Psychoanalytic Criticism

Background

Psychoanalysis focuses on human actions and desires and provides an explanation for the structure, development, and growth of the human personality. Until the 1850s, there were no such explanations and theoretical propositions that could explain human psychology. At that time, Sigmund Freud was the first to present his theory about the development, structure, and disorders of the human psyche. Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and other students expanded the psychology of the human mind to understand why humans behave in certain ways. Carl Jung developed the concepts of archetypes, the collective unconscious, and the personal unconscious.

In the 1950s, Northrop Frye further extended Jung’s ideas and showed that his theory is applicable to literature. More recently, Jacques Lacan made an addition to Freud’s theory of consciousness as he related it to linguistics to show that how language shapes our consciousness.

Sigmund Freud

Hysteria

Sigmund Freud introduced the concept of hysteria in his book “Studies in Hysteria.” Hysteria refers to an emotional disorder (neurosis) that shows physical symptoms in an individual. Freud was concerned that his patients had no physical causes for their disorders. After classifying his patients as hysterical, he went into their examinations and suggested that repressed ideas and desires that were too strange and inappropriate to acknowledge resulted in the psychological disorder. He came to the conclusion that although we are not aware of its presence or operations, the unconscious plays a key role in what we do, feel, and say.

Unconsciousness

The most significant aspect of the Freudian theory is his concept of the unconscious. Unlike the conscious mind, which Freud compared to the visible portion of an iceberg, the unconscious is like the unseen mass beneath the surface of water. Freud believed that the unconscious mind contains thoughts, feelings, and memories that are not accessible to the conscious mind. These thoughts and feelings can influence behavior, decisions, and motivations, even though they may not be conscious. Freud used the idea of the unconscious to explain various psychological problems. He argued that understanding the unconscious is the key to understanding human behavior and emotions. In simple terms, our actions are the result of an unconscious mind that we do not recognize and therefore cannot control.

Concept of Id

Freud divided the human mind, which he termed psyche, into three parts: the Id, the superego, and the ego. They are largely unconscious. The id is the part of the psyche that is motivated by pleasure and seeks immediate gratification. It rejects all social and ethical laws to seek pleasure. According to Freud, id does not distinguish between good and evil and thus is unknown of the consequences of an action.

Concept of Superego

Secondly, the superego is the part of the psyche that works on social and moral principles. It seeks personality value, ethics, and moral development. While Id seeks pleasure, the superego continuously suppresses satisfaction and moral principles.

Concept of Ego

Ego is the part of the human psyche that acts as a moderator and mediator between Id and superego. It operates according to the principles of reality, ensuring that neither the superego nor the id are completely suppressed. Instead, it assists individuals in manifesting and acknowledging both opposing forces. In simple terms, ego helps individuals to manage their actions and behavior. It enables them to make decisions, think critically, and act responsibly.

Concept of Oedipus Complex

Sigmund Freud introduced the concept of oedipal complex in Interpretation of Dreams. Oedipus Complex refers to a child’s unconscious sexual desire for the opposite-sex parent, which leads to feelings of rivalry and hatred towards the same-sex parent. He viewed it as a universal phenomenon and a stage of children’s sexual development. Before Freud, children were considered asexual. However, Freud proposed that the shaping of the id occurs during childhood. He argued that childhood is the phase of intense sexual drive.

He claimed that every child goes through three phases of psychosexual development. The oral phase is the first stage of sexual development. During this stage, the child experiences pleasure through the mouth and tongue. The second is called the anal stage. At this stage, a child recognizes the presence of another sexual organ, which provides sexual pleasure. Freud referred to the final phase as the phallic stage. In this stage, the child realizes that they are capable of sexual activity and that sexual activity can bring pleasure. They begin to explore their own sexuality and sexual identity.
In order to explain how the child experiences it, Freud referred to literature. In Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, Freud noted that the experience of Oedipus is the experience of all male children. In the same way that Oedipus kills his father and marries his mother unknowingly, every child forms such attachment to his mother and unconsciously grows to desire her. Because of his strong bond with his mother, he establishes a rivalry and hatred towards his father. Because he fears being castrated by his father, the male child represses his sexual desires. This repression leads to feelings of insecurity and guilt, which later manifest in the form of an Oedipus complex.

Carl Gustav Jung

After Freud, his friend Carl Gustav Jung contributed massively to the psychoanalytic school of thought. To differentiate his theory from Freud’s, he refers to his approach as analytical psychology. Jung used the term psyche to refer to the entirety of an individual’s intangible personality. He asserts that the conscious and unconscious form the psyche. The unconscious refers to what Freud called ego, the center of the psyche, whereas the unconscious is further divided into two parts: personal unconscious and collective unconscious. According to Jung, the personal unconscious accommodates personal experiences that are personally acquired. However, the collective unconscious contains images and structures that are common to the entire humanity, called archetypes.

