Sunday, December 13, 2009

Psychoanalytical Criticism
Psychoanalytical criticism, which emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century, is a type of literary criticism which uses some of the techniques of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of literature. It is a type of literary criticism that explores and analyzes both literature in general and specific literary texts in term of mental processes. Psychological critics generally focus on the mental processes of the author, analyzes works with an eye to their authors’ personalities. Some psychological critics use literary works to reconstruct and understand the personalities of authors-or to understand their modes of consciousness and thinking.

Freud
It is a widely excepted notion that Sigmund Freud is the psychologist of the 19th and 20th century; you seldom hear the word "psychology" without people immediately thinking of Freud. His theories of psychosexual development; the stages, Oedipal crisis, and character, include some of the most renowned psychiatric research, as well as some of the most controversial. To Freud the sex drive is the most motivating force, not only for adults, but for children and infants as well.
Freud focused on the ambiguities of language as reflections of mental processes, particularly as they manifest themselves in dreams, symptoms, slips of the tongue, and puns.
Freud powerfully developed an old idea: that the human mind is essentially dual in nature, operating both consciously and unconsciously. He also identified three components of the human psyche. He called the predominantly passionate, irrational, unknown, and unconscious part of the psyche the ‘id,’ or ‘it.’ Freud viewed the id- insatiable and pleasure-seeking – as the source of our instinctual physical (especially libidinal) desires. Freud opposed the id to the superego, the part of the psyche that has internalized the norm and mores of society. Since the superego reflects social beliefs, behaviors, and even pressures, it almost seems to be outside the self, making moral judgments and telling us to make sacrifices even when such sacrifices may not be in our best interests. The third aspect of the psyche identified by Freud id the ego, or the ‘I,’ which is predominantly rational, logical, and conscious, the ego must constantly mediate between the often competing demands of the id and the superego; roughly speaking, it must choose between (or balance) liberation and self-gratification on one hand and censorship and conformity on the other.



Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan (April 13, 1901 – September 9, 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literary theory. He gave yearly seminars, in Paris, from 1953 to 1981, mostly influencing France's intellectuals in the 1960s and the 1970s, especially the post-structuralist philosophers. His interdisciplinary work is Freudian, featuring the unconscious, the castration complex, the ego; identification; and language as subjective perception, and thus he figures in critical theory, literary studies, twentieth-century French philosophy, and clinical psychoanalysis.
The mirror stage (le stade du miroir):
Lacan's first official contribution to psychoanalysis was the mirror stage which he described " as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience". By the early fifties, he no longer considered the mirror stage as only a moment in the life of the infant, but as the permanent structure of subjectivity. In the paradigm of The Imaginary order, the subject is permanently caught and captivated by his own image. Lacan writes, "[T]he mirror stage is a phenomenon to which I assign a twofold value. In the first place, it has historical value as it marks a decisive turning-point in the mental development of the child. In the second place, it typifies an essential libidinal relationship with the body-image".
As he further develops the concept, the stress falls less on its historical value and more on its structural value. In his fourth Seminar, La relation d'objet, Lacan states that "the mirror stage is far from a mere phenomenon which occurs in the development of the child. It illustrates the conflictual nature of the dual relationship".
The mirror stage describes the formation of the Ego via the process of objectification, the Ego being the result of feeling dissension between one's perceived visual appearance and one's perceived emotional reality. This identification is what Lacan called alienation. At six months the baby still lacks coordination. However, he can recognize himself in the mirror before attaining control over his bodily movements. He sees his image as a whole, and the synthesis of this image produces a sense of contrast with the uncoordination of the body, which is perceived as a fragmented body. This contrast is first felt by the infant as a rivalry with his own image, because the wholeness of the image threatens him with fragmentation, and thus the mirror stage gives rise to an aggressive tension between the subject and the image. To resolve this aggressive tension, the subject identifies with the image: this primary identification with the counterpart is what forms the Ego. The moment of identification is to Lacan a moment of jubilation since it leads to an imaginary sense of mastery, yet the jubilation may also be accompanied by a depressive reaction, when the infant compares his own precarious sense of mastery with the omnipotence of the mother. This identification also involves the ideal ego which functions as a promise of future wholeness sustaining the Ego in anticipation.
In the Mirror stage a misunderstanding - "méconnaissance" - constitutes the Ego—the 'moi' becomes alienated from himself through the introduction of the Imaginary order subject. It must be said that the mirror stage has also a significant symbolic dimension. The Symbolic order is present in the figure of the adult who is carrying the infant: the moment after the subject has jubilantly assumed his image as his own, he turns his head towards this adult who represents the big Other, as if to call on him to ratify this image.

