PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

1. What do you understand by Psychoanalytic criticism? Psychoanalytical criticism is the study of relation of conscious and unconscious state of mind. According to Sigmund Freud's theory of psychoanalysis human behaviors are guided by unconscious layer of mind. Literature is also creative reflection of our unconscious.


 a. The origin of unconscious 
Human beings have many desires for power, love, sex and so on. But all the desires cannot be easily fulfilled. Suppose, we are attracted to a friend sexually in college. But you have to repress your desires there. When our desires are not fulfilled, they are repressed. The repressed desires make a storehouse in our mind. The storehouse of unfulfilled desires makes our unconscious. The unconscious affects our conscious activities. "You can't get always what you consciously want, but you get what you unconsciously need." The desires try to come out again, but you control it and tell a joke, or write erotic poem or go to cyber or see the attractive person in the dream. Human psychology has three layers in the mind: id, ego and superego. The desires are id, the social rules that control the desires is superego, and the middle layer of mind which maintains balance between id and superego is ego. Unconscious is filled with ids. 

B. Family is one of the origin of unconscious. 
 A son is sexually attracted to the mother. He wants to kill the father who comes between him and his mother. This is called (edipal complex. A daughter is attracted to her father. This is called Electra complex, Two children always compete to get more love from parents than other brothers or sisters. This competition is called sibling rivalry. In childhood these desires may not be fulfilled. If he/she cries the parents call him/her bad boy/bad girl. Father takes the mother, another child gets more love, so the child feels pain, and suppresses his desires. So the origin of unconscious is childhood age. 

C. The defenses, anxiety, and core issues To repress our id is painful. Yet, we have to repress. The id tries to come out. I tries to 'I lay out.' But while coming out, we bring it our in socially acceptable form. We want to show us that we are civilized. So we use defenses to protect us from shame. The processes by which the desires are kept in the unconscious (id) are called defenses. In other words they are the processes by which we keep the repressed repressed in order to avoid Knowing what we feel we can't handle knowing. We have fear that the id may come out. So we have anxiety/fear. We have dark desires inside but we want to show that we are good inside also. So we need defences. There are several types of defenses: 

1. Selective perception: hearing and seeing only what we feel can
handle 

2. Selective memory: We try to remember that we can easily handle
and forget that painful memories that we cannot handle. 

3. Denial: believe that the unpleasant event never happened 

4. Avoidance: staying away from people or event that reminds the
painful event. 

5. Displacement: taking it our on someone or something less
threatening than the person who caused the fear, frustration, hurt or anger 

6.Projection: ascribing our fear, problem, or guilty desire to someone else than. 

7. Regression: Just returning to the painful psychological state for
sometime and forgetting it. 

8. Active reversal: acknowledging and working through it actively. 

Sometimes our defenses may break out. We may not be able to control the id/ destructive desires. When it comes out in a public, we feel ashamed/fear/anxiety. Anxiety reveals issue of our unconscious. The core issues that form our unconscious are: 

1. Fear of intimacy: we may have fear that we may be too close to
some body emotionally.

2. Fear of abandonment: we may have fear that our parents may
leave us alone and go away. 

3. Fear of betrayal: we have fear that the loved ones may
deceive/betray us. 

4. low self esteem: we may feel that we are inferior than others, less
beautiful, or less handsome or less intelligent 

5. insecure/unstable sense of self: we may feel that I do not know about myself, we may change ourselves, searching what actually
'I am or I like! 

6. Oedipal fixation: in our childhood our desire for opposite sex parents are not fulfilled. The dysfunctional relation with parents may not allow us to developed a mature relation with the peers. 

D. Dreams and dream symbols 

During the sleep the unconscious is more free than in awaken time. Our unconscious expresses the messages about what it wants in our dream. In weam also we are little bit influenced by society (superego), therefore the 

dreams come in symbolic way. The underlying meaning of dream is latent content. The surface meaning is manifest content. In dream you sawa balloon in girl friend's hand (manifest). The latent meaning of the dream se you want to play with her breasts. Vertical images like pillar, mountain, gun, pen are male sexual dream symbols. They refer to the male sexual organ (phallic symbols). The horizontal or deep symbols like cave, lake, well, holes are female sexual imageries. Our dreams are safer outlets of psychological desires or pain. When the dreams are frightening they are nightmares. When nightmare are seen in daytime, or while we are awaken and conscious we are in psychological crisis or trauma. 

E. The meaning of death 

Fear and attraction to death also helps to construct our unconscious. Everyone is frightened with death because it is self-destructive. Death drive refers to fear of being abandonment and fear of being alone. When we die we die alone and go to the dark unknown and when our relatives die we are left alone. Fear of death is related to fear of intimacy. When death is reality, we cannot be too intimate to others because when one dies intimate relation turns into a great shock or pain. 

F.  The meaning of sexuality 

Sexuality is a basis of unconscious. The opposite of death drive is love drive, which for Freud is also a sex drive. He calls it Eros/love. Everybody has libido/sexual energy. This is id. Society/super ego controls id. Ego maintains balance. Sexual desire before marriage is id. Society says don't have sex. It is superego. Ego says 'ok, you can marry and do it privately.' Girls do not have penis. They are jealous of brother's penis. This is called penis envy. The boy sees that his sister doesn't have penis. He fears that his penis may be cut. This is castration anxiety. All activities are related to sexual fulfillment. Even the child passes through oral, anal and genital sexual stages.

G. Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Julia Christevia 

Lacan developed theory of psychological development of infants. According to him, human self is not coherent. It is fragmented, multiple and changing. This fragmentation begins from the childhood period especially at six to eight months. From the mirror stage, the child enters to symbolic stage when he starts to recognize that he is separate from the mother. This recognition occurs when the child mirrors himself. He finds his self different from actual. He is different from mother as well. The separation from mother and entering into symbolic stage takes place after the mirror stage. He starts learning symbolic language. In symbolic age, he starts to think in language. When one learns language, self is changed into chain of signifiers. Self is broken into fragments. The actual self of oneself is never known. Human self is slippery and changing. Therefore, we become different persons in different times. We
come our own "little other" or "objet petit." Lacanian psychoanalysis deconstructs our self like Derrida deconstructing language. His famous saving clarifies this idea, "Our unconscious is structured like language."
Julia Christiva used the theory of Lacan and Deconstruction and said that all the theories are patriarchal because the language itself is patriarchal. To bring freedom to women we need to protest against the language at first Revolution should be first started from phallo centric (Male centric) semiotics/ signs. Psychoanalytic critic of literature analyze the elements of unconscious symbtolically present in literary work. Creative art is a kind of fulfillment of unconscious.