psychoanalytic criticism

2021年1月25日发(作者：兴盛)
Psychoanalytic literary criticism
Overview
The
object
of psychoanalytic
literary
criticism, at
its
very
simplest,
can
be
the
psychoanalysis of the author or of a particularly interesting character in a given work.
The
criticism
is
similar
to
psychoanalysis
itself,
closely
following
the
analytic
interpretive
process
discussed
in
Freud's
The
Interpretation
of
Dreams
and
other
works.
Critics
may
view
the
fictional
characters
as
psychological case
studies,
attempting
to
identify
such
Freudian
concepts
as
the Oedipus
complex, penis
envy, Freudian
slips, Id,
ego
and
superego and
so
on,
and
demonstrate
how
they
influence the thoughts and behaviors of fictional characters.
However, more complex variations of psychoanalytic criticism 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 French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's remark that
structured like a language
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).
Like
all
forms
of
literary
criticism,
psychoanalytic
criticism
can
yield
useful
clues
to
the
sometime
baffling
symbols,
actions,
and
settings
in
a
literary
work;
however,
like
all
forms
of
literary
criticism,
it
has
its
limits.
For
one
thing,
some
critics
rely
on
psychocriticism
as
a

size
fits
all
approach,
when
other
literary
scholars argue that no one approach can adequately illuminate or interpret a complex
work
of
art.
As
Guerin,
et
al.
put
it
in
A
Handbook
of
Critical
Approaches
to
Literature
,

The danger is that the serious student may become theory-ridden, forgetting that
Freud's is not the only approach to literary criticism. To see a great work of fiction or
a
great
poem
primarily
as
a
psychological
case
study
is
often
to
miss
its
wider
significance and perhaps even the essential aesthetic experience it should provide.
Methods
Freud wrote several important essays on literature, which he used to explore the
psyche of authors and characters, to explain narrative mysteries, and to develop new
concepts
in
psychoanalysis
(for
instance,
Delusion
and
Dream
in
Jensen's
Gradiva
and
his
influential
readings
of
the Oedipus myth
andShakespeare's
Hamlet
in
The
Interpretation
of
Dreams
).
The
criticism
has
been
made, however, that in his and his early followers' studies 'what calls for elucidation
are not the artistic and literary works themselves, but rather the psychopathology and
biography
of
the
artist,
writer
or
fictional
characters'. Thus
'many
psychoanalysts
among Freud's earliest adherents did not resist the temptation to psychoanalyze poets
and
painters
(sometimes
to
Freud's
chagrin').
[4]
Later
analysts
would
conclude
that
'clearly
one
cannot
psychoanalyse
a
writer
from
his
text;
one
can
only
appropriate
him'.

Early psychoanalytic literary criticism would often treat 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
danger
is
that
'such
criticism tends to be reductive, explaining away the ambiguities of works of literature
by reference to established psychoanalytic doctrine; and very little of this work retains
much influence today'.
[6]

Jungians
Later readers, such as Carl Jung and another of Freud's disciples, Karen Horney,
broke
with
Freud,
and
their
work,
especially
Jung's,
led
to
other
rich
branches
of
psychoanalytic criticism: Horney's to feminist approaches including womb envy, and
Jung's
to
the
study
of archetypes and
the collective
unconscious.
Jung's
work
in
particular
was
influential
as,
combined
with
the
work
of
anthropologists
such
as Claude
Lé
vi-Strauss and Joseph
Campbell,
it
led
to
the
entire
fields
of mythocriticism and archetype analysis.
Northrop Frye considered that 'the literary critic finds Freud most suggestive for
the theory of comedy, and Jung for the theory of romance'.
[7]

Form
Waugh
writes,
'The
development
of
psychoanalytic
approaches
to
literature
proceeds from the shift of emphasis from
works'.
[8]
Thus
for
example Hayden
White has
explored
how
'Freud's
descriptions
tally
with
nineteenth-century
theories
of tropes,
which
his
work
somehow
reinvents'.
[9]

Especially influential here has been the work of Jacques Lacan, an avid reader of
literature who used literary examples as illustrations of important concepts in his work
(for
instance,
Lacan
argued
with Jacques
Derrida over
the
interpretation
of Edgar
Allan
Poe's

Purloined
Letter
theories
have
encouraged
a
criticism
which focuses not on the author but on the linguistic processes of the text'.
[10]
Within
this
Lacanian
emphasis,
'Freud's
theories
become
a
place
from
which
to
raise
questions of interpretation, rhetoric, style, and figuration'.
[11]

However, Lacanian scholars have noted that Lacan himself was not interested in
literary criticism
per se
, but in how literature might illustrate a psychoanalytic method
or concept.
[12]

Reader response
According
to
Ousby,
'Among
modern
critical
uses
of
psychoanalysis
is
the
development of
on the relations between reader and text'
[13]
- as with reader response criticism. Rollin