Psychoanalytic Theory for beginners

"There is no art to find the mind's construction in the face" - Macbeth (Duncan)

A form of literary theory which makes use of the techniques of psychoanalysis, it is a theory about human mind. Psychoanalytic concepts are prevalent in our everyday life. It came into being during the 1920s. This form of literary theory can be understood as emerged from the romantic notion that literature is an expression of author's personality. The psychoanalytic view of human behaviour is relevant to our experience of literature. Psychoanalysis is defined as a form of mental therapy which aims to cure mental disorders by investigating the interaction of the conscious and unconscious elements of the mind.  Its origin can be traced to the work of the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), who first used the term 'Psychoanalysis' to describe his method of mental therapy.

According to Freud and other psychoanalytic critics, the unconscious mind is a storehouse of desires, fears and other internal conflicts. The unconscious is very powerful and plays an important role in shaping our personality and controlling our actions. Freud further explains that the mind makes short visits to the realm of unconscious when we dream. The events represented in dreams can be compared to the events described in a literary text.
We have partial access to the unconscious through our dreams and creative activities. During the time of dream the unconscious becomes free to express itself. The dream becomes a nightmare, when it is too fearful or threatening. It may lead to trauma when the conscious defence breaks down. Death and sexuality are always the fascinating themes of psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalytic critics interpret a literary text from this perspective in order to analyse the author or the central characters. Freud takes fictional characters as the method of study and formulates the concepts such as Oedipus complex, Id, ego and super ego. He wanted to describe mental illness and their causes and cure; he found useful analogies of literary works. His 'The Interpretation of Dreams' (1900) and the essay 'The Uncanny' are the best known pieces. Freud examined some of Shakespearean characters in an exceptional way, most famously Hamlet, Macbeth and Lear.

Freud divides the mental processes into three psychic zones: The Id, The Ego and The Super-ego. Id is entirely unconscious and the reservoir of libido, the primary source of all psychic energy. Freud's favourite territory, which is the area of instincts, dreams, desires and all that doesn't come to the fore in our consciousness.  It functions to fulfil certain things such as pleasure principles. As his words imply in his essay ' The structure of the unconscious': "Naturally the id knows no values, no good, no evil, and no morality". So, the id is the source of all our zeal and desires. It functions to gratify our instinct for pleasure without regarding the social conventions and moral restraints.

The ego is the conscious mind which we work with. It mediates between the unconscious id and super-ego. It is the source of our decision making and our rational thought. Thus, it acts as a regulating agency which protects the individual from the dangers posed by the id. Though a large portion of the ego is unconscious, even then the ego comprises what we think in the conscious mind. The ego stands for good reason and good sense, while id stands for the untamed passions. When id is governed by the pleasure principle, the ego is governed by the reality principle.

The other regulating agent which functions to protect society is the Super-ego. It is the treasure house of conscience and pride. It is the representative of all moral aspects, the higher things in human life. It serves to control the drives of the id. Primarily Super-ego is dominated by morality principle. We might say the id would make us devils, the ego healthy and rational human beings and the Super-ego would make us angels.  Many scholars do not accept this three fold division of human psyche. But they have not reacted against the application of Freudian theories to the symbolic interpretation of literature. However, the most controversial point of psychoanalytical criticism is its tendency to interpret imagery in terms of sexuality. Perhaps even more objectionable is the interpretation of such activities as dancing, riding and flying as a symbol of sexual pleasure.

Dream Mechanism and the Unconscious according to Freud

Freud described dreams as the 'royal road' to the unconscious, arguing that dreams provide  the best understanding of the repressed desires in us. Freud argued that during sleep there is no danger of the unconscious desires being put into action. They find a measure of fulfilment when they express themselves as dreams. It is a direct expression of the repressed desires.  Dreams are codes, presenting themselves as complex images so that the repressing force is bypassed. They are distorted expressions of desire that have to be decoded by the analyst in order to understand what desires and prohibitions exist in the person's unconscious.

For Freud dreams are the language of the unconscious and repressed desires. This language is broadly termed as 'dream-work'. The mechanism of dream has two central dimensions: Latent dream content and Manifest dream content.  Latent dream content is the actual content of the unconscious that seeks expression. The expression of the content in the form of images or events in one’s dream is the manifest dream content. The problem is that all of the latent dream content is not clearly visible within the manifest one; the latent dream content is hidden inside complex structures and codes. This content can be revealed only through a thorough analysis of the manifest dream. Freud argued that the latent dream content undergoes four process before it expresses itself in the manifest dream.

1- Condensation: The manifest dream content doesn't capture the full substance of the latent content. The latent content is condensed in the manifest dream. Several elements are hidden on each other to produce a complex image in the manifest dream.

2- Displacement: here the latent dream content works as association and then is expressed in complex images. Freud gave a great deal of importance to displacement. For example in Sylvia Plath's poem, 'Daddy', the image of a Nazi officer occurs. As we proceed through the poem we realize that the Nazi soldier is a version of her father. So displacement works through association, and here the authoritarian father is associated with authoritarian Nazi officer. It is similar to the literary metaphor.

