PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

Overview/Comparison

As popular and pervasive of any form of criticism "after" the New Criticism, Psychoanalytic Criticism emerged as a literary critical tool in the United States and Europe in the 1930s and 40s as Freud's theories of psychoanalysis were popularized. (Psychologists of different schools, notably Carl Jung and Norman Holland, also contributed to this trend, but we only have time and space to consider the Freudian variant here). New Critics, of course, dismissed psychoanalysis--like any other "science" or "pseudo-science"--as one of those extrinsic "sources" for literary interpretation that turned literature into something other than "literature" (do poems sit on couches and tell us their problems?), but in the end, the point de terre of psychoanalytic approaches to literature, at least in their earlier forms, was similar to that claimed by the New Critics. As Terry Eagleton has pointed out, if at its worst, Psychoanalytic Criticism views literature as a kind of "escape" or fantasy, at its best it can bring us as close to the basic concerns of human existence as literature ever gets.

The question may be, do we even have to "refit" psychoanalysis for literary critical use? After all, Freud's "interpretation" of dreams bears a close resemblence to what many of us see as a method of interpreting literary texts--that is, digging beneath the surface or (what Freud called the "manifest content" of a dream) to get to the "deeper" symbolic meaning (what Freud called "latent content") beneath; and, in fact, much of Freud's theory is built precisely on a myth that is also a piece of classic literature, Sophocles's Oedipus Rex.

If the central focus of the New Criticism and Deconstruction is "the text"(however that is defined) and the focus of Reader-Response criticism "the reader" (however that is defined) at least in its earliest forms, the focus of Psychoanalytic Criticism is "the author" or, as the psychoanalyst might say, "the subject who speaks." As "neurotic" as any human being, writers don't act crazy, but find other ways of gratifying or otherwise expressing their secret fantasies, desires, or obsessions. Just as in dreams the raw material produced by these deepest emotions must be reordered into coherent images in order to be remembered, the raw materials of the writer's unconscious are reordered by traditional literary figures and forms in becoming literature. The job of the psychoanalytic critic may be on one hand, to read the writer's work--just as the psychoanalyst reads a dream--to discover the driving forces behind the author's psyche; or, on the other hand, to discover in biographies, letters, and other historical works the psycho-social pressures bearing on individual authors that might deepen our understanding of their work. The same critical operations could be carried out to analyze individual characters represented in literary works, whether as reflections of the author's psyche or as figures whose psycho-social "history" could be read (a la New Criticism) in the text itself.

The major drawbacks of Psychoanalytic Criticism may sound New Critical: first, it requires (especially in its later post-structuralist forms) an inordinate amount of theoretical knowledge in addition to a broad literary and historical repertoire, and second, it draws our attention away from what has been written (literature) to the writer and beyond. Worst of all, Psych-crit has been faulted for reducing the complexity of literature to a mass of psycho-sexual evidence that fails to take into account the nuances of form or plot or tone, or that simply presses into the service of psychoanalysis aspects of both form and content that may be interesting in and of themselves. Still, like all other critical methods, psychoanalytic criticism at its best will entail "close" reading and will incorporate nuance. And since no critical method will yield "all" of what a literary work has to offer, this critical method can hardly be singled out for censure on that score.

Post-Structuralist Variants

The most trenchant critique of Freudian Psychoanalytic theory (to say nothing of its literary-critical spawn) is that it is sexist. Its prototypical "subject" or "author" is uncontrovertibly male (indeed, the "Oedipus Complex" or "castration complex" makes only limited sense in relation to female subjects). Later post-structuralist revisions have in some part rescued Freud's theory from its hopelessly patriarchal self.

The theorist most responsible for a kind of "unisex" Freud was Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst and philosopher whose work has influenced, as we will see, not only psychoanalytic criticism but some types of feminist and marxian criticism as well. Unfortunately for all, Lacan's theory itself is notoriously impenetrable, and thus there is still considerable disagreement about what it all means for anyone. Lacan himself refused to "clarify" himself, and indeed, one might say, he was only being true to his theory.

Remember, the unconscious is the center and source of the psychoanalyzed subject. For Freud, the unconscious comes into being during the process by which we become who we are as social beings by burying part of ourselves from ourselves (in the boy's case, repressing his desire for his mother, and thus obeying the law of his father/society). The place we bury these repressed desires is the unconscious. So far, so male. Yet unlike Freud, who saw the Oedipus complex as a symbolic physical castration, Lacan viewed this same process in terms of language. That is, the time we "become who we are by burying part of ourselves from ourselves" is not in some fantasy with our parents, but in using language, a medium not of ourselves but "other"--apart from us-- to express ourselves to others and to ourselves. And since language is something used by both boys and girls, men and women, Lacan's theory seems capable of describing the experience of both male and female subjects. In fact, if we view "who we really are" as a "signified," for Lacan, our subjectivity is, like all meaning, deferred. Looking to language or signifiers to explain ourselves to ourselves, we never CAN really achieve self-awareness or wholeness as one signifier slips under "us" only to bring us to some other signifier. Rather, "who we are" for Lacan is precisely this split subject, symbolically seeking for "meaning," "mother," personal "selfhood," and all other marks of adequacy summarized in what he terms (in his typical nearly unexplainable way) the "phallus."

All of these relations, of course, can be traced in literature as well, but since Lacan's theory is that we can never locate subjecthood, obviously "the author" will no longer be the focus. Rather, Lacanian criticism will often show how characters represent the search for wholeness that language dooms us to, the ways characters define themselves in terms of "others," or characters' mistaken identifications of themselves in the mirror society holds up to them.