Psychoanalysis: Correspondence between literary and unconscious process, Dreamwork.

Psychological and psychoanalytic criticism

(From- A Glossary of Literary Terms- M. H. Abrams)

Psychological criticism deals with a work of literature primarily as an expression, in an indirect and fictional form, of the state of mind and the structure of personality of the individual author. This approach emerged in the early decades of the nineteenth century, as part of the romantic replacement of earlier mimetic and pragmatic views by an expressive view of the nature of literature; see criticism. By 1827 Thomas Carlyle could say that the usual question “with the best of our own critics at present” is one “mainly of a psychological sort, to be answered by discovering and delineating the peculiar nature of the poet from his poetry.” During the Romantic Period, we find widely practiced all three types of the critical procedures (still current today) that are based on the assumption that the details and form of a work of literature are correlated with its author’s distinctive mental and emotional traits: (1) reference to the author’s personality in order to explain and int experience the distinctive subjectivity, or consciousness, of its author (see critics of consciousness). We even find that John Keble, in a series of Latin lectures On the Healing Power of Poetry—published in 1844, but delivered more than ten years earlier—proposed a thoroughgoing proto-Freudian literary theory. “Poetry,” Keble claimed, “is the indirect expression . . . of some overpowering emotion, or ruling taste, or feeling, the direct indulgence whereof is somehow repressed”; this repression is imposed by the author’s sentiments of “reticence” and “shame”; the conflict between the need for expression and the compulsion to repress such selfrevelation is resolved by the poet’s ability to give “healing relief to secret mental emotion, yet without detriment to modest reserve” by a literary “art which under certain veils and disguises . . . reveals the fervent emotions of the mind”; and this disguised mode of self-expression serves as “a safety valve, preserving men from madness.” (The emergence and the varieties of romantic psychological criticism are described in M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 1953, chapters 6 and 9.) In the present era many critics make at least passing references to the psychology of an author in discussing works of literature, with the notable exception of those whose critical premises invalidate such reference; mainly proponents of formalism, New Criticism, structuralism, deconstruction. Since the 1920s, a widespread form of psychological literary criticism has come to be psychoanalytic criticism, whose premises and procedures were established by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Freud had developed the dynamic form of psychology that he called “psychoanalysis” as a procedure for the analysis and therapy of neuroses, but soon expanded it to account for many developments and practices in the history of civilization, including warfare, mythology, and religion, as well as literature and the other arts. Freud’s brief comment on the workings of the artist’s imagination at the end of the twenty-third lecture of his Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1920), supplemented by relevant passages in the other lectures in that book, set forth the theoretical framework of what is sometimes called “classical” psychoanalytic criticism. Freud proposes that literature and the other arts, like dreams and neurotic symptoms, consist of the imagined, or fantasied, fulfillment of wishes that are either denied by reality or are prohibited by the social standards of morality and propriety. The forbidden, mainly sexual (“libidinal”) wishes come into conflict with the “censor” (the internalized representative within each individual of a society’s standards of morality and propriety) and are repressed by the censor into the unconscious realm of the artist’s mind, but are permitted to achieve a fantasied satisfaction in distorted forms that serve to disguise their real motives and objects from the conscious mind. The chief mechanisms that effect these disguises of unconscious wishes are (1) “condensation” (the omission of parts of the unconscious material and the fusion of several unconscious elements into a single entity); (2) “displacement” (the substitution for an unconscious object of desire by one that is acceptable to the conscious mind); and (3) “symbolism” (the representation of repressed, mainly sexual, objects of desire by nonsexual objects which resemble them or are associated with them in prior experience). The disguised fantasies that are evident to consciousness are called by Freud the manifest content of a dream or work of literature; the unconscious wishes that find a semblance of satisfaction in this distorted form he calls the latent content. Also present in the unconscious of every individual, according to Freud, are residual traces of prior stages of psychosexual development, from earliest infancy onward, which have been outgrown, but remain as “fixations” in the unconscious of the adult. When triggered by some later event in adult life, a repressed wish is revived and motivates a fantasy, in disguised form, of a satisfaction that is modeled on the way that the wish had been gratified in infancy or early childhood. The chief enterprise of the psychoanalytic critic, in a way that parallels the enterprise of the psychoanalyst as a therapist, is to decipher the true content, and thereby to explain the emotional effects on the reader, of a literary work by translating its manifest elements into the latent, unconscious determinants that constitute their real but suppressed meanings. Freud also asserts, however, that artists possess special abilities that differentiate them radically from the patently neurotic personality. The artistic person, for example, possesses to an especially high degree the power to sublimate (that is, to shift the instinctual drives from their original sexual goals to nonsexual “higher” goals, including the discipline of becoming proficient as an artist); the ability to elaborate fantasied wish fulfillments into the manifest features of a work of art in a way that conceals or deletes their merely personal elements, and so makes them capable of satisfying the unconscious desires of people other than the individual artist; and the “puzzling” ability—which Freud elsewhere says is a power of “genius” that psychoanalysis cannot explain—to mold an artistic medium into “a faithful image of the creatures of his imagination,” as well as into a satisfying artistic form. The result is a fantasied wish fulfillment of a complex and artfully shaped sort that not only allows the artist to overcome, at least partially