How do Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism and Theory work?

The work of Sigmund Freud influences the study of the unconscious and human behaviour. It is Freud's belief that human responses to the world are structured by the existence of three competing impulses within the psyche—the ego, id, and superego—and the conflict that results from child-parent relations. According to psychoanalytic literary theory, psychoanalysis was initially applied to either the author or the main character of a work to identify the unconscious meaning or latent symbolism beneath the manifest language. In many of his essays, Freud applied his theories to Shakespeare's Hamlet and Ibsen's Rebecca West. Later psychoanalytic theory was influenced by Jacques Lacan and shared some concerns with deconstruction and poststructuralist theory about the unconscious and language. The psychoanalytic theory has greatly influenced other theories, such as reader-response theory and feminist theory, as well as individual thinkers. Harold Bloom, for example, was influenced by Freud's Oedipus complex when he developed his theory of the struggle between "strong" and "weak" poets.

10 Facts About Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism and Theory

1. To interpret texts, psychoanalytic criticism adopts the methods of "reading" developed by Freud and later theorists.

2. Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud coined psychoanalysis.

3. Freud was regarded as the father of psychoanalysis.

4. A literary work manifests the author's neuroses as it reveals the author's hidden anxieties and desires.

5. In psychoanalysis, mental disorders are treated according to psychoanalytic theory.

6. An emphasis is placed on unconscious mental processes, and it is sometimes referred to as "depth psychology."

7. The psychoanalytic movement originated in clinical observations and formulations.

8. During the 1890s, Freud worked with Austrian physician and physiologist Josef Breuer to study neurotic patients under hypnosis.

9. Freud and Breuer observed that when the sources of patients' ideas and impulses were brought into consciousness during the hypnotic state, the patients showed improvement.

10. Several key concepts are used in psychoanalytic criticism, including:

    1. Unconscious,

    2. Repression and sublimation,

    3. Id, ego and superego,

    4. Neurosis,

    5. Carl Gustav Jung's Archetypal Criticism,

    6. Infantile sexuality,

    7. Oedipus complex, Electra Complex,

    8. Psychosexual stage of libido, oral, anal, and phallic,

    9. Transference and Projection,

    10. Defence mechanism,

    11. Freudian slip,

    12. Dreamwork,

    13. Displacement.

Literary Criticism and Theory Unlocked

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