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Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis
• As a reading method
• It tries to read unconscious symptoms in a
text
• While reading the text, the reader tries to
find the contradiction, repetition
Some thoughts
• Supremacy unconsciousness over
consciousness
• Dynamic relationship Id-Ego-Superego
• Oedipus phase, penis-envy, displacement,
repression
• Life instinct and death instinct (death wish)
Id-Ego-Superego
• Id works with pleasure principle
• Ego works with reality principle , trying to
meet Id’s need.
• Superego works with morality principle
The unconscious
• where id, ego and superego work
• The unconscious is not only impulsive but
also rational and can be “moral”
• The unconscious still can control the
individual with unconscious ways
Sex Theory
• Culture comes from displacement towards
sex instinct
• Displacement happens in oedipal phase
(2-5 years old)
• The child sees his father as his competitor
to have sexual desire to his mother
Repression and Hysteria
• When superego represses, ego build a
wall to block sexual instinct
• Sexual instinct appear in symbolic forms to
trick ego
• These symbolic forms of sexual instinct
are called hysteria
Life instinct and death instinct
• Life instinct: eat, sleep, work, make love
• Death instinct : mysterious and easy to
duplicate symbolic forms of life instinct
• Death instinct is much stronger than other
instincts and determine human’s life
Psychoanalysis and literature
• Literary text is treated as a group of
symptoms that project its author’s psyche
• Psyche that is projected is where the
unconscious is
• That is why, literary text is symptomatic;
revealing and hiding something at the
same time;
• Literary text could be analyzed as “a
patient” by noticing its structure, diction,
imagery, and characters and other textual
elements.
• In a therapy, psychoanalysis tries to find
the patient’s main trauma while in
literature, psychoanalysis reveals the
unconscious meaning of the text
Text as a group of symptoms that
projects the author’s psyche
• Text is the result of displacement of
unconscious material in the author’s
psyche in the symbolic forms in symptoms
in structure, characters, imagery and other
textual elements
• Reading text means identifying
displacement and finding what experience
displacement in the author’s psyche
reflected in “text psyche”
• Text is read to find out what beyond the
text
Reading literary text as
symptomatic reading
• Literary text is assumed to be like hysteria
which reveal or hide trauma of the author’s
psyche
• The analysis can only rely on the
symptoms in the text
• It is needed to read the text interrogatively,
and not appreciatively
• It is not literal reading
• It is figurative reading
Structure, diction and other textual
elements
• Textual structure reflects the unconscious
dynamic through the delay of ending,
constructing climax, plot, contrast etc.
• Diction/Imagery is consciously selected
symptom but controlled by the
unconscious (Freud concept: slip of the
tongue)
• Character can be viewed as symbolic
manifestation of certain psyche element
(Id, Ego, Superego) the relation dynamic
of which with other character is seen in
conflict
• The other textual elements which can be
analyzed using psychoanalysis are :
theme, title, point of view, figurative
language, etc.
Text, meaning and trauma
• Meaning is what is conveyed consciously
to the readers/audience
• Trauma is a frustration caused by an
unfulfilled instinct when it is contradictory
with Superego moral standard
• The Instinct can slip into the theme and
can upset the theme
• The analysis of the contradiction between
the meaning of conscious text and
unconscious impulses, the source of
trauma (the author’s unconscious psyche)
is supposed to be revealed