Concept of Archetypes

Archetypes refer to the universal cognitive structures that influence our behavior and drive our thoughts and emotions. Jung believed that archetypes are innate, universal, and common to all cultures. He argued that they are part of our collective unconscious and passed down through generations. Archetypes also influence our decisions and actions and can be seen in literature, mythology, art, and religion. A hormonious balance of archetypes helps the psyche function normally as archetypes form the structure of the psyche. In particular, there are three major archetypes that shape the self. They are the persona, shadow, and anima.

Persona

Persona is one of the archetypes that lies in the psyche’s collective unconscious. The word persona comes from Latin, meaning mask or false face. Persona refers to the social mask or fake aspect of a personality one shows in public in order to hide the real self. It is the part of one’s unconscious self that is presented to the external world, and it is the image that one wishes to present to others. According to Jung, “it is a compromise between the individual and society as to what a man should appear to be. He takes a name, earns a title, and represents an office; he is this and that. In a certain sense, all this is real. Yet in relation to the essential individuality of the person concerned it is only secondary reality”. He considered persona a force that helps people to appear as members of a race, society, professional class, etc., and not a human being with his/her own unique characteristics.

Shadow

According to Jung, the shadow archetype refers to the dark side of a person’s personality or psyche. Shadow refers to our hidden darker side, which either we are totally unfamiliar with or do not want to express. The shadow can be referred to as the id, which acts on selfish and pleasure principles. Shadow also consists of selfeshness, desires, repressed ideas, and emotions. Jung believes that if one wants a productive and healthy personality, one “must look to the dark, hitherto unacceptable side” of our psyche.

Anima

According to Jung, the anima refers to the force that drives men to act as women and women to act as men. In simple terms, Jung believed that a male possesses feminine characteristics while a female possesses masculine characteristics. He believed that these characteristics were a part of a person’s unconscious mind and were expressed through behavior, thoughts, and feelings. He argued that these characteristics were necessary for an individual’s psychological and spiritual growth.

Individuation Process

According to Carl Jung, the integration of conscious and unconscious or archetypes is called individuation. The individuation process refers to the process of the psyche becoming whole and hormonious. Since the conscious and unconscious revolve around self, the central point of the psyche, self takes into consideration both the categories before drawing essence and reality of an individual. Therefore, the self is a source of transformation when one realizes oneself and returns to one’s real being by transforming the negative drives into realization. Jung defines the individuation as “individuation means becoming a single, homogeneous being, and, in so far as individuality embraces our innermost, last, and incomparable uniqueness, it also implies becoming one’s own self. We could therefore translate individuation as self-realization”.

Jaques Lacan

In the 1950s, Jaques Lacan brought fresh perspective to the unconscious view in psychoanalysis, but with significant differences from Freudian analysis. In contrast to Freud, who believed that the unconscious could be made conscious, Lacan argued that the ego, or conscious, can never replace or possess the unconscious contents. Lacan believed that the only way to access the unconscious is through language and that the unconscious cannot be fully known or understood.
Jaques Lacan claimed that the unconscious is structured like a language. He extended this idea by referring to Saussure, but with some notable changes. According to Saussure, language is a system of signs, signified and signifiers. Words and objects have arbitrary relationships that are not inherent. We learn the difference between two signifiers not because of their natural meanings but due to the differences between two signifiers, which Saussure termed binary opposition. According to Lacan, language is not a system of signs but rather a system of signifiers, and the unconscious, unlike Saussure, contains only signifiers that refer to other signifiers. Each has meaning only because it differs from another signifier.
Lacan viewed the unconscious as a constantly shifting chain of signifiers. According to Lacan, the unconscious contains nothing beyond signifiers, which makes the entire system unstable. In simple terms, the signified is actually beyond our reach, and according to Lacan, the unconscious is well-structured like a language, not disorganised and full of repressed desires and wishes, as Freud believed.
In order to support his claim that the unconscious is structured like language, Lacan stated that the two elements mentioned by Freud as part of dreams: condensation and displacement (unconscious), are similar to metaphor and metonymy (language). Condensation refers to a single dream element that has various meanings and interpretations. Lacan argued that just as metaphor stands for various meanings, condensation contains several meanings in one image. Similarly, metonymy is a device of language in which a word is replaced with another word closely related to it in some way. Like metonymy, displacement also uses a single element of an experience to refer to the whole. Therefore, it can be deduced that the unconscious is structured like language. It means that this structure of the unconscious is similar to the way we use language to create and express ideas.