Daddy
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time---
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been sacred of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You----

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two---
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

21 comments:

  1. Psychoanalytic Criticism


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

    One interesting facet of this approach is that it validates the importance of literature, as it is built on a literary key for the decoding. Freud himself wrote, "The dream-thoughts which we first come across as we proceed with our analysis often strike us by the unusual form in which they are expressed; they are not clothed in the prosaic language usually employed by our thoughts, but are on the contrary represented symbolically by means of similes and metaphors, in images resembling those of poetic speech" (26).

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  2. psychoanalytic criticism, a form of literary interpretation that employs the terms of psychoanalysis (the unconscious, repression, the Oedipus complex, etc.) in order to illuminate aspects of literature in its connection with conflicting psychological states. The beginnings of this modern tradition are found in Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), which provides a method of interpreting apparently unimportant details of narratives as ‘displacements’ of repressed wishes or anxieties

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  3. Feminist literary criticism, arising in conjunction with sociopolitical feminism, critiques patriarchal language and literature by exposing how these reflect masculine ideology. It examines gender politics in works and traces the subtle construction of masculinity and femininity, and their relative status, positionings, and marginalizations within works.

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  4. some difficulties in psychoanalytic approaches to popular culture

    From the outset psychoanalysts have been very wary of the way popular culture presents therapy: from Freud's reluctance to become involved in the project which eventually became G. W. Pabst's film Secrets of a Soul, to the recent statements on the musical Freudiana.1 However, it would appear that popular culture has itself often had a cause for grievance in the way it has been treated by psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysts have relentlessly demonstrated a penchant for analysing popular texts in order to emphasize the tenability of one or another subdivision of clinical theory. In most cases, such work represents a sincere attempt to engage with arguments regarding the way in which texts function. However, the key problem of psychoanalytic approaches to texts—even when utilized by clinicians with a professed love of popular culture—is that they underestimate the material that they scrutinize. Paradoxically, those clinicians most guilty of these charges clearly wish to i

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  5. Sigmund Freud's ideas
    “For Freud, the unresolved conflicts that give rise to any neurosis are the stuff of literature. A work of literature, he believes, is the external expression of the author’s unconscious mind. Accordingly, the literary work must be treated like a dream.”
    1) the unconscious--the big iceberg which contains the hidden, repressed desires of life can be released through lit
    2) dreams--latent content is the real desire; manifest content is the remembered, reported dream--in lit the manifest is the plot; latent, the true meaning of the author--the unconscious which the reader, a psychoanalytic critic can uncover. Condensation is the grouping of all of one’s feeling (usually anger) into one content form, similar to metaphor. Displacement is the transference of the feeling (anger) to someone or something else, similar to metonymy, in which an associative term is used for the object or concept.
    3) Tripartite model: id-ego-superego—in literature, sometimes characters can take these parts, sometimes settings can--always symbolic; id is irrational, instinctual, unknown, unconscious, containing secret desires, wishes, fears. It houses the libido, source of psychosexual desires and psychic energy; pleasure principle resides in id ; ego is rational, logical, waking part, corresponds to the reality principle; it regulates desires from id ; superego is the censor of inappropriate desires (according to social norms), working through punishment in form of guilt and fear
    4) Oedipal complex, penis envy, castration complex--all these can be used to interpret thematic elements in a story ; Freud sees the male as having the advantage, because the girl will never possess a penis and must, therefore, find fulfillment in relationship to a male in her adult life in order to make up for her lack.

