Literary Theory and Criticism, Part-IV

Psychoanalysis

The Essence of Freudian Psychoanalysis

As with Marxism, it is impossible to do justice to the complexity of Freudian theory in the small scope of this book. Those aspects alone which are of direct relevance to literary theory will be summarised here. It must be said at the outset that much that passes for psychoanalysis of literature often uses the concepts, terminology and methodology very loosely. Be that as it may, a whole range of literary analysis and theory has now come to be termed psychoanalytic by virtue of its practitioners proclaiming it so. Certain concepts and views on mental processes must be held in common for the term psychoanalysis to be justified. Sigmund Freud himself was quite clear about what those essential concepts are. In a short article for inclusion in an encyclopaedia, he stated, under the heading The Corner-Stones of Psychoanalytic Theory: ‘The assumption that there are unconscious mental processes, the recognition of the theory of resistance and repression, the appreciation of the importance of sexuality and of the Oedipus complex–these constitute the principal subject-matter of psychoanalysis and the foundations of its theory. No one who cannot accept them should count himself a psychoanalyst.’

Psychoanalysis was very much the product of one man’s mind, although Freud gradually gathered many followers about him who shared his convictions and developed aspects of the theory further. He developed psychoanalysis in the first instance as a means of helping mentally disturbed patients. While studying under Charcot in Paris, he had become convinced of the existence of an extensive unconscious area of the mind which can, and does, wield strong influence over our conscious mind. Through close study of mentally disturbed patients and their symptoms he discovered that knowledge of the unconscious was accessible through analysis of dreams, symptomatic nervous behaviour and parapraxes (the famous Freudian slips).The conscious mind cannot cope with some of the unsavoury truths buried in the unconscious and, when they threaten to surface, represses them, attempting in practice to deny their reality. The tensions caused between the need of such truths to surface and the determination of the self to repress them can lead to serious mental disturbance, what Freud called neurosis, involving compulsive behaviour and obsessive modes of thinking. Cure was effected by helping the patient to understand what had brought about the behavioural disturbance and by tracing it to its roots in the unconscious. The most common, but not the only, needs repressed proved to be sexual in nature. Freud also developed a theory of the development of infantile sexuality and extended the areas of psychoanalytic interest to include broader cultural and social phenomena, including primitive beliefs, superstition, religion, the nature of civilisation etc.

He did not delineate a theory of art or aesthetics but gave clear indications of how he saw art and literature fitting into a psychoanalytic scheme. Evidence for his views is spread throughout his writings and demonstrated in his frequent allusions to, and quotations from, works of literature. In his comments on E T A Hoffmann’s story, The Sandman, in the essay The Uncanny, and in his comments on Shakespeare’s Richard III and Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, he hinted at lines of analysis rather than followed them through. His one extensive study of a work of literature was of the novella Gradiva by Wilhelm Jensen, which happens to lend itself very well to a Freudian analysis. Many theorists and critics assume too readily that Freud equated creative writing with dreaming and the outpourings of neurotics, largely because they rely too much on the opinions expressed in one essay: Creative Writers and Daydreaming. In fact, Freud clearly regarded the artist as a unique individual who avoids neurosis and sheer wishful thinking through the practice of his or her art. The artist or writer is involved in a process of sublimation (refining basic drives, such as those of sex and aggression, and converting them into creative and intellectual activity). Art is not an escape but a means of dealing with inner contradictions and re-establishing a productive relationship with the world. A good writer enables his/her readers to establish a similar relationship to their world, often in a new and critical light. Art is an illusion but its effects are real: ‘Art is a conventionally accepted reality in which, thanks to artistic illusion, symbols and substitutes are able to provoke real emotions.’ (The Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest).

The best model for a psychoanalytic aesthetics in Freud’s own writings is his work Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious (1905).This study of wit (sometimes translated as ‘Jokes’) explores not only the psychological state of the person being witty but also explains how wit affects the audience and why consideration of the social context is important. In creating and enjoying wit, we share a critique of the social suppression of instincts. Wit, as an aesthetic phenomenon, is very far from being a form of consolation or reconciliation. It enlightens us and enables to share in protest against the self-denial we have accepted as the cost of a civilised existence.

