From the ancient belief in humors to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ psychoanalytic and pharmacological methodologies, diverse theories about the mind have affected the literary production of novelists. Categorization according to these theories is difficult, because authors tend to mix… Read More ›
Sigmund Freud
Trauma Studies
Psychological trauma, its representation in language, and the role of memory in shaping individual and cultural identities are the central concerns that define the field of trauma studies. Psychoanalytic theories on trauma paired with additional theoretical frameworks such as poststructural,… Read More ›
Psychoanalysis and Gender
While many theories of subjectivity pay little attention to the productive role of gender in the formation of the subject, psychoanalysis, for all its limitations, has always been interested in gender as primary in the production of subjects. Freud articulated… Read More ›
Fetishism and Commodity Fetishism
Fetishism is the displacement of desire and fantasy onto alternative objects or body parts (e.g., a foot fetish or a shoe fetish), in order to obviate a subject’s confrontation with the castration complex. According to Sigmund Freud, fetishism is connected… Read More ›
The Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860)– who is the most widely read philosopher in Germany today – offered an incisive critique of the bourgeois world: its vision of the present as alone real, its exaltation of a rationality answering merely to pragmatic needs,… Read More ›
Psychoanalytic Reading of Kafka’s The Man Who Disappeared
Kafka’s first novel, The Man who Disappeared (Der Verschollene), still better known in the English-speaking world at least under Max Brod’s title, Amerika, is set against the realist backdrop of the most modern and technologically advanced society in the world,… Read More ›
Psychoanalysis and the Cinema
Cinema and psychoanalysis were born around the same time. In 1895 the Grand Café of Paris hosted the first movie event of history, while at the same time Studies in Hysteria by Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud hit the shelves… Read More ›
Sigmund Freud and the Trauma Theory
Although Sigmund Freud himself inaugurated this field of study, he subsequently abandoned it. Early in his career, he assumed that a history of sexual seduction in childhood was responsible for the neurotic symptoms he observed in his patients. Gradually, however,… Read More ›
Lesbian Film Theory and Criticism
Theoretical approaches to the cinematic representation of lesbianism represent a particularly complex and fruitful area of feminist film study, as well as one filled with substantial debate. Issues arise, for instance, concerning the exact definition of a lesbian film as… Read More ›
Key Theories of Lionel Trilling
A writer of significance in the history of American letters, even at the height of his fame Lionel Trilling (1905–1975) was considered ‘a critic without portfolio’. What this means for the contemporary reader, used to critical categories, theories and factional… Read More ›
Carl Jung’s Contribution to Psychoanalytic Theory
A philosopher, psychoanalyst and a disciple of Freud, CG Jung treated the human self as the totality of all psychic processes considering the Freudian concept of individual consciousness as incomplete and unnecessarily negative, Jung proposed a second and far deeper… Read More ›
Jacques Lacan’s Reinterpretation of Freud
Jacques Lacan, who is often referred to as the “French Freud” transposed Freudian concepts into the realm of Saussurean structural linguistics, focussing on the operations of the process of signification, instead of the human mind as such. Lacanian reading attempted… Read More ›
Feminist Critique of Freud
Freud had been widely discredited by early second wave feminists including Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millett and Germaine Greer. Millett, in particular, had persuasively argued that Freudian theory worked to perpetuate sexual difference and reinforce the belief that inferiority was… Read More ›
Freud’s Critique of Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Freued’s theory of Oedipus Complex is best demonstrated in his analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Oedipus complex is the strong affinity that the child develops for his mother in its intense urge to possess the mother, wishes to kill the father…. Read More ›
Lacanian Psychoanalysis
The aura created by the Freudian interpretations reached its zenith when the French Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (propelled into this arena by his reading of Freud and Salvador Dali) achieved a place in the literary critical canon. The linguistic, philosophical and… Read More ›
Freudian Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalytic criticism (emerged in the 1960s), the most influential interpretative theory among the series of waves in the post war period is based on the specific premises of the workings of the mind, the instincts and sexuality, developed by the… Read More ›
Edward Said’s Orientalism
One of the prominent books of the Postmodern era, on par with Darwin‘s On the Origin of Species, Marx‘ Das Capital and Freud‘s Interpretation of Dreams, Edward Said‘s Orientalism (1978) inaugurated postcolonial theory. Appearing at the same time as the… Read More ›
Frankfurt School’s Contribution to Postmodern Thought
From top left to right: Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Leo Löwenthal, Friedrich Pollock, Franz Leopold Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin. The Frankfurt School of philosophers, cultural critics and social scientists, the leading figures of which included Max Horkheimer,… Read More ›
Philosophical Influences on Poststructuralism
Unlike structuralism that derived from linguistics, poststructuralism owes its origin to philosophy, which as a discipline, always tends to emphasise the difficulty in achieving complete and secure knowledge about things. This point is encapsulated in Nietzsche’s famous remark: “There are… Read More ›
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