Literary Theory: Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis on Prezi

Freud – the interpretation of dreams in 1901

The importance of the unconscious

instinctive urges

Question – why did this new emphasis on the unconscious place greater significance on literature?

Freud expounded a theory that human instincts, yearnings, desires, etc. are so powerful that they often find ways of expressing themselves outside of the control of the ego, or of social prohibitions.

“The super-ego is the moral component of the psyche, which takes into account no special circumstances in which the morally right thing may not be right for a given situation. The rational ego attempts to exact a balance between the impractical hedonism of the id and the equally impractical moralism of the super-ego; it is the part of the psyche that is usually reflected most directly in a person's actions. When overburdened or threatened by its tasks, it may employ defense mechanisms including denial, repression, and displacement.” (Wikipedia)

The mind reworks repressed urges into acceptable forms.

Question – Can you think of examples of how the mind reworks repressed urges into acceptable forms?

e.g. Macbeth scene.

• Defences: intellectualization (e.g. focusing on the details of a funeral service arrangements to avoid dealing with grief)

• projection (e.g. assigning to others the feelings or thoughts we have ourselves)

• rationalization (e.g. blaming someone else for something we know is our own fault)

• regression (e.g. the instinct to retreat to a womb-like duvet to escape from real-world problems)

• sublimation (e.g. redirecting libidinal urges in non-libidinal ways, like sublimating sexual urges through sports or art)

• suppression (try to think of your own examples)

Another key aspect is that of child/parent relationships and boundaries

Significance for literature that often these aspects of the human psyche rely on the ability to create representations of the world. Human beings develop a sense of independence from parental care by being able to ‘fictionalise’ – transferring into alternative form – those care-givers.

Menalie Klein – we ‘introject’ objects which we are overly attached to, and they become part of an internal fantasy.

According to Lacan, this process works in the same way that linguistic Saussurian structures of signifier /signified works – the objects themselves are displaced within the sign.

“The linguistic process is inherently a process of production, one that appropriates and transforms reality.” (Theweleit)

For Lacan, the relationship between mother and child is a sexualised one which creates a protective sense of wholeness in the developing child. This false sense of wholeness needs to be removed during the child’s development in order for maturation to be reached.

For Julia Kristeva, the body of the mother is often depicted in literature and art as a threat to masculinity – threatening to engulf it. As such, the mother figure is often sidelined in representations.

Klaus Theweleit studied nazi writers and identified what he belief to be aspects of undeveloped psychologies – an exaggerated need to source both their identities and their masculinities in outside sources (uniforms, marches, ritual, etc.). Fascism is the manifestation of this need – a need which exceeds more basic functions such as sex or food:

“Fascist masses may portray their desire for deliverance from the social double bind, for lives that are not inevitably entrapping, but not their desire for full stomachs.  The success of fascism demonstrates that masses who become fascist suffer more from their internal states of being than from hunger or unemployment.  Fascism teaches us that under certain circumstances, human beings imprisoned within themselves, within body armor and social constraints, would rather break out than fill their stomachs; and that their politics may consist in organizing that escape, rather than an economic order that promises future full stomachs for life.”

Theweleit focuses on their relationships with women and women’s bodies in his analysis, exploring their articulation of their marital relationships, their ideals of motherhood and purity and their descriptions of the bodies of the women they killed.

“the idea of woman is coupled with violence” (50),

“women are robbed of their sexuality and transformed into inanimate objects” (51),

“the men experienced communism as a direct assault on their genitals” (74). 

Dwinger describes a woman’ death as

“it wasn’t really so much a mouth as a bottomless throat, spurting blood like a fountain” (177)

and telling his men to attack the rifle-women and

“let our revulsion flow into a single river of destruction.  A destruction that will be incomplete if it does not also trample their hearts and souls”. (180)

A sestina (also, sextina, sestine, or sextain) is a highly structured poem consisting of six six-line stanzas followed by a tercet (called its envoy or tornada), for a total of thirty-nine lines.