Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism Theory
When handling an expression of the personal, we are ultimately dealing with psychology, philosophy, and existentialism. Literary thinkers and critics, such as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Jean-Paul Sartre, contributed to psychoanalysis and existentialism which led to many epiphanies and extensions of psychological research in the psychoanalytic literary criticism theory.
Thus, psychoanalytic literary criticism is a literary criticism or a literary theory that, in method, concept, or form, is influenced by the tradition of psychoanalysis that was begun by Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalytic reading has been practised since the early development of psychoanalysis itself and developed into a heterogeneous interpretive tradition.
Freud pioneered psychoanalysis. He assumes that personality arises out of unconscious psychological processes that interact to determine our thoughts, feelings, and behaviour. Freud believed that personality has three components.
The first component is the id, which operates according to the pleasure principle. The second component is the ego, which operates according to the reality principle. The third component is the superego, which internalises society’s rules and values. The ego uses defence mechanisms to prevent unconscious conflicts among these components from becoming conscious and causing anxiety or guilt.
Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology, defined consciousness as the function or activity which maintains the relation of psychic contents to the ego. In that way, he distinguished it conceptually from the psyche itself, which is comprised of both consciousness and the unconscious. In Jung’s model, the ego is not the same thing as consciousness. The ego is simply the dominant complex of the conscious mind. Of course, in practice, we can only become aware of psychic contents by means of the ego. In other words, the more we know about what’s going on in our unconscious, the more conscious we become.
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote Being and Nothingness in 1943 and it remained the defining treatise of the existentialist movement, along with works from de Beauvoir, such as The Ethics of Ambiguity. In brief, Sartre provides a series of arguments for the necessary freedom of human reality, based upon an ontological distinction between what he calls being-for-itself, pour soi, and being-in-itself, en soi, roughly between that which negates and transcends consciousness and the pure plenitude of objects.
Carl Jung came up with multiple concepts and some of which are defined in Jungian Psychotherapy will be employed in the following analysis of the extracts:
Active Imagination: to describe bridging the gap between unconsciousness and consciousness.
Collective Unconscious: Jung was the first to use the term collective unconscious as a means for describing an expression of the unconscious that is exhibited by every living being with a nervous system.
Individuation: an individual develops into who they truly are intended to be.
Jung believed that the psyche, or the soul, was driven toward individuation. His psychodynamic psychology revolved around the archetypes within the collective unconscious, as well as the personal unconscious and the ego.
The theory will be applied in another article for application purposes.
