2 short discussion question with 150 to 200 words each
Miamidade20177
NotesonTheoryPsychologicalTheories.ppsNotes on Theory
Psychoanalytical Theories
What is Psychoanalysis?
- Sigmund Freud: (1856-1939) The father of psychoanalysis
- Psychoanalytic criticism adopts the methods of "reading" employed by Freud and later theorists to interpret texts.
- It argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the author, that a literary work is a manifestation of the author's own neuroses.
- It is usually assumed that all such characters are projections of the author's psyche.
Methodology
- It is attempt to understand human behavior and motivation.
- There is a focus dreams and the Unconscious mind.
- We are motivated more so by the unconscious drive (Id) overt and covert desires OR manifest and latent desires.
- These are the basis of human actions.
What influenced literary criticism?
- Psychological literary criticism examines the internal mental states and desires of characters.
- “Oedipal Complex” A man's unhealthy, but not uncommon interest in his mother's sexuality.
- A psychoanalyst focuses on unstated motives and unconscious states of mind that the characters, authors, and readers have by paying attention to deeper symbols in the text.
Question Question Question
- What drove/motivated the author to write such a work?
- A critic may examine the psychology of a reader.
- What draws us in or repels us from certain literary themes?
- Psychoanalysts interpret literature the way a psychologist might look at a dream.
Jacques Lacan: (1901-1981)
- The most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud.
- The unconscious and the nature of language.
- “The Mirror Stage” is a concept in which infants recognize themselves in a mirror or other symbolic connection which induces apperception: the turning of oneself into an object that can be viewed from outside themselves. This is how the ego is produced.
We all do it!
- One doesn't have to be an expert to have interest in psychoanalytic theories.
- It is a tool many of us already use when we look at literature.
The Oedipus Complex
- “His [Oedipus] destiny moves us only because it might have been ours — because the Oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so.”
