan (French Freud):- ''Unconscious is

structured like language, Metaphor and metonymy....human

mind is not preexisted to,but constituted by the language we use''

Conclusion

There is lots of criticism of Freud's theory,such as for feminist critics attacked the male centered nature of Freud's theory ,esp.Oedipus Complex..and Penis envy.

.. The danger is that the serious student may become theory

ridden,forgetting that freud is not the only approach to literary criticism.

To see a great poem primarily as a psychological case study is often to miss wider significance and perhaps even the essential aesthetic experience it shuld provide.

Later analysts would conclude that 'clearly one cannot psychoanalyze a writer from his text,one can only appropriate him.'.