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  6. A Feminist Reading of Pride and Prejudice


    The opening line of Pride and Prejudice, "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife" (51; ch. 1), alerts the reader from the outset that the plot centers around marriage. Opinions concerning Pride and Prejudice, which focuses on the Bennet sisters and their pursuit of eligible bachelors, have generally fallen into two categories. Some feminist critics such as Gilbert and Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic argue that, "Austen dramatizes how damaging it has been for women to inhabit a culture created by and for men" (120); others, including Julie Shaffer, suggest that Austen allows for the personal growth of the heroine while empowering her within the marriage plot. Although detractors conclude the heroine's marriage ultimately supports the patriarchal institution of marriage and portrays female submission to male domination, fans praise Austen's portrayal of "modern marriage," a union of equal partners.

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  7. Feminist theory :
    Like most theoretical projects, feminist thought has generated a variety of conceptual models that, in turn, suggest particular reading strategies encompassing diverse and sometimes conflicting perspectives. Many feminist scholars undertake humanist-oriented literary analysis, while the materialist critiques of Marxist and socialist feminists and the philosophical deconstructions of French feminists have posed challenges to such relatively straightforward reading practices. Some of the most powerful recent critiques of subject and gender construction have been undertaken by queer-feminists such as Teresa de Lauretis and Judith Butler (see Wendy Pearson and Helen Merrick in this volume). Other critical models, of particular interest in the context of sf, have been suggested by cyber-theorists such as Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles, who are concerned with how developments in contemporary science and technology - for instance, advances in reproductive and communications technologies - are shaping and will continue to shape the lives of women.

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  9. Marxist Critics are very concerned about the structures of a society. They see a society's economic structures as its base--the foundation on which a society rests (think, "basement"). Societies are inherently conservative, so each society (especially those in it currently benefiting from whatever economic base is in place) wants to perpetuate or continually reproduce its base--those foundational economic structures. Those foundational economic structures are often class interactions and power hierarchies.

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  10. Principles of Freud's Theory of Psychoanalysis
    In An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Freud (1949) explains the principal tenets on which psychoanalytic theory is based. He begins with an explanation of the three forces of the psychical apparatus--the id, the ego, and the superego. The id has the quality of being unconscious and contains everything that is inherited, everything that is present at birth, and the instincts (Freud, 1949, p. 14). The ego has the quality of being conscious and is responsible for controlling the demands of the id and of the instincts, becoming aware of stimuli, and serving as a link between the id and the external world. In addition, the ego responds to stimulation by either adaptation or flight, regulates activity, and strives to achieve pleasure and avoid unpleasure (Freud, 1949, p. 14-15). Finally, the superego, whose demands are managed by the id, is responsible for the limitation of satisfactions and represents the influence of others, such as parents, teachers, and role models, as well as the impact of racial, societal, and cultural traditions (Freud, 1949, p. 15).

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  11. It is a literary approach where critics see the text as if it were a kind of dream. This means that the text represses its real (or latent) content behind obvious (manifest) content. The process of changing from latent to manifest content is known as the dream work, and involves operations of concentration and displacement. The critic analyzes the language and symbolism of a text to reverse the process of the dream work and arrive at the underlying latent thoughts.

    The object of psychoanalytic literary criticism, at its very simplest, can be the psychoanalysis of the author or of a particularly interesting character. In this directly therapeutic form, it is very similar to psychoanalysis itself, closely following the analytic interpretive process discussed in Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. But many more complex variations are possible. The concepts of psychoanalysis can be deployed with reference to the narrative or poetic structure itself, without requiring access to the authorial psyche (an interpretation motivated by Lacan's remark that "the unconscious is structured like a language"). Or the founding texts of psychoanalysis may themselves be treated as literature, and re-read for the light cast by their formal qualities on their theoretical content (Freud's texts frequently resemble detective stories, or the archaeological narratives of which he was so fond).

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  12. Psychoanalysis is a body of ideas developed by Austrian physician Sigmund Freud and continued by others. It is primarily devoted to the study of human psychological functioning and behavior, although it also can be applied to societies.

    Psychoanalysis has three applications:


    1.a method of investigation of the mind;
    2.a systematized set of theories about human behaviour;
    3.a method of treatment of psychological or emotional illness
    Freudian psychoanalysis refers to a specific type of treatment in which the "analysand" (analytic patient) verbalizes thoughts, including free associations, fantasies, and dreams, from which the analyst formulates the unconscious conflicts causing the patient's symptoms and character problems, and interprets them for the patient to create insight for resolution of the problems.

