2. PSYCHOANALYTIC
CRITICISM
 Definition
 Main Characteristics
 Main Figures
 Sigmund Freud
 Jacques Lacan

3. PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

4. Definition of PSYCHOANALYTIC
CRITICISM:
 The application of psychoanalytic
principles to the study of literature,
initiated primarily by Freud.

5. PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

6. Main Characteristics:
 The unconscious governs our behavior, the
unconscious is the ultimate source and
explanation of human thought and behavior
 The idea of the unconscious has
problematized all of the notions on which
philosophy, theology, and even literary
criticism have conventionally rested: the ideal
of self-knowledge, the ability to know others, the
capacity to make moral judgments, the belief that
we can act according to reason, that we can
overcome our passions and instincts, the ideas of
moral and political agency, intentionality, and the
notion – held for centuries – that literary creation
can be a rational process.

7. Main Characteristics:
 Freud postulated that we bear a form of
“otherness” within ourselves: we cannot claim
fully to comprehend even ourselves, why we act
as we do, why we make certain moral and political
decisions, why we harbor given religious
dispositions and intellectual orientations.
 Even when we think we are acting from a given
motive, we may be deluding ourselves; and much
of our thought and action is not freely determined
by us but driven by unconscious forces which we
can barely fathom.
 Far from being based on reason, our thinking
is intimately dependent upon the body, upon its
instincts of survival and aggression.

8. PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

9. Sigmund Freud (1856–
1939)
 We can obtain a sense of Freud’s psychoanalytic
“literary-critical” procedure by looking at his paper
“Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming.”
 Freud presented very important concepts like: The
Unconscious, The Oedipus Complex, The Theory of
the Instincts, and The Interpretation of Dreams
 He analyzed many famous literary texts notably
Oedipus Rex and Hamlet
 Freud admits at the outset that the creative writer is
a “strange being” who himself cannot explain his
power to arouse new and intense emotions in us.

10. Jacques Lacan (1901–
1981)
 The work of the French psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan centers around his extensive
re-reading of Freud in the light of insights
furnished by linguistics and structuralism.
 Lacan effectively reformulates in linguistic
terms Freud’s account of the Oedipus
complex.
 Lacan posits three orders or states of human
mental disposition: the imaginary order, the
symbolic order, and the real.
 Lacan elaborates his most renowned concept
in the “mirror stage,” (1949).