and temporarily, personal conflicts and repressions, but also makes it possible for the artist’s audience “to obtain solace and consolation from their own unconscious sources of gratification which had become inaccessible” to them. Literature and art, therefore, unlike dreams and neuroses, may serve the artist as a mode of fantasy that opens “the way back to reality.” This outline of Freud’s theory of art in 1920 was elaborated and refined, but not radically altered, by the later developments in his theory of mental structures, dynamics, and processes. Prominent among these developments was Freud’s model of the mind as having three functional aspects: the id (which incorporates libidinal and other desires), the superego (the internalization of social standards of morality and propriety), and the ego (which tries as best it can to negotiate the conflicts between the insatiable demands of the id, the impossibly stringent requirements of the superego, and the limited possibilities of gratification offered by reality). Freud has himself summarized for a general audience his later theoretical innovations, with his remarkable power for clear and dramatic exposition, in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933) and An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1939). Freud asserted that many of his views had been anticipated by insightful authors in Western literature, and he himself applied psychoanalysis to brief discussions of the latent content in the manifest characters or events of literary works including Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and King Lear. He also wrote a brilliant analysis of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and a full-length study, Delusion and Dream (1917), of the novel Gradiva by the Danish writer Wilhelm Jensen. Especially after the 1930s, a number of writers produced critical analyses, modeled on classical Freudian theory, of the lives of authors and of the content of their literary works. One of the best-known books in this mode is Hamlet and Oedipus (1949) by the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones. Building on earlier suggestions by Freud himself, Jones explained Hamlet’s inability to make up his mind to kill his uncle by reference to his Oedipus complex— that is, the repressed but continuing presence in the adult’s unconscious of the male infant’s desire to possess his mother and to have his rival, the father, out of the way. (Freud derived the term from Sophocles’ Greek tragedy Oedipus the King, whose protagonist has unknowingly killed his father and married his mother.) Jones proposes that Hamlet’s conflict is “an echo of a similar one in Shakespeare himself,” and goes on to account for the audience’s powerful and continued response to the play, over many centuries, as a result of the repressed Oedipal conflict that is shared by all men. In more recent decades there has been increasing emphasis by Freudian critics, in a mode suggested by Freud’s later writings, on the role of “ego psychology” in elaborating the manifest content and artistic form of a work of literature; that is, on the way that the “ego,” in contriving the work, consciously manages to mediate between the conflicting demands of the id, the superego, and the limits imposed by reality. On such developments see Frederick C. Crews, “Literature and Psychology,” in Relations of Literary Study, ed. James Thorpe (1967), and the issue on “Psychology and Literature: Some Contemporary Directions,” in New Literary History, Vol. 12 (1980). Norman Holland is a leading exponent of the application of psychoanalytic concepts not (as in most earlier criticism) to the relation of the author to the work, but to the relation of the reader to the work, explaining each reader’s individual response as the product of a “transactive” engagement between his or her unconscious desires and defenses and the fantasies that the author has projected in the literary text; see under reader-response criticism. The term psychobiography designates an account of the life of an author (see biography) that focuses on the subject’s psychological development, relying for evidence both on external sources and on the author’s own writings. It stresses the role of unconscious and disguised motives in forming the author’s personality, and is usually written in accordance with a version, or a revision, of the Freudian theory of the stages of psychosexual development. A major exemplar of the mode was Erik H. Erikson’s Young Man Luther (1958), in which Erikson stressed the importance of Luther’s adolescent “identity crisis.” Other notable instances of literary psychobiography are Leon Edel, Henry James (5 vols., 1953–72), and Justin Kaplan, Mark Twain and His World (1974). Prominent and diverse examples of Freudian literary criticism can be found in the collections listed below. It should be noted, in addition, that many modern literary critics, like many modern authors, owe some debt to Freud; such major critics, for example, as Kenneth Burke, Edmund Wilson, and Lionel Trilling assimilated central Freudian concepts into their overall critical views and procedures. Carl G. Jung is sometimes called a psychoanalyst, but although he began as a disciple of Freud, his mature version of depth psychology is very different from that of his predecessor, and what we call Jungian criticism of literature departs radically from psychoanalytic criticism. Jung’s emphasis is not on the individual unconscious, but on what he calls the “collective unconscious,” shared by all individuals in all cultures, which he regards as the repository of “racial memories” and of primordial images and patterns of experience that he calls archetypes. He does not, like Freud, view literature as a disguised form of libidinal wish fulfillment that to a large extent parallels the fantasies of a neurotic personality. Instead, Jung regards great literature as, like the myths whose patterns recur in diverse cultures, an expression of the archetypes of the collective racial unconscious. A great author possesses, and provides for readers, access to the archetypal images buried in the racial memory, and so succeeds in revitalizing aspects of the psyche which are essential both to individual self-integration and to the mental and emotional well-being of the human race. Jung’s theory of literature has been a cardinal formative influence on archetypal criticism and myth criticism. See Jung, Contributions to Analytic Psychology (1928) and Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933); also Edward Glover, Freud or Jung (1950). Since the development of structural and poststructural theories, there has been a strong revival of Freudian theories, although in diverse reformulations of the classical Freudian scheme. Close attention to Freud’s writings, and frequently the assimilation of some version of Freud’s ideas to their own views and procedures, are features of the criticism of many current writers, whether they are Marxist, Foucauldian, or Derridean in theoretical commitment or primary focus. Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence specifically adapts to the composition and reading of poetry Freud’s concepts of the Oedipus complex and of the distorting operation of defense mechanisms in dreams. A number of feminist critics have attacked the male-centered nature of Freud’s theory—especially evident in such crucial conceptions as the Oedipus complex and “penis envy” on the part of the female child; but many feminists have also adapted a revised version of Freudian concepts and mental mechanisms to their analyses of the writing and reading of literary texts. See Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1975); Mary Jacobus, Reading Woman (1986); Nancy Chodorow, Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (1990); Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Freud on Women: A Reader (1992); Rosalind Minsky, ed., Psychoanalysis and Gender: An Introductory Reader (1996). Jacques Lacan, “the French Freud,” developed a semiotic version of Freud, converting the basic concepts of psychoanalysis into formulations derived from the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, and applying these concepts not to the mental processes of human individuals, but to the operations of the process of signification. (See under linguistics in literary criticism.) Typical is Lacan’s oftquoted dictum, “The unconscious is structured like a language.” His procedure is to recast Freud’s key concepts and mechanisms into the linguistic mode, viewing the human mind not as pre-existent to, but as constituted by, the language we use. In Lacan’s revision, for example, both gender and desire are not producers, but products of the signifying system. Especially important in Lacanian literary criticism is Lacan’s reformulation of Freud’s concepts of the early stages of psychosexual development and the formation of the Oedipus complex into the distinction between a prelinguistic stage of development that he calls the imaginary and the stage after the acquisition of language that he calls the symbolic. In the imaginary stage, there is no clear distinction between the subject and an object, or between the individual self and other selves. Intervening between these two stages is what Lacan calls the mirror stage, the moment when the infant learns to identify with his or her image in a mirror, and so begins to develop a sense of a separate self, and an (illusory) understanding of oneself as an autonomous subject, that is later enhanced by what is reflected back to it from encounters with other people. When it enters the symbolic, or linguistic, stage, the infant subject assimilates the inherited system of linguistic differences, hence is constituted by the symbolic, as it learns to accept its predetermined “position” in such linguistic oppositions as male/female, father/son, mother/daughter. This symbolic realm of language, in Lacan’s theory, is the realm of the law of the father, in which the “phallus” (used in a symbolic sense to stand for male privilege and authority) is “the privileged signifier” that serves to establish the mode for all other signifiers. In a parallel fashion, Lacan translates Freud’s views of the mental workings of dream formation into textual terms of the play of signifiers, converting Freud’s distorting defense mechanisms into linguistic figures of speech. And according to Lacan, all processes of linguistic expression and interpretation, driven by “desire” for a lost and unachievable object, move incessantly (as in Derrida’s theory of deconstruction) along a chain of unstable signifiers, without any possibility of coming to rest on a fixed signified, or presence. (See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, 1977; The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1998; and The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60, 1997. See also Lacan’s much discussed reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Purloined Letter as an allegory of the workings of the linguistic signifier, in Yale French Studies, Vol. 48, 1972; and Malcolm Bowie, Lacan, 1991.) Lacan’s notions of the inalienable split, or “difference,” that inhabits the self, and of the endless chain of displacements in the quest for meaning, have made him a prominent reference in poststructural theorists. And his distinction between the pre-Oedipal, maternal stage of the prelinguistic imaginary and the “phallocentric” stage of symbolic language has been exploited at length by a number of French feminists; see Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva under feminist criticism. See Jerome Neu, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Freud (1991). Many of Freud’s psychoanalytic writings on literature and the arts have been collected by Benjamin Nelson, ed., Sigmund Freud on Creativity and the Unconscious (1958). Anthologies of psychoanalytic criticism by various authors are William Phillips, ed., Art and Psychoanalysis (1957), and Leonard and Eleanor Manheim, eds., Hidden Patterns: Studies in Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism (1966). Useful discussions and developments of Freudian literary theory are Frederick J. Hoffman, Freudianism and the Literary Mind (rev. 1957), which also describes Freud’s wide influence on writers and critics; Norman N. Holland, Holland’s Guide to Psychoanalytic Psychology and Literature-and-Psychology (1990); and Peter Brooks, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (1994). Elizabeth Wright, Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice (1984), reviews various developments in psychoanalytic theories and their applications to literary criticism. For two major traditional critics who have to an important extent adapted Freudian concepts to their general enterprise, see Edmund Wilson, The Wound and the Bow (1941), and Lionel Trilling, “Freud and Literature,” in The Liberal Imagination (1950). Frederick C. Crews, who in 1966 wrote an exemplary Freudian critical study, The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes, later retracted his Freudian commitment; see his Skeptical Engagements (1986). For feminist views and adaptations of Jacques Lacan, see Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (1985); Shoshana Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight (1987); and Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (1990). In recent years Slavoj Žižek has argued for the primacy of Lacan as an ethical and political thinker. See The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) and Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (1991).

