英美文学批评12

Keywords: Unconsciousness
A mental process that is structured beneath the surface consciousness, and has no easy access to consciousness, but must be inferred, discovered, and translated into conscious form in some special manners.
• The forbidden, mainly sexual ("libidinal") wishes come into conflict with, and are repressed by, the "censor" (the internalized representative within each individual of the standards of society) into the unconscious realm of the artist's mind, but are permitted by the censor to achieve a fantasied satisfaction in distorted forms which serve to disguise their real motives and objects from the conscious mind.
severely repressed Oedipal
feelings.
Talking cure
• Freud’s third premise is that because of the powerful social taboos attached to certain sexual impulses, many of our desires and memories are repressed ( that is, actively excluded from conscious awareness).
Keywords: Oedipus complex
Freud borrowed this term from Greece classic Sophoclean tragedy in which the hero Oedipus unknowingly slew his father and married his mother. In psychoanalytical theory, Oedipus complex derives from the boy’s unconscious rivalry with his father for the love of his mother.
Freud’s Theories
• Like iceberg, the human mind is structured so that its great weight and density lie beneath the surface (below the level of consciousness)
• Literature and the other arts, like dreams and neurotic symptoms, consist of the imagined, or fantasized, fulfillment of wishes that are either denied by reality or are prohibited by the social standards of morality and propriety.
英美文学批评12
英美文学批评
Theory 2 Psychoanalysis
Psychological criticism
• Psychological criticism deals with a work of literature primarily as an expression, in fictional form, of the state of mind and the structure of personality of the individual author.
Hamlet and Oedipus (1949) , by Ernest Jones
• Building on earlier suggestions by Freud himself, Jones explained Hamlet's inability to make up his mind to kill his uncle by reference to his Oedipus complex—that is, the repressed but continuing presence in the adult's unconscious of the male infant's desire to possess his mother and to have his rival, the father, out of the way. (Freud derived the term from Sophocles' Greek tragedy Oedipus the King, whose protagonist has unknowingly killed his father and married his mother.)
Known for his studies of the repression, sexual desire and the unconscious mind, Freud believed the mind could be divided into 3 categories:
The id contains "primitive desires" (hunger, rage, sex),
The super-ego contains internalized norms, morality and taboos.
The ego mediates between the two.
Thus,
• psychoanalyzing a work of literature can give us great insight into the unconscious of the author. (psychological approach)
Keywords: Libido
• Freud called by this name (Libido) the energy of those instincts which have to do with all that may be comprised under the word “love”. To Freud, “love” consists in sexual love with sexual union as its aim, but he did not separate from this either the self-love or love for parents and children, friendship and love for humanity in general, and also devotion to concrete objects and to abstract ideas.
Psychoanalysis
• Since the 1920s, a very widespread form of psychological literary criticism has come to be psychoanalytic criticism, whose premises and procedures were established by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939).
源自文库
• The disguised fantasies that are evident to consciousness are called by Freud the “manifest” content of a dream or work of literature; the unconscious wishes that find a semblance of satisfaction in this distorted form he calls the “latent” 潜在的 content.
is that all
human behavior
is motivated
ultimately by
what we would call sexuality.
•Ernest Jones points out that Hamlet as a psychoneurotic may be traced to the hero’s
• Jones proposes that Hamlet's conflict is "an echo of a similar one in Shakespeare himself," and goes on to account for the audience's powerful and continued response to the play, over many centuries, as a result of the repressed Oedipal conflict that is shared by all men.
Freud on literary criticism
• Freud asserted that many of his views had been anticipated by insightful authors in Western literature, and he himself applied psychoanalysis to brief discussions of the latent content in the manifest characters or events of literary works including Shakespeare's Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and King Lear.
• The character of the ghost and Claudius are dramatic projections of Hamlet’s own conscious-unconscious ambivalence toward the father figure. The ghost represents the conscious ideal of fatherhood. His view of Claudius represents Hamlet’s repressed hostility toward his father as a rival for his mother’s affection.
• Freud had developed the dynamic form of psychology that he called psychoanalysis as a means of analysis and therapy for neuroses, but soon expanded it to account for many developments and practices in the history of civilization, including warfare, mythology, and religion, as well as literature and the other arts.
• The foundation of Freud’s contribution to modern psychology is his emphasis on the unconscious aspects of the human psyche.
• Freud’s second
major premise