Psychoanalysis in Literature: A Few Words
Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways." - Sigmund Freud
Let us imagine. You entered your home, utterly exhausted. The moment you entered your home, you saw your parents having an argument. You needed to eat something. You asked your mother to give you something to eat. In the meanwhile, your mother got angry at you. Your father also got steamed up. After finding yourself completely innocent, you said, “ what have I done wrong? Why are you guys taking it out on me? I just came home, knowing nothing. And you have made me part of your argument without me asking for it”. Your parents were practicing a psychoanalytic concept called Displacement, it is a situation in which we transfer our anger with one person onto another person normally to someone who we know would not fight back. There are so many such concepts frequent in our day to day life namely rivalry among siblings, complexes, and defense mechanisms but unfortunately, we don’t consider them important and believe on the external and immediate causes of such behavioral manifestations.
We all have a psychological past. Each moment in our childhood such as connection with our parents and siblings, role in family dynamics, (a love affair with our beloved), confrontation with someone holding adverse opinions about what we hold important and many more such events that we experienced in our childhood and adulthood significantly influence our personality, world view, relations, profession, family set-up and most importantly our decisions in the present life. No single one of our childhood moments be ignored when talking about psychoanalysis. It helps us understand the patterns of behavior in our character. Understanding the basic concept of Psychoanalysis does make our life easier in that we behave differently having once gone through its basic ideas. Though it helps us understand different patterns of our behavior in real life, it is also productive in literature. Since literature is a deep observation of society, people in society and their relationship to each other in a systematic and artistic manner, psychoanalysis helps us unravel the secret behind Oscar Wild’s Dorian Gray, strangling himself to death. It also sheds light on Lady Macbeth’s insomnia, Hamlet’s indecision, Bronte’s Heathcliff and Catherine and their love affair. In short, you observe a character transgressing from the so called rituals and boundaries of our moral life in any story, he suffers or experiences psychological traumas.
Sigmund Freud, the Austrian neurologist, pioneered the idea of Psychoanalysis. It is a method of treating different psychological problems thorough dialogues. A clinical psychologist indulges a patient in a conversation, leading him to express the real causes of his current state. Psychoanalysis became influential when Sigmund Freud gave his famous idea of Unconscious Mind. According to Freud, human beings are driven, motivated or significantly influenced by desires, needs, fears, and conflicts of which they have no idea. This idea was developed into what is now called the Unconscious. It is the repository of those oppressed desires, unresolved conflicts, unwanted fears, strange outcomes of relationships, painful and emotional events and thoughts that we want to keep aside and never want to remember or experience as their expression results in our emotional and psychological control, leading us to experience many an abnormality. Therefore, we want to keep them in the Unconscious. In short, unconscious is that part of our mind that we don’t know about but it directs our behavior and shapes our personality.
The unconscious comes into being when we are very young through repression. It is the process of intentionally oppressing or expunging unwanted desires and experiences from our conscious mind. However, repression does not eliminate these problems but it transfers them into the Unconscious part of our mind which heavily influences our current life. Usually, we don’t analyze what we do or how we behave in the ways we do because we sometimes don’t know what we do is abnormal due to repression. Moreover, we cannot know the real causes of our behavioral patterns unless we completely analyze them and that we don’t want to know and avoid it further through distortion and disguise. For example, I had been living with my partner and suddenly, I was cheated upon. After some time, though my partner will still haunt me, I will try to connect to a friend, a teacher, or even an animal or anything that resembles my partner to re-enact and live my past life and experience the same relationship–which is impossible because it was not successful, so if this gets successful, I would still want it to end.
Similarly, as mentioned before, family plays a vital role in shaping our unconscious. It actually commences in the family structure. Each of us lives our familial relationship. Things like rivalry among siblings, value or role playing, attachment and detachment of parents, and different complexes heavily shape our personality and unconscious mind. However, such things are normal and are considered developmental stages that everyone lives. What is not fruitful is our persistence on being influenced by them and our weakness to get through them that can prove detrimental to our psychological and social life. Several examples can be given in this regard. The most common one is the Oedipal attachments. There is a great example quoted by Lois Tyson. Men while living Oedipal attachments divide women into good-girl/bad-girls. For instance, if I long for my mother’s attention and I was not given it due to my father’s control over my mother, then I will live with this trauma till adulthood. This emptiness can be only filled if I find someone like my mother with whom I can experience my emotional relationship. There is a sexual urge in such a connection which I cannot fulfill due the sacred relationship I have with my mother. So those I feel comfortable having sex with are counted as bad girls and those I feel comfortable having pure, non-sexual relation with are counted as good girls. The thing is if I am unable to recognize the root cause of this issue, then I will not be able to change my relation. This can only be done through psychoanalysis.
Other most important factors are the defenses used to overshadow our latent issues and experience or sustain our current destructive behavioral patterns. Defenses are used not to realize our real issues and through which content of our unconscious is kept oppressed because around the current behavioral patterns we have shaped our identities and social roles that we don’t want to loose. Several defenses are used for such purposes. For instance, selective perception can be used to hear or listen to what we tolerate or absorb to listen to. Similarly, selective memory is used to modify our memory to forget our painful experience, which will surely influence our behavior without us knowing it. Denial is the idea that no negative things and unpleasant problems exist in our lives. Projection is when we attribute our fears, pain or problems to some else and making them responsible for them, including Regression—the temporary return to our actual psychological state and Active Reversal.
In relation to that, Dreams and the different symbols in dreams are also central to classical Freudian psychoanalysis. During our dreams, defenses don’t cooperate the same way as they do when we are awake. We can clearly express our true selves in our dreams. But, dreams do have defenses. The defense that we have in our dream is ‘Dream Distortion’. The two main words to remember are Latent Content and Manifest Content. The first one is the actual expression of our oppressed feelings and desires, which is altered by the defenses, dream Displacement and Condensation, whereas the latter is the altered version of what we experience in our dream. Each and everything we see or experience in our dream has a hidden meaning and concept related to our unconscious mind. The latent content of our dream is never found as we try to change it even when we are awake. Our forgets it as when do a secondary revision we don’t remember the whole dream because of our defenses. But we can interpret the manifest content in various ways. Similarly, death and sexuality are also significant to the study of Psycho analysis.
In literature, it was used to analyze the behavior of author or a character. For example, if I am reading Oscar Wild’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, then I can trace whatever the character practices to its author himself and he is crafted by him. When we read something with the lens of psychoanalysis, it is pertinent to remember that we have to discover or detect whatever has been practised or discussed above. We can analyze a character in a novel by understanding his behavioral patterns, relationships with other characters, defense mechanisms used by him, his dreams, sexual connection and so on. We can also focus on the narrator’s state of mind and the author’s personality from the work. Some of the main points to remember while analyzing a text psychoanalytically are given below:
• Focus on how does repression work its way throughout the text. Is there any instance in which the character is influenced by his unconscious motives.
• Can you find an Oedipal complexes in the work? Does the character find himself influenced by his childhood experiences?
• Are there any instances of projection, displacements, selective memory, denial, avoidance, regression or temporary revival? How do these defenses influence the character and the plot of the story?
• Does the character dream? What symbols frequent his dreams? Interpret them subjectively.
• Does the text reveal anything about the personal life of the author?
• What does the text suggest about the collective response of readers towards interpreting a character?
This was a short introduction to Freudian Psychoanalysis. Remember, these ideas are heavily criticized by different critics and are updated or reinterpreted by Jacques Lacan in his works. It is advised the readers must read both explanatory and critical works written by different literary theorists.