Sigmund Freud

From Chapter VI. The Dream-Work 

Every attempt that has hitherto been made to solve the problem of dream: has dealt directly with their manifest content as it is presented in our memory. All such attempts have endeavoured to arrive at an interpretation of dreams from their manifest content or (if no interpretation was attempted to form a judgement as to their nature on the basis of that same manifest content. We are alone in taking something else into account. We have introduced a new class of psychical material between the manifest content 01 dreams and the conclusions of our enquiry: namely, their latent content, 01 (as we say) the 'dream-thoughts', arrived at by means of our procedure. It i! from these dream-thoughts and not from a dream's manifest content that we disentangle its meaning. We are thus presented with a new task which had no previous existence: the task, that is, of investigating the relation between the manifest content of dreams and the latent dream-thoughts, and of tracing out the processes by which the latter have been changed into the former. The dream~thoughts and the dream-content are presented to us like two versions of the same subject-matter in two different languages. Or, more properly, the dream-content seems like a transcript of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression,' whose characters and syntactic laws it is our business to discover by comparing the original and the translation. The dream-thoughts are immediately comprehensible, as soon as we have learnt them. The dream-content, on the other hand, is expressed as it were in a pictographic script, the characters of which have to be transposed individually into the language of the dream-thoughts. If we attempted to read these characters according to their pictorial ,value instead of according to their symbolic relation, we should clearly be led into error. Suppose I have a picture-puzzle, a rebus, in front of me. It depicts a house with a boat on its roof, a single letter of the alphabet, the figure of a running man whose head has been conjured away, and so on. Now I might be misled into raising objections and declaring that the picture as a whole and its component parts are nonsensical. A boat has no business to be on the roof of a house, and a headless man cannot run. Moreover, the man is bigger than the house; and if the whole picture is intended to represent a landscape, letters of the alphabet are out of place in it since such objects do not occur in nature. But obviously we can only form a proper judgement of the rebus if we put aside criticisms such as these of the whole composition and its parts and if, instead, we try to replace each separate element by a syllable or word that can be represented by that element in some way or other. The words which are put together in this way are no longer nonsensical but may form a poetical phrase of the greatest beauty and significance. A dream is a picture-puzzle of this sort and our predecessors in the field of dream-interpretation have made the mistake of treating the' rebus as a pictorial composition: and as such it has seemed to them nonsensical and worthless. 
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The nightly formation of dreams, or the dream-work in Freudian terminology, involves the censorship of unconscious wishes (frequently sexual) that undergo four kinds of deliberate, positive distortion on their way to consciousness: condensation, displacement, symbolization, and secondary revision or elaboration. These unconscious processes explain why dreams usually emerge as garbled "nonsense." The task of the psychoanalyst is, with the help of the patient, to make sense of dream texts. Here, psychoanalysis asserts that nonsense is meaningful and that ·distortion is inescapable and creative. Both assertions are taken seriously by many 'critics and theorists as they work to understand texts, especially since literary discourses 'are, often as seemingly nonsensical and distorted as dreams Psychoanalytic decoding of symbols has proved particularly illuminating to critics, notably those followers of Carl Jung who have made' inventories of archetypes-universal symbols such as the garden and the desert, water and fire, the hero and the monster, the river journey and the ordeal, birth and death-that they believe are stored in humanity's collective unconscious.