Psychoanalytic Criticism

Introduction 

       Sigmund Freud, an Austrian-born neurologist, a psychotherapist is the founder of psychoanalysis. He is the first to draw the attention to the significance of the unconscious process of mind in normal and neurotic behavior. Psychoanalysis is the analysis of the unconscious forces believed to affect our mind and behavior. It is not, however, primarily a literary practice; it is a clinical and therapeutics methodology. But, it has become a very important process in the analysis of literature.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), 

       Whether we realize it or not, psychoanalytic concepts have become part of our everyday life, and therefore psychoanalytic thinking should have the advantage of familiarity. Why do we take out our anger on someone who is less strong than us, like our younger brother? Why not on someone stronger than us like our father or elder brother? Well, this is a psychological behavior in which we transfer our anger with one person onto another person (usually one who won't fight back or can't hurt us as badly as the person with whom we are really angry). Psychoanalysis wants to invade our most private being and reveal us to ourselves and to the world as somehow inadequate. Psychoanalysis helps us to understand human behaviors that until now may have seemed utterly baffling. If we can understand human behaviors with the help of psychoanalysis, then we must certainly be able to better understand literary texts, which are about human behavior.

The origins of the unconscious

       What is your favorite color? Red? Green? Yellow? or other? Why do you think that certain color is your favorite one? Can you answer that? You may answer like "because I like that color". But why do you like that particular color? why not others? and now you can't answer this question. Well, I have the answer. You like Green/Red/Yellow/another color because your unconscious mind likes it that's why you like it. so what is unconscious? Unconscious is the part of our mind that controls your behavior. All this time you have been motivated by the unconscious mind. The human mind has three parts: conscious, subconscious and unconscious. I'm not going to talk about conscious and subconscious because I'm not interested. My interest is in unconscious.
       The unconscious is a kind of storage, in our mind that stores pain. wounds, fears, guilty desires, unresolved conflict and all the painful experiences and emotions. According to psychoanalysis, each individual human being has the psychological history that begins with the childhood experiences in the family, and adult behavior is the direct result of that early experiences. The main purpose of psychoanalysis is to help us fix our psychological problems or disorder or dysfunctions, the focus is on patterns of behavior that are destructive in some ways. The repetition of destructive behavior exposes the existence of some important psychological difficulty that has probably been influencing us without our knowing it. Freud's most fundamental insight is that all human beings are motivated, even driven, by desires, fears, needs, unresolved conflicts of which they are unaware. The place in mind where all these desires, fears, needs, unresolved conflicts are kept is called unconscious of mind. The unconscious is the storehouse of those painful experiences and emotions, wounds, fears, guilty desires, and unresolved conflicts we do not want to know about because we feel we will be overwhelmed by them. The unconscious comes into being through repression of these unhappy psychological events when we are very young. Repression, however, doesn't exclude our painful experiences, but we unconsciously behave in ways that will allow us to 'play out' without admitting it to ourselves. For psychoanalysis, the unconscious is not a passive storage of neutral data, but it is a dynamic object that joins us at the deepest level of our being. 

       The family is very important in psychoanalytic theory because our behavior and thoughts are shaped as per role is given in the family. The birth of the unconscious lies in the way we perceive our place in the family. The oedipal conflict, sibling rivalry, penis envy, castration anxiety are merely descriptions of the dominant ways of family conflict.

The defenses, anxiety, and core issues

       Our mind will not openly allow us to find out what is it there in the unconscious because we are afraid of what we will find if we examine them too closely. Defenses are the processes by which the content of our unconscious are kept hidden in order to avoid knowing what we feel we can't handle knowing. Defenses include selective perception (hearing and seeing only what we can feel we can handle), selective memory (modifying our memories so that we don't feel overwhelmed by them or forgetting painful events entirely), denial (believing that the problem doesn't exist), avoidance (staying away from people or situation that are liable to make us anxious by stirring up some unconscious), displacement ( 'taking it out' on someone or something less threatening than the person who caused our fear, hurt, frustration, or anger), projection (ascribing our fear, problem, or guilty desire to someone else and then condemning him or her for it, in order to deny that we have it ourselves), and regression (the temporary return to a former psychological state either a painful or a pleasant experience, which is not just imagined but relieved).

       Defenses hide the content of our unconscious and give temporary relief. But sometimes our defenses momentarily break down, and this is when we experience anxiety. Anxiety can be an important experience because it can reveal our core issues. Following are the common core issues.