3- representation and representability: The language of the dream often uses complex images that have no clear basis in reality. The latent dream content makes use of the strange or images where there is no rational connection between any of them. All of the incidents would be based on our life and cultural context, and the dreamer may not aware of it. Dreams acquire a language of representation in which contradictory elements may coexist. Dream organizes everything into one image.

4- Secondary Revision: The dreamer himself/herself interprets the dream also recapture it in this process. This process is accompanied by a certain amount of censorship where the dreamer forgets or ignores certain things. Its quite impossible to retain all the incidents happened in dream. The conscious mind organizes the elements of the dream into recognizable as well as acceptable themes or images and ignores the rest. Thus, in addition to the condensation, the displacement and the representation we also have revision where the dreamer rejects certain uncomfortable aspects of the dream.

Freud's theories concerning child psychology was more controversial than any other concepts. Contrary to the traditional understandings, Freud found infancy and adulthood as periods of intense sexual experience. The child reaches to the stage of psychosexual development when he is five years old. It is the time when Oedipus Complex manifests itself. The Oedipus Complex derives from the boy's unconscious rivalry with his father for the love of his mother. Freud borrowed the term from the classic Sophoclean tragedy Oedipus, the king. In this tragedy, the hero unwillingly murders his father and marries his mother. 

Freud' s theories have been applied to the interpretation of some literary works like Shakespeare's Hamlet and Herman Melville's Moby Dick. In Hamlet, King Claudius represents Hamlet's repressed hostility towards his father as a rival of his mother's affection. In Moby Dick the white whale represents the strict conscience (super ego) of New England Puritanism.

 

Lacanian Psychoanalysis

Freud's disciple Jacques Lacan, also known as "the French Freud", developed a semiotic version of Freudian Psychology. He is certainly the most influential psychoanalytic thinker since Freud. He converted the basic concepts of psychoanalysis in the light of linguistic theory. His view is that the unconscious is structured like a language, and it is a product of language. The unconscious comes into being simultaneously along with language. He presented his famous paper called the 'Mirror Stage' in 1936. According to Lacan, the practice of psychoanalysis is completely depends on language. He explores culture, language and human mind.

When Freud sets up the three fold division of the mind as the Id, ego and the super ego, Lacan creates three stages as the imaginary, the symbolic and the real.

The first stage is the imaginary in which, according to MH Abrams, “there no clear distinction between the subject and the object, or between the individual self and other selves". In the pre-Oedipal stage the child has a symbiotic (dependent) relationship with the mother and doesn't distinguish between itself and the mother.

For Lacan, one does not live in a world of realities, but a world of signs and signifiers. When he says that the unconscious is strucured like a language he means that the unconscious works through metaphors and signs. So, in the symbolic stage child acquires language, and is perhaps the most important formulation in Lacan. It is the moment in which the child enters society and social relations. In language, for example, the child discovers that society has different names for 'Father's, 'mother' and 'child'. She is 'Mother' in language, and is different from 'I'. Here, the child discovers many signifiers and social relations. So, language is the symbolic order, which constitutes the universe of the child.

After in the Mirror Stage that spans the ages of 6 and 18 months. Now the infant learns to identify with its image in a mirror and begins to develop a separate self. By doing this, child imagines a self that has no lack, no notion of absence, insufficiency or Incompleteness. But this is simply an illusion. With the mirror stage, the child enters into the system of language. The child discovers and identifies everything like how one thing is different from the other.

If the imaginary is the domain of images and the symbolic is about signifiers, the real in Lacan's theory, is beyond both. It cannot be imagined, symbolised or known directly. For Lacan the real is that which resists representation. It challenges both the imaginary and the symbolic. The real is not the 'objective world'; it is something quit impossible to express and imagine (simply the reality exists beyond language).

Psychoanalytic theory has permeated in the postmodern condition. It has impacted many areas like historiography, feminism, film studies and poststructuralism on the whole. While feminist critics like Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Judith Butler and Juliet Mitchell have applied Lacanian psychoanalysis to their readings of texts in complex ways.  The works of the versatile duo Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guttari stands out as they have extended the bounds of psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalytic criticism, whether Freudian or Lacanian helps us in our critical assessment of literary works in many ways. It can be author based, text based or reader based. It is very useful in unlocking perplexing symbols and actions in a literary work. However one must guard against depending completely on a psychoanalytic reading of literature, as one may miss the wider significance of the work.

Reference & for further reading

• Sigmund Freud (Routledge Critical Thinkers) by Pamela Thurschwell
• Jacques Lacan (Routledge Critical Thinkers) by Sean Homer
• A New Approach to Literary Theory and Criticism  by R.S. Malik and Jagdish Batra
• Critical Theory Today : A User - Friendly Guide by Lois Tyson
• English Literary Criticism And Theory by M. S. Nagarajan
• Literary Theory:The Pocket Essential Guide by David Carter
• Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory by Pramod Nayar
• A glossary of literary terms by M. H. Abrams

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