Criticism of Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud
Uploaded by amany kamal on May 26, 2006
[color=red:1f0ee0cda9][i:1f0ee0cda9]Criticism of Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud[/i:1f0ee0cda9][/color:1f0ee0cda9]
[color=indigo:1f0ee0cda9]According to Freud, the human psyche may be divided into three components: the id, the unconscious room of desires and impulses; the superego, the moral censor; and the ego, the conscious self that tries to balance between the disagreeing demands of id and superego.
Literature, according to Freud, is seen as the wish fulfillment of desires and wishes denied by the reality principle or banned by ethical systems. These unconscious desires find symbolic expression in art exactlyexcatly as in dreams. Art is sublimation, the translation of instinctual desires into higher aims, and the goal of psychoanalytic criticism is to reveal the latent content of the work that underlies and determines its visible content.
Freud's impact on the criticism and theory of literature has been and is still considerable. Ernest Jones uses the notion of the Oedipus complex -- the desire of a boy to possess his mother and supplant his father -- as an explanatory model for Hamlet; Harold Bloom uses it as an analogy for the relationship between a strong poet and his literary predecessors. Jacques Lacan develops a linguistic interpretation of Freud, arguing that "the unconscious is structured like a language." Norman N. Holland applies psychoanalytic concepts to reader-response criticism Feminist critics deconstructs Freud's patriarchal assumptions. Moreover, psychobiography, a genre that uses data from the real events of an author's life and the fictional events dramatized in his literature, is a product of psychoanalytic theory. In short, the analysis of literary symbolism heavily owes a favor to Freudian theory.[/color:1f0ee0cda9]