Psychoanalytical Criticism (Psychological Criticism)

“Psyche” the Greek word means spirit, soul, or mind. Psychology is the science of the mind. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the celebrated Austrian psychologist coined the term psychoanalysis

in 1896. He used the term to describe the therapeutic technique of deeply probing into the unconscious. For Freud human mental activity is controlled by the “unconscious” mind and the primary source of psychic energy is sexual - “libido”.

          

         Psychoanalytic criticism is a form of literary criticism which uses some of the techniques of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of literature. Broadly, psychological criticism deals with the

work of literature as the expression of the inner psyche or character and personality of the author. This was made possible with Sigmund Freud’s important work The Interpretation of Dreams

published  in  1900.    There  is  nothing  new  in  linking  the  author  and  his  work  very  closely.

Coleridge, with his theory of imagination, proceeded on the path of psychological criticism. John Livingston Lowes’ The Road to Xanadu on the sources of Coleridge’s “Rime of Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan” are a sort of non Freudian psychological criticism.

  Linked with Freud’s idea of the unconscious is the idea of “repression” which is the “forgetting” or ignoring of unresolved conflicts, unadmitted desires or traumatic past events which will remain in the unconscious. Through “sublimation” the repressed material is promoted into something grander or is disguised as something “noble.” For example, repressed sexual urges may

be given sublimated expression in the form of intense religious experiences or longings. Repressed experiences also reappear in the form of dream images through a process of displacement and condensation. Displacement is a process wherein one person or event is represented by another which is in some way linked to it. In condensation, a number of people, events or meanings are combined and represented by a single image in the dream. Dreams, thus, communicate indirectly. The purpose of devices like displacement and condensation is two-fold. Firstly these devices disguise the repressed fears and wishes so that they can get past the bodily censor which normally prevents their surfacing into the conscious mind. Secondly, they mould this material into something that can be converted into images, symbols and metaphors which then can be represented in the dream. In the same way, slips, spoonerisms jokes etc, are repressed experiences represented in different forms. By analyzing and coming to the root cause of such manifestations,

psychoanalytic interpretation is able to uncover deep rooted psychological problems. Freud, later suggested a three part model of psyche, dividing it into the “ego,” the “super ego,” and the “id”

which roughly correspond to the consciousness, the conscience and the unconscious.

Poststructuralism and Deconstruction

Poststructuralism begins at the point where structuralists start to doubt the adequacy of the

comprehensive theory that they are imposing on literature. Poststructuralism is less concerned with establishing a firm hold on the text than with acknowledging the text’s elusive/slippery nature and

the fallibility of all readings. It stresses the indeterminacy of all texts and the inadequacy of all readings.

Postsructuralism takes its lead from the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida who followed the insights of structuralists about language to its conclusion. A central idea is that

language is an infinite chain of words which has no extralingual origin or end. Derrida used Saussure’s concept of difference, that words are defined by their difference from other words. He

then introduced the concept of deference, to show how meaning is endlessly deferred (delayed) as each word leads us on to another word in the signifying system. Normally readers are committed to the notion of presence, to the idea that there should be some outside referent to which the word can relate. According to Derrida, however, the text should be seen as an endless stream of signifiers, with words only pointing to other words, without any final meaning. Such a view rejects the ordering strategies that readers and writers impose on language. The form of criticism that emerges from such thinking is referred to as deconstruction. The terms poststructuralism and deconstruction are often used interchangeably. Strictly speaking, poststructuralism encompasses all the approaches that have developed in the wake of structuralist insights into language. Such approaches step back to look at how we conventionally organize the world. Deconstruction, which originated from Derrida and was later taken up by American critics like Hillis Miller and Geoffrey Hartman is a less broadly-based outgrowth of structuralism. It could also be considered as applied poststructuralism. In her book The Critical Difference (1981), Barbara Johnson clarifies the term. 

 

              "Deconstruction is not synonymous with "destruction", however. It is in fact much closer to the original meaning of the word 'analysis' itself, which etymologically means "to undo" -- a virtual synonym for "to de-construct." ... If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not the text, but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another. A deconstructive reading is a reading which analyses the specificity of a text's critical difference from itself."