    The specifics of the analyst's interventions typically include confronting and clarifying the patient's pathological defenses, wishes and guilt. Through the analysis of conflicts, including those contributing to resistance and those involving transference onto the analyst of distorted reactions, psychoanalytic treatment can clarify how patients unconsciously are their own worst enemies: how unconscious, symbolic reactions that have been stimulated by experience are causing symptoms.

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  13. Eaccording to freud Ego,Id.and Super -go:
    According to Freud, the ego is an aspect of the subject that emerges from the id-the biological, inherited, unconscious source of sexual drives, instincts, and irrational impulses. The ego develops out of the id's interaction with the external world.
    Thus, the ego can be thought of as a variable aspect of the subject constructed as a system of beliefs that organize one's dealings with the internal and external demands of life according to certain laws referred to by Freud as secondary process. It reconciles the biological, instinctual demands and drives (both unifying and destructive in nature) of the id (governed by primary process) with the socially determined constraints of the super-ego (internalized rules placing limits on the subject's satisfactions and pleasures) and the demands of reality.

    The healthy, mature ego translates the demands of both the id and the super-ego into terms which allow admission of them without destruction. Thus, constructive acceptance and transformation of the demands made by both the id and the super-ego are techniques of the ego and essential elements of mental health.

    Psychoanalytic therapy involves reliving repressed fantasies and fears both in feeling and in thought. This process involves a transference, i.e. a projection of the attitudes and emotions, originally directed towards the parents, onto the analyst. This is necessary for successful treatment. Access to these repressed fears is gained often through dream interpretation, where the manifest content in dreams is understood as a symbolic expression of the hidden or latent content. (Internal censorship demands that the wish be transformed, leading to a disguised or symbolic representation.) The sources of dream content results from

    lost memories
    linguistic symbols
    repressed experiences
    "archaic" material inherited but not directly experienced.
    Dreams are "guardians of sleep", i.e. wish fulfillments that arise in response to inner conflicts and tensions whose function is to allow the subject to continue sleeping. Dream-Work is the production of dreams during sleep-the translation of demands arising from the unconscious into symbolic objects of the preconscious and eventually the conscious mind of the subject. Dream Interpretation is the decoding of the symbols (manifest content) and the recovery of their latent content, i.e. the unconscious and, hence, hidden tensions and conflicts that give rise to the dreams in the first place.

    Objections to Freud's Theory
    Some of the objections typically raised in response to Freudian theory are:

    Freud's hypotheses are neither verifiable nor falsifiable. It is not clear what would count as evidence sufficient to confirm or refute theoretical claims.
    The theory is based on an inadequate conceptualization of the experience of women.
    The theory overemphasizes the role of sexuality in human psychological development and experience.

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  14. Dreams are "guardians of sleep", i.e. wish fulfillments that arise in response to inner conflicts and tensions whose function is to allow the subject to continue sleeping. Dream-Work is the production of dreams during sleep-the translation of demands arising from the unconscious into symbolic objects of the preconscious and eventually the conscious mind of the subject. Dream Interpretation is the decoding of the symbols (manifest content) and the recovery of their latent content, i.e. the unconscious and, hence, hidden tensions and conflicts that give rise to the dreams in the first place.

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  15. PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

    Sigmund Freud's ideas

    “For Freud, the unresolved conflicts that give rise to any neurosis are the stuff of literature. A work of literature, he believes, is the external expression of the author’s unconscious mind. Accordingly, the literary work must be treated like a dream.” (Bressler 153)

    1) the unconscious--the big iceberg which contains the hidden, repressed desires of life can be released through lit

    2) dreams--latent content is the real desire; manifest content is the remembered, reported dream--in lit the manifest is the plot; latent, the true meaning of the author--the unconscious which the reader, a psychoanalytic critic can uncover. Condensation is the grouping of all of one’s feeling (usually anger) into one content form, similar to metaphor. Displacement is the transference of the feeling (anger) to someone or something else, similar to metonymy, in which an associative term is used for the object or concept.

