Sigmund Freud’s theories of the personality and the unconscious mind received international attention in his lifetime as psychoanalysis became an accepted method of treating emotional disorders. Freud’s ideas rather quickly became the basis of an approach to literary criticism that remains active and influential in the present, to which his name is usually attached. This approach is also known as psychoanalytic criticism; some specialists distinguish a more general approach as psychological criticism.
Freud hypothesized a three-part structure of the personality. At one extreme is the superego, a self-censoring mechanism oriented toward group needs and community protocols that are protected by rules and laws and that are devoted to order, discipline, and regulation; at the other, unconscious extreme is the id, a wellspring of desires and appetites driven by the will to fulfill them. The ego must mediate between these extremes by bringing the experiences of the external world to bear on the internal forces of order versus disorder, conformity versus individualism, and the accommodation of group mandates versus the gratification of personal desire.
Imbalances among these three parts lead to neurotic behaviors: too much domination of the superego produces highly repressed individuals, while too much domination of the id produces selfish wildness. Freud himself recognized that his method of psychoanalysis could be useful in understanding the products of human activity such as art and culture, and in addition to his clinical and therapeutic works, he wrote interpretive studies of Gradiva, a novel by Wilhelm Jensen, and “The Sandman,” by E. T. A. Hoffmann, as well as studies of civilization, anthropology, and religion.
One of the most famous of Freud’s ideas has a direct connection to literature: the myth of the Theban king Oedipus, fated to kill his father and marry his mother, provided the framework for Freud’s explanation of infantile sexuality, an unsettling and revolutionary idea in its day. Freud thought that adult neurosis could develop from the repression, in infancy, of feelings of rivalry toward the parent of the same sex as the infant and longing for the opposite-sex parent. The term Oedipus complex refers to males who have not outgrown this triangle of hostility, exclusion, and possessiveness; Electra complex refers to females.
The conflict that develops when, among three individuals, two of them want the same thing exclusively from the third provides all the necessary ingredients for a plot and a narrative. Many fictional examinations of family life and adult maladjustment spring from this universal feature of human emotional experience; however, a writer may clothe the story in such a way that only an interpretive application of Freud’s insights can reveal the underlying structure.
In literary criticism, a reader using the Freudian approach examines characters and events in accordance with Freud’s theories that may even extend to examinations of authors’ lives or of readers’ reactions to a literary text. Literary characters not infrequently turn out to be id, ego, or superego figures engaged in conflict as they struggle for dominance. Sometimes flashback or reminiscence will reveal the repressed childhood crisis that is the root cause of adolescent or adult emotional distress. A writer’s symbolic choices may reveal a pattern of psychological malfunction, either in the writer’s fiction or in the writer’s life, just as Freud’s techniques in his most famous work, The Interpretation of Dreams, distinguish the latent or hidden meaning of a dream from the manifest content that the dreamer recollects.
Because psychoanalysis and literature are both about human beings, and because literature and human beings both display a public face that may differ from the hidden underpinnings that create it, Freud’s work will continue to be of interest to literary critics even if research into the biochemical functioning of the brain makes it irrelevant to the science of psychology.
Bibliography
Crews, Frederick. Psychoanalysis and Literary Process. Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop Publishers, 1970.
Fromm, Erich. Greatness and Limitations of Freud’s Thought. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.
Skura, Meredith Anne. The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981.
Categories: British Literature, Drama Criticism, Literature, Novel Analysis
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