A deconstructive reading is a sort of double reading – it acknowledges the way in which the

writer attempts to order things, but then points to the contradictions and problems in the text. Terry Eagleton defines it as ‘reading against the grain’ or as ‘reading the text against itself’ with the purpose of ‘knowing the text as it cannot know itself’. A deconstructive reading uncovers the

unconscious rather than the conscious dimension of the text, all the things which its overt textuality

glosses over or fails to recognize. An example of deconstructionist reading (here, using etymology) is the meaning of the word ‘guest’. Etymologically ‘guest’ and ‘host’ have the same root. However the word ‘host’ comes from the Latin hostis which means enemy or stranger. This hints at a

potential double aspect of a guest, as either welcome or unwelcome. This notion of hostility is like the repressed unconscious of the word.

The critic’s own response can also be deconstructed, for the critic, too, is involved in trying to create coherence where none exists. Derrida’s method is to look closely at individual texts,

searching for the contradictions and gaps in what appears to be a logical argument. However, this

reading also is a misreading as it imposes ordering strategies. The standard ordering strategy of Western culture is the organisation of thoughts into binary pairs – i.e. as good/evil, man/woman,

white/black etc. wherein one of the pairs is privileged and dominant. Derrida draws attention to the presence of and inadequacy of the use of binaries in order to present a coherent case.

One of the key figures in the deconstructive approach to literature is Roland Barthes (later works). Barthes was the first to talk of the openness of texts, the text’s connection with other texts and the reader’s role in the production of meaning. He argued that texts can be either ‘readerly’ or ‘writerly’. A readerly text was one that left the reader with nothing to do – it explained, explicated

and described everything. It controlled meaning and the reader was a mere passive recipient of

meaning. A writerly text, on the other hand, was one where the reader had an active role to play.

The text teased and offered the readers hidden clues to decode. It offered a subtext which the

reader was left to decipher. In other words Barthes was proposing that meaning was not embedded

within the text but within the reader. For Barthes, therefore

1.      The text is plural

2.      The text is open to other texts in an endless series of intertextual operations.

3.      The author is ‘dead’

4.        The ‘pleasures’ of the text lie in the process of playing with the narrative.

Here Barthes puts in a different view of textuality. He argues for an openness and endlessness of meaning-making and narrative process.

Structuralism is an intellectual movement

Structuralism is an intellectual movement which began in France in the 1950’s.It was first

seen in the works of the anthropologist Levis Strauss and in the early work of Roland Barthes. Saussure’s linguistic model is said to be the origin of structuralism. Later Strauss used it in anthropology to study the structures underlying early societies.

            Structuralism has been applied to linguistics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, folklore, mythology and Biblical studies, in fact to all cultural phenomena. It claims to be scientific and objective. It identifies structures, systems of relationships which give meaning and identities to signs in culture. It shows us the ways in which we think. The structures in question here are those imposed by our way of perceiving the world and organizing experience and not objective entities already existing in the world. It follows from this that meaning or significance is not an essence residing inside things but is outside, in the ways in which we give it meaning through certain codes and conventions. These codes and conventions form the grammar or the structure which generate meanings. Hence, for the structuralist, meaning is constructed through a culturally shared system of signification. In the structuralist approach to literature there is a constant movement away from the interpretation of the individual literary work and a drive towards understanding the larger, abstract structures out of which they evolved. To take a crude example of chicken and egg, for the structuralists determining the precise nature of the chicken (containing structure) is the most important activity and not the egg (the individual text).Thus structuralism is an analytical approach which is less concerned with the unique qualities of any individual example than with the structures that underlie these individual examples.

           

Applying Saussure’s ideas about language to literary texts, structuralists consider texts as a self-sufficient system. They are concerned with the operations of and relations between the signifiers, rather than outside the system of language at the signified. Like the New critics they do not move outside the text to relate it to life. Instead they move in the opposite direction, trying to work out general theories about how texts function. The pure structuralist hopes to establish a grammar of texts, a set of general rules about how texts function.

The structuralist critics work with general ideas about the patterns underlying texts. They look closely at the structure and language of a text and thus make the book’s own form its subject.

They point out how the text might be discussing the gap between the word and the world, the gap between the structure of art and the structure of reality. Structuralist criticism is, by and large, self-reflexive. It points to the limits of literature in representing the complex world. It discusses the problems of writing about reality. These critics analyse prose narratives mainly, relating the text to some larger containing structure such as:

a)  the conventions of a particular literary genre 

b)  a network of intertextual connections 

c)  a projected model of an underlying universal narrative structure 

d)  a notion of narrative as a complex of recurrent patterns or motifs.