• Fear of intimacy -- the chronic and overpowering feeling that emotional closeness will seriously hurt or destroy us and that we can remain emotionally safe only by remaining at an emotional distance from others at all times.
• Fear of abandonment -- the unshakable belief that our friends and loved ones are going to desert us (physical abandonment) or don't really care about us (emotional abandonment)
• Fear of betrayal -- the nagging feeling that our friends and loved ones can't be trusted.
• Low self-esteem -- the belief that we are less worthy than other people and, therefore, don't deserve attention, love, or any other of life's reward.
• Insecure or unstable sense of self -- the inability to sustain a feeling of personal identity, to sustain a sense of knowing ourselves.
• Oedipal fixation (or oedipal complex) -- a dysfunctional bond with a parent of the opposite sex that we don't outgrow in adulthood and that doesn't allow us to develop mature relationships with our peers. (Tyson 26-27)

       The core issues are related to one another. Just as fear of intimacy can function as both a defense and a core issue, a given core issue can result from another core issue.The core issues stay with us throughout life and unless effectively addressed, they determine our behavior in destructive ways of which we are usually unaware.

Dreams and dream symbols

       Dreams are simply images that we see while we sleep. In other words, the dream refers to a series of thoughts, images, and sensations that occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. You have probably heard that dreams have some kind of meaning like some religious meaning. But under psychoanalytic criticism, the dream have psychological meaning. Freud thinks, if we analyze our dream too closely then we can find out what is hidden in our unconscious mind. That will help us to analyze our identity and even personality.

       Dreams are also the product of our unconscious mind. When we sleep, it is believed that our defenses do not operate in the same manner they do when we are awake. During sleep, the unconscious is free to express itself, and it does so in the form of a dream. In other words, unconscious releases the pains. wounds, fears, guilty desires, unresolved conflict in the form of a dream. However, even in our dream, there is some kind of censorship. There is some kind of protection against frightening insights into our repressed experiences and emotions, and that protection takes the form of dream distortion. The message our unconscious expresses in our dream, which is the dream's underlying meaning, or latent content, is altered so that we don't readily recognize it. Because the processes called displacement and condensation will alter the meaning of the dream.

       Dream displacement occurs when we see a 'safe' person, event, or object as a 'stand in' which represents a more threatening person, event, or object. For example, if you are sexually molested by a school teacher in real life, you may dream  that a friend is sexually molesting you instead of dreaming the exact incident. Condensation occurs during a dream whenever we use a single dream image or event to represent more than one unconscious wound or conflict. For example, battling a ferocious bear might represent psychological battles or conflict both at home and at work or at school. Displacement and condensation occur while we dream and these processes collectively known as primary revision. What we actually dream is the dream's manifest content. The manifest dream is the symbolic transformation of latent content. In Interpreting our dream then, our goal is to recall the manifest content and try to uncover the latent content. When we wake up, we might forget certain parts of the dream or remember those parts somewhat differently from how they actually occurred to further protect ourselves from knowing what is too painful to know. This process, which takes place when we are awake, is called secondary revision.

       Dream's manifest content, as a kind of dream symbolism, can be interpreted much the way we interpret symbols of any kind. There is no one-to-one correspondence between a given symbol and its meaning. So to increase our chances of interpreting our dream accurately, we must learn over time how we tend to represent certain ideas, feeling, and people in our dreams, and we must know the context in which a particular dream image occurred: what happened in the dream before, during, and after a particular dream image appeared?

       A dreamer creates all character in their dream, and each person we dream about is really a part of our own psychological experiences. Our sexuality is an important reflection of our psychological being. In order to interpret dreams, we need to be aware of the male and female imagery that can occur in the dream. Male imagery, or phallic symbols, can include towers, rockets, guns, arrows, swords, and the like. For example, if you dream that you are sword fighting with your friend, you might be expressing unconscious sexual aggression toward that friend or toward someone else for whom that friend is a safe stand-in. That sexual aggression might be interpreted in a number of ways: you may desire your friend's mate, or you may be jealous of your friend's mate, or you may want to hurt your mate's sexual self-image as your mate has hurt yours. Female imagery can include caves, rooms, walled-in gardens, cups, or enclosures and containers of any kind, or even milk, fruit and other kinds of food. For example, if you dream you are trapped or lost in a small, dark room, you might be expressing an unconscious fear of your mother's control over you or a fear that you have never completely matured as a human being. Another example can be, if you dream that you are trying to feed a number of kittens from a small bottle, you might expressing an unconscious feeling that too much is being asked of you by your children or spouse or your employer or by all of them.