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981)

Jacques Lacan has greatly influenced recent psychoanalytic theory in general as well as literary theory in particular. He broadened and redefined several basic psychoanalytic concepts in ways with which many orthodox Freudians disagree. According to Freud, in the earliest phase of childhood, the individual is dominated by the ‘pleasure principle’, seeking unreflecting gratification, with no definitely established identity and gender. Eventually, the child comes up against the restrictions of the father. (In pure Freudian terms this involves preventing the child from realising Oedipal desires for its mother by threatening it with castration. All this, of course, takes place on a subconscious level.) The father thus comes to represent the ‘reality principle’, forcing the child to heed the requirements of the real world for the first time. Identifying with the father now makes it possible for the child to take on a masculine role and makes it aware for the first time of various forms of institutionalized law. The female child passes through slightly different stages in the Freudian scheme of things, which have been fundamentally criticised by many feminist writers. The personality is then split between the conscious self and repressed desire.

Lacan describes the earlier state of being, when the child is unaware of any distinctions between subject and object, as the ‘imaginary’. Then comes the ‘mirror phase’, when the child starts to become aware of itself as an individual (as though seeing an image of itself in a mirror) and identifies this self. It produces something identifiable as an ego. When it becomes aware of the father’s restrictions, it enters the ‘symbolic’ world and also becomes aware of binary oppositions: male/female, present/absent etc. Behind all this, the restricted desire persists.

Lacan then basically reinterprets Freud’s theory of the conscious and the unconscious in terms of Saussure’s theory of ‘signifiers’ and ‘signifieds’. Entering the symbolic order of consciousness, the child starts to link ‘signifiers’ and ‘signifieds’: developing language, in fact. The signifier ‘I’ however is never fully comprehensible and, like other signifiers, never fully corresponds to ‘signifieds’. To use Lacan’s metaphor, ‘signifieds’ slide under ‘floating signifiers’.

The whole of Freud’s dream theory is also reinterpreted by Lacan as a textual theory, using Jakobson’s concepts of ‘metaphor’ and ‘metonymy’ to explain the various structuring principles defined by Freud, such as ‘displacement’ (transferring emphasis from one element in a dream to another), ‘condensation’ (combining several ideas and images) and so on. The general effect of Lacan’s theories has been to sow seeds of doubt in the minds of many thinkers and writers about the ability of language to express anything with certainty. Meaning, especially in many modernist literary works, has become elusive and difficult, if not impossible, to pin down.

For Lacan, the whole of human life is like a narrative in which significance constantly eludes us. Consciousness starts out with a sense of loss (of the mother’s body), and we are constantly driven by a desire to find substitutes for this lost paradise. All narrative can, in fact, be understood in terms of a search for a lost completion.

Another important concept in Lacanian thought is that of ‘The Other’. This refers to the developing individual’s awareness of other beings, who are also necessary in defining the individual’s identity. ‘The Other’ is clearly a general concept for the entire social order. As the social context of every individual’s life is constantly changing, however, so is the individual’s sense of identity. It is always a process, never a state. Ideology is also part of ‘The Other’ and provides a ‘misrecognition’ of the self, a false interpretation which nevertheless becomes part of the self. But ideology gives us the illusion of filling the lack that desire is eternally seeking to fill, which is why it always has such a firm hold over us. When we read a literary text too, we allow it to dominate us in a similar way and to fill the lack in our being.

To read a text by Lacan is itself to be in constant pursuit of the obscure object of desire. Lacan’s writing is at the other end of the spectrum from Freud’s, whose clarity and clear argument won him the Goethe prize for good style in scientific writing.

The Psychoanalysis of Reader Response

Some critics have applied a psychoanalytic approach to the kind of satisfaction a reader feels when reading a work of literature. This may be interesting but it is rather limited in the insights it yields. The American Norman N Holland, in The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968), argues that we enjoy a work of literature because it enables us to work through deep anxieties and desires in ways which remain socially acceptable. Literature allows a compromise, which placates moral and aesthetic norms, while allowing realisation of what would normally remain repressed. This is little more than a restatement of Freud’s own views in The Creative Writer and Daydreaming. Simon Lesser, in Fiction and the Unconscious (1957), had already pursued a similar line, presenting literature as a form of therapy. In Holland’s book Five Readers Reading (1975), he explores how readers adapt their identities in the course of interpreting a text and discover a new unity within themselves.

