According to the book “Beginning Theory” by Peter Barry

 Psychoanalytic Criticism is a form of literary criticism which uses

some of the techniques of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of
literature.

Psychoanalysis itself is a form of therapy which aims to cure

mental disorders by investigating the interaction of conscious and
unconscious elements the mind.

This practise is based upon specific theories of how the mind, the
instinct, and sexuality work.

It is developed by the Austrian, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

 Freud’s Major Ideas

1. Unconscious : part of the mind beyond consciousness which

nevertheless has a strong influence of our actions, linked with the
idea of repression.
• Freud suggest a three-part, model of the psyche, dividing it into
ego, the super ego and the id.

2. Sexuality (Infantile Sexuality) : the notion that sexuality begins not

at puberty, with physical maturing, but in infancy, especially
through the infant’c relationship with the mother.

3. Libido : the energy drive associated with sexual desires. It has

three stages of focus, the oral, the anal, the phallic.
A final example of important Freudian terminology is the dream work, the
process by which real events or desires are transformed into dream images.

Include displacement

One person or event is represented by another which in some way linked or

associated with it, perhaps because of a similar sounding word or by some form
of symbolic substitution; and condensation, a number of people, events, or
meanings are co,bined and represented by a single image in the dream.

Thus, characters, motivation, and events are represented in dreams in a

very literary way, involving the translation by the dream work of abstract
ideas or feeling into concrete image.
Dreams, just like literature, do not usually make explicit
statement. Both tend to communicate obliquely or indirectly,
avoifing direct or open statement, and representing meanings
through concrete embodiments of time, place , or person.
 How Freudian Interpretation Work
• Freudian interpretation is popularly thought to be a matter of
attributing sexual connotations to objects, so that towers and
laders, are seen as phallic symbols.
• Freudian interpretation is often highly ingenious rather than
simplistic.
• Freudian interpretation has always been of considerable interest
to literary critics.

•The basic reason is that the unconsciousness like the poem, novel,
play, cannot speak directly and explicity but does so through
images, symbol , emblems, and methapors.

•Literature too is not involved with making direct explicit

statements about life, but with showing and expressing experience
through imagery, symbolism, metaphor and so on.

•However, because the statements made are not expicit there is an

invitable ‘judmental’ element involved, and in consequence
psychoanalytic interpretations of literature are often controversial.
 What Freudian Psychoanalytic Critics Do
1. Give central importance, in literary interpretation, to the distinction between the
conscious and the unconscious mind.

2. Pay attention to the unconscious motives and feelings, weather these be (a)
those of the author, or (b) those of the characters depicted in the work.

3. Demonstrated the presence in the literary work of classic psychoanalytic

symptoms, conditions, or phases, such as the oral, anal, and phallic stages of
emotional and sexual development in infants.

4. Make large-scale applications of psychoanalytic concepts to literary history in

general.

5. Identify a ‘psychic’ context for the literary work, at the expense of social or
historical context, privileging the individual ‘psycho drama’ above ‘the social
drama’ of class conflict.
 Jacques Lacan (1901-1981)
• Lacan was a French Psychoanalyst
• Whose work has had an extraordinary influence upon
many aspects of recent literary theory.
• His famous theory of ‘the mirror stage’
• His ideas were influenced by figures who
successively dominated Parisian intellectual life.
Such as Claude Levi-Steauss, Ferdinand de
Sasussure, and Roman Jakobson.
• Lacan begins the piece by paying allegiance to the intellectual
dominance of language studies.
• He asks (rhetorically) how could a psychoanalysist of today not
realise that his realm of truth is in fact the word?
• Language is central and this is so because in ivestigating the
unconscious the analyst is always both using and examinung
language – in effect, Freudian psychiatri is entirely a verbal
science.
• Unconsciousness is not a chaotic mass of disparate material, as
might formerly have been thought, but an orderly network, as
complex as the structure of a language.
• What the psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious is
the whole structure of language.
• In Lacan slogan, unconscious, is stuctured like a language.