       No matter how frightening or disturbing our dreams are, they are the safe outlets for unconscious wounds, fears, guilty desires, and unresolved conflicts.

The Meaning of death

       I've always afraid of death, I mean who doesn't? Almost all the people in this planet afraid to die. I'm not only afraid of dying myself that I'm also afraid that my loved ones would die. Sooner or later we all have to die. But even if we are afraid of death, we like death. Death is attractive to us. Don't get it? Let's find out how.

       We have a notable relationship with death. Our relationship to death is a principle organizer of our psychological experiences. That's why psychoanalytic theorists have given great importance to the subject matter of death. Freud suggests that there has been some tendency to treat death as an abstraction because its force is too frightening. Freud treated death as a biological drive, which he called the death drive or Thanatos. Human beings have a death drive. Freud attempted to account the alarming degree of self-destructive behavior of individuals and the whole nations, whose constant wars and internal conflicts could be viewed as a form of mass suicide. He concluded that there must be something in our biological makeup as a species to explain this death work, this psychological and physical self-destruction.

       A more useful and accurate way of understanding our relationship to death is to examine it in relation to the rest of our psychological experiences, of which it is an integral part. If we do this we will see that death is intimately connected to a number of other psychological realities. Because of the differences in their psychological makeup, every individual respond to death in various ways. For many of us, the thought of our own death keys into our fear of abandonment and fear of being alone. Death is the ultimate abandonment: no matter how close we are to our loved ones, no matter how important we are in our communities, when we die we die alone. Even if we die in a plane crash with two hundred other people, we each die our own private death. This fear of abandonment also plays a role when we fear the death of others. Fear of death is often responsible for fear of intimacy and fear of life. Taken to its logical extreme, this relationship to death will result in suicide. Our intense fear of losing our life makes living so painful and frightening that our only escape is death.

       Our fear of death is not simply fear of biological death but translates for most of us into fear of loss in general–loss of friends' attention, loss of children's love, loss of health, loss of job, loss of looks, loss of money–then we can see how death, emotional death if not biological death, is so attractive, at least on the unconscious level: if I don't feel anything, then I can't be hurt. This fear of loss is probably the biggest reason why some of us are afraid to get too close to another person or to love too deeply.

The meaning of sexuality

       Boys, how do you feel when someone says to you 'You're a girl, you sissy!'? Obviously, it will threaten you. Because penis represents the power, and you may not consciously know that but you will be afraid of losing that power. And girls, have you ever desired to become a boy. Of course, you want to become a boy because you want to feel that power. Psychoanalysis calls this term 'penis envy', or the desire to have a penis. Many women, whether they consider themselves feminists or not, have a difficult time believing that little girls, upon realizing that little boys have penises, suffer from penis envy. Our society's rigid definitions of gender roles oppress female of all ages and to elevate males to positions of dominance in all spheres of human activity. Is it any wonder that a little girl will want to be a little boy when she realizes that little boys have right and privileges she isn't supposed to even desire?

       Another area of psychological experience that has directed to obtain abstract explanation is human sexuality. Psychoanalytic theorists before Freud believed that sexuality is a  matter of biological pressure that is discharged in the act of sexual intercourse. Freud called that drive eros and placed it in opposition to thanatos, the death drive. He realized that our sexuality is part and parcel of our identity and thus relates to our capacity to feel pleasure in ways that are not generally considered sexual. He believed that even infants are the sexual being who passes through stages like oral, anal and genital in which pleasure is focused in different parts of the body. Psychoanalysis today sees a close connection between our sexuality and our identity because the origin of our sexual being is in the nature of the affirmation or disruption of our sense of self that occurs in childhood. Therefore, our sexuality is one of the clearest and most consistent barometers of our psychological state in general. Our sexuality is an inescapable human reality to which we must live a relationship.

       Sexual behavior is also a product of our culture because our culture sets down the rules of proper sexual conduct and the definitions of normal and abnormal sexual behavior. Society's rules and definitions concerning sexuality form a large part of our superego, or the social values and taboos that we internalize and experience as our sense of right and wrong. The superego is in direct opposition to the id, the psychological reservoir of our instincts, and our libido, or sexual energy. The ego plays a role of referee between id and superego, and all three are defined by their relationships. So the ego is the product of conflict between social rules and regulations (superego) and our desire (id). The relationships among ego, id, and superego tell us as much about our culture as the do about ourselves.