Harold Bloom (1930–)

Harold Bloom applied psychoanalysis to the actual history of literature, interpreting developments and changes in styles and norms, in poetry in particular, as the result of a conflict between generations, akin to that envisioned in the Freudian Oedipus complex. As sons feel oppressed by their fathers, so do poets feel themselves to be in the shadow of influential poets who came before them. Any poem can be read as an attempt to shake off the ‘anxiety of influence’ of earlier poems. Poets reconstruct and reform earlier poems. Therefore, all poems can be considered to be rewritings of older poems, as deliberate ‘misreadings’ (or what Bloom calls ‘misprisions’) of them, to assert the younger poet’s own individuality in face of them. These ideas found expression in Bloom’s A Map of Misreading (1975), in which he was very much going beyond the implications of psychoanalysis. The work is already very much poststructuralist in its concerns. In it a poem is seen as containing a series of undermining devices. He also explicitly attacks deconstructive criticism, which he regards as ‘serene linguistic nihilism’, and endeavours to reaffirm the notion of author’s intention. For Bloom, criticism is itself a form of poetry and poems incorporate literary criticism of other poems. It is one poetic and critical continuum.

Julia Kristeva (1941–)

Julia Kristeva combines Lacanian psychoanalysis with politics and feminism. In her book La Révolution du langage poétique (1974), Kristeva redefines and renames Lacan’s concept of the ‘imaginary’ from a feminist perspective. In the Lacanian scheme, when the child enters the ‘symbolic’ phase and starts naming things and heeding principles of order and law, its whole existence takes as its centre the ‘transcendental signifier’, the phallus, the father as embodiment of law. Kristeva wishes to destroy the omnipotence of this male order. She posits a form of language as existing already in Lacan’s ‘imaginary’ pre-Oedipal stage, which she calls instead the ‘semiotic’ stage. The ‘semiotic’ is a vague almost mystical concept. The underlying ‘semiotic’ flow is artificially broken up into units when the ‘symbolic’ order is imposed on it, but it persists as a kind of force within language. It is clearly associated with an essential femininity but it also occurs in a period of development when no distinctions of gender have yet taken place.

Kristeva finds confirmation of her theories not only in the ill-formed language of children and the language used by the mentally ill but also in certain kinds of poetry, such as that of the French Symbolists, in whose language, she argues, ordinary language is stretched to the limits of its conventionally accepted meanings. Such works, and such criticism, are essentially anarchic, a reaction against fixed signifiers of power, order and control, everything that is in any way associated with masculine dominance. All clear distinctions are broken down, as are all binary oppositions. There seems to be in her writing an assumption that the  anarchy created by her mode of reading texts also implies a political anarchy, and thereby a political critique. Terry Eagleton has revealed this to be a rather naïve and simplistic notion of the political: ‘…she pays too little attention to the political content of a text, the historical conditions in which its overturning of the signified is carried out…’

Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961)

Strictly speaking C G Jung is not a psychoanalyst but what he himself preferred to call an analytical psychologist. He is included here, however, for three important reasons: his theories have been very influential in the interpretation of literature; they have a lot more in common with Freud’s theories than either of them would have been willing to admit; and they do not really fit into any other broad category utilised in this book.

It has become commonplace to stress the differences between Freud’s and Jung’s theories but it must also be remembered that, when compared to other kinds of psychological theory, they can be shown to share many common fields of interest: the study of schizophrenia, neuroses and psychoses, the nature of psychological complexes, the interpretation of dreams, and unconscious mental processes in general, to name only the most important fields.

Freud and Jung differed especially over the so-called libido theory. Jung thought that Freud related libido (the Latin for ‘desire’ or ‘lust’) too closely to sexual drives. He preferred the notion of ‘psychic energy’. He developed a general theory of character types, broadly defined, in two terms which have entered common parlance, as extroverted and introverted personality types. Jung also believed in the existence of a collective unconscious, which is common to the whole human race and contains universal archetypes. These are primordial and universal images, revealed in dreams, artistic and literary productions, primitive religions and mythologies. One of the most important archetypes is that of the animus/anima. The animus is a woman’s archetypal image of man and the anima is the man’s archetypal image of woman. The animus often appears as a wise old man, and the anima as a virginal girl or a mother goddess. The general aim of Jungian psychology is what he called ‘individuation’, a process by which the individual is helped to harmonise his/her ‘persona’ (the self as presented to the world) and ‘the shadow’ (the darker potentially dangerous side of the personality that exists in the personal unconscious). It could be said that the failure of individuation is represented symbolically in Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous story Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which Dr Jekyll is the ‘persona’ and Hyde is ‘the shadow’.

Jungian psychology has contributed little to the study of literature as text, but much to the interpretation of symbols and images in texts. The Jungian theory of archetypes has been influential on the French philosopher of science and literary theory Gaston Bachelard. He combined Freud’s views on daydreaming with Jung’s conception of archetypes in The Poetics of Reverie (1960). The theory of archetypes was also taken up by the Canadian literary theorist Herman Northrop Frye in his book, Anatomy of Criticism (1957).