    3) Tripartite model: id-ego-superego—in literature, sometimes characters can take these parts, sometimes settings can--always symbolic; id is irrational, instinctual, unknown, unconscious, containing secret desires, wishes, fears. It houses the libido, source of psychosexual desires and psychic energy; pleasure principle resides in id (Bressler 150); ego is rational, logical, waking part, corresponds to the reality principle; it regulates desires from id (Bressler 150-1); superego is the censor of inappropriate desires (according to social norms), working through punishment in form of guilt and fear (Bresssler 150)

    4) Oedipal complex, penis envy, castration complex--all these can be used to interpret thematic elements in a story ; Freud sees the male as having the advantage, because the girl will never possess a penis and must, therefore, find fulfillment in relationship to a male in her adult life in order to make up for her lack

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  16. Jacques Lacan:
    1) human subjects enter a pre-existing system of signifiers which take on meanings only within a language system--people find a "subject" position within a relational system (based on differences--usually binary opposites)

    2) the early pleasure principle of Freud is succeeded by the reality principle, which in our society (Freud would seem to say universally) privileges male roles, patriarchal laws, creates superego, etc--but desire remains--repressed in unconscious or is unconscious

    3) the first would be imaginary stage, in which there are no clear distinction between subject and object--as child develops he creates an ideal self, the ego; the second, the symbolic, is that where phallus is dominate signifier and everything is binary

    4) The "I" which discourses is not just the conscious "I" but the unconscious "I" which desires

    5) His signifier/signified are the unconscious and the concept--the signifier "floats"; the signified "slides"--no stability--he sees all of Freud's work in dreams, defense mechanisms, etc. in our language--where things are not what they appear--where slips of tongue occur, where metaphor (condensation--several images combine) and metonymy (displacement--significance shifts from one image to a contiguous one) are used.

    6) "For Lacan there never were any undistorted signifiers." His thinking "has encourage modern criticism to abandon faith in language's power to refer to things and to express ideas or feelings. Modernist literature often resembles dreams in its avoidance of a governing narrative position and its free play of meaning."

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  17. [edit] Freud and psychoanalysis
    In October 1885 Freud went to Paris on a traveling fellowship to study with Europe's most renowned neurologist, Jean Martin Charcot. He was later to remember the experience of this stay as catalytic in turning him toward the practice of medical psychopathology and away from a less financially promising career in research neurology.[7] Charcot specialised in the study of hysteria and its susceptibility to hypnosis, which he frequently demonstrated with patients on stage in front of an audience. Freud later turned away from hypnosis as a potential cure, favouring free association and dream analysis.[8] Charcot himself questioned his own work on hysteria towards the end of his life.[9]

    After opening his own medical practice, specializing in neurology, Freud married Martha Bernays in 1886. Her father Berman was the son of Isaac Bernays, chief rabbi in Hamburg. After experimenting with hypnosis on his neurotic patients, Freud abandoned this form of treatment as it proved ineffective for many, in favor of a treatment where the patient talked through his or her problems. This came to be known as the "talking cure", as the ultimate goal of this talking was to locate and release powerful emotional energy that had initially been rejected, and imprisoned in the unconscious mind. Freud called this denial of emotions "repression", and he believed that it was often damaging to the normal functioning of the psyche, and could also retard physical functioning as well, which he described as "psychosomatic" symptoms. (The term "talking cure" was initially coined by the patient Anna O. who was treated by Freud's colleague Josef Breuer.) The "talking cure" is widely seen as the basis of psychoanalysis.[10] Carl Jung initiated the rumor that a romantic relationship may have developed between Freud and his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, who had moved into Freud's apartment at 19 Berggasse in 1896.[11] (Psychologist Hans Eysenck has suggested that the affair resulted in a pregnancy and a subsequent abortion for Miss Bernays.[12]) The publication in 2006 of a Swiss hotel log, dated 13 August 1898, has suggested to some Freudian scholars (including Peter Gay) that there was a factual basis to these rumors.[13]

    In his forties, Freud "had numerous psychosomatic disorders as well as exaggerated fears of dying and other phobias" (Corey 2001, p. 67). During this time Freud was involved in the task of exploring his own dreams, memories, and the dynamics of his personality development. During this self-analysis, he came to realize the hostility he felt towards his father (Jacob Freud), who had died in 1896,[14] and "he also recalled his childhood sexual feelings for his mother (Amalia Freud), who was attractive, warm, and protective" (Corey 2001, p. 67) considers this time of emotional difficulty to be the most creative time in Freud's life.

    After the publication of Freud's books in 1900 and 1902, interest in his theories began to grow, and a circle of supporters developed in the following period. Freud often clashed with those supporters who critiqued his theories, however, the most famous being Carl Jung, who had originally supported Freud's ideas. Part of the reason for the fallout between Freud and Jung was the latter's interest and commitment to religion and mysticism, which Freud saw as unscientific.[15]

    As if to highlight how important nicotine and fine cigars were to Freud for his cognitive productivity, during a time that World War I hit Austria hard, he wrote in a letter:

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

    One interesting facet of this approach is that it validates the importance of literature, as it is built on a literary key for the decoding. Freud himself wrote, "The dream-thoughts which we first come across as we proceed with our analysis often strike us by the unusual form in which they are expressed; they are not clothed in the prosaic language usually employed by our thoughts, but are on the contrary represented symbolically by means of similes and metaphors, in images resembling those of poetic speech" (26).

    Like psychoanalysis itself, this critical endeavor seeks evidence of unresolved emotions, psychological conflicts, guilts, ambivalences, and so forth within what may well be a disunified literary work. The author's own childhood traumas, family life, sexual conflicts, fixations, and such will be traceable within the behavior of the characters in the literary work. But psychological material will be expressed indirectly, disguised, or encoded (as in dreams) through principles such as "symbolism" (the repressed object represented in disguise), "condensation" (several thoughts or persons represented in a single image), and "displacement" (anxiety located onto another image by means of association).

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  19. Freud and feminism

    In some surprising ways, literary critics have shown that Freudian criticism does not exist in a vacuum. We might expect feminists to ignore Freud; but in fact several feminist critics have taken an interest in Freud's theories. Luce Irigaray, for example, examines Freud's belief that the female sexual identity results from a "castration complex" (406). According to Freud, when a girl realizes that she lacks a penis, the emotions which result from her lack of and desire for a penis will lead her to submit to the social patriarchy (406). Irigaray takes issue with Freud and his method of defining female sexuality in terms of lack--of having "nothing" (405). Irigaray suggests that having "nothing" means "having no thing, no being and no truth" (405). Irigaray's argument leads us to wonder if it is not the "castration complex" which determines a woman's role in the patriarchal system, but rather the definition

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  20. Psychoanalytic theory
    Psychoanalytic criticism is form of literary criticism which uses some of techniques of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of literature .They pay attention to feelings emotion, unconscious , and hidden or inner area in human beings.
    **It is based on conscious and unconscious.
    Theas theories were developed by austrian,Sigmund freud (1856-1939) .freud life work is seriously flowed by methodological irregularities .


    **psychoanalysis is a body of ideas developed sigmund freud and continued by others .It is primarily developed to the study of human psychological functioning and behaviour although it also can be applied to a societies
    Psychoanalysis theory has three application
    *** A method of investigation of the mind

    ***A systematized set of theories about human behaviour

    ***A method of treatment of psychological and emotional illness.
    The five sexual stages of human being
    1-Oral stage (1month -18months) humans are sucking the milk from their mothers .

    2-Anal stage (1year -3years ) toilet training.
    a_ Anal retentive
    B_ Anal explusive

    3-phalic stage(from 3 to 6 year)
    A –Castration complex.
    B- Oedipus complex.(Males).
    C- Electra complex .(Female).
    4-Latency stage(from 6 to 13 year) (school)

    5-Puberty stage (14) the age of maturity

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  21. Sigmund Freud's ideas
    His signifier/signified are the unconscious and the concept--the signifier "floats"; the signified "slides"--no stability--he sees all of Freud's work in dreams, defense mechanisms, etc. in our language--where things are not what they appear--where slips of tongue occur, where metaphor (condensation--several images combine) and metonymy (displacement--significance shifts from one image to a contiguous one) are used

    ReplyDelete