Psychoanalytic Criticism and jane Eyre | Study notes Psychology

Psychoanalytic Criticism

and

Jane

Eyre

WHAT IS PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM?

It seems natural to think about literature in terms of dreams. Like

dreams, literary works are fictions, inventions of the mind that, al-

though based on reality, are by definition not literally true. Like a literary

work, a dream may have some truth to tell, but, like a literary work, it

may need to be interpreted before that truth can be grasped. We can

live vicariously through romantic fictions, much as we can through

daydreams. Terrifying novels and nightmares affect us in much the

same way, plunging us into an atmosphere that continues to cling, even

after the last chapter has been read — or the alarm clock

has sounded.

The notion that dreams allow such psychic explorations, of course,

like the analogy between literary works and dreams, owes a great deal to

the thinking of Sigmund Freud, the famous Austrian psychoanalyst who

in 1900 published a seminal essay,

The Interpretation of Dreams.

But is

the reader who feels that Emily Bronte's

Wuthering Heights

dreamlike — who feels that Mary Shelley's

Frankenstein

is night-

marish — necessarily a Freudian literary critic? To some extent the answer

has to be yes. We are all Freudians, really, whether or not we have read a

single work by Freud. At one time or another, most of us have referred

to ego, libido, complexes, unconscious desires, and sexual repression.

The premises of Freud's thought have changed the way the

WHAT IS PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM?

Western world thinks about itself. Psychoanalytic criticism has influ-

enced the teachers our teachers studied with, the works of scholarship

and criticism they read, and the critical and creative writers we read as

well.

What Freud did was develop a language that described, a model that

explained, a theory that encompassed human psychology. Many of the

elements of psychology he sought to describe and explain are present in

the literary works of various ages and cultures, from Sophocles' Oedipus

Rex to Shakespeare's Hamlet to works being written in our own day.

When the great novel of the twenty-first century is written, many of these

same elements of psychology will probably inform its discourse as well.

If, by understanding human psychology according to Freud, we can

appreciate literature on a new level, then we should acquaint ourselves

with his insights.

Freud's theories are either directly or indirectly concerned with the nature

of the unconscious mind. Freud didn't invent the notion of the

unconscious; others before him had suggested that even the supposedly

"sane" human mind was conscious and rational only at times, and even

then at possibly only one level. But Freud went further, suggesting that

the powers motivating men and women are mainly and normally

unconscious.

Freud, then, powerfully developed an old idea: that the human mind

is essentially dual in nature. He called the predominantly passional,

irrational, unknown, and unconscious part of the psyche the id, or "it."

The ego, or "I," was his term for the predominantly rational, logical,

orderly, conscious part. Another aspect of the psyche, which he called

the superego, is really a projection of the ego. The superego almost

seems to be outside of the self, making moral judgments, telling us to

make sacrifices for good causes even though self-sacrifice may not be

quite logical or rational. And, in a sense, the superego is "outside," since

much of what it tells us to do or think we have learned from our parents,

our schools,.or our religious institutions.

What the ego and superego tell us not to do or think is repressed,

forced into the unconscious mind. One of Freud's most important

contributions to the study of the psyche, the theory of repression, goes

something like this: much of what lies in the unconscious mind has

been put there by consciousness, which acts as a censor, driving under-

ground unconscious or conscious thoughts or instincts that it deems

unacceptable. Censored materials often involve infantile sexual desires,

Freud postulated. Repressed to an unconscious state, they emerge only

Partial preview of the text

Download Psychoanalytic Criticism and jane Eyre and more Study notes Psychology in PDF only on Docsity!

Psychoanalytic

Criticism

and

Jane

Eyre

WHAT IS PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM?

It seems natural to think about literature in terms of dreams. Like

dreams, literary works are fictions, inventions of the mind that, al- though based on reality, are by definition not literally true. Like a literary work, a dream may have some truth to tell, but, like a literary work, it may need to be interpreted before that truth can be grasped. We can live vicariously through romantic fictions, much as we can through daydreams. Terrifying novels and nightmares affect us in much the same way, plunging us into an atmosphere that continues to cling, even after the last chapter has been read — or the alarm clock^ has sounded.

The notion that dreams allow such psychic explorations, of course,

like the analogy between literary works and dreams, owes a great deal to the thinking of Sigmund Freud, the famous Austrian psychoanalyst who in 1900 published a seminal essay,

The Interpretation of Dreams.

But is

the

reader

who

feels

that

Emily

Bronte's

Wuthering

Heights

is

dreamlike — who feels that Mary Shelley's

Frankenstein

is night-

marish — necessarily a Freudian literary critic? To some extent the answer has to be yes. We are all Freudians, really, whether or not we have read a single work by Freud. At one time or another, most of us have referred to ego, libido, complexes, unconscious desires, and sexual repression. The premises of Freud's thought have changed the way the

WHAT IS PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM?

Western world thinks about itself. Psychoanalytic criticism has influ- enced the teachers our teachers studied with, the works of scholarship and criticism they read, and the critical and creative writers

we

read as

well.

What Freud did was develop a language that described, a model that

explained, a theory that encompassed human psychology. Many of the elements of psychology he sought to describe and explain are present in the literary works of various ages and cultures, from Sophocles'

Oedipus

Rex

to Shakespeare's

Hamlet

to works being written in our own day.

When the great novel of the twenty-first century is written, many of these same elements of psychology will probably inform its discourse as well. If, by understanding human psychology according to Freud, we can appreciate literature on a new level, then we should acquaint ourselves with his insights. Freud's theories are either directly or indirectly concerned with the nature of

the

unconscious

mind.

Freud

didn't

invent

the

notion

of

the

unconscious; others before him had suggested that even the supposedly "sane" human mind was conscious and rational only at times, and even then at possibly only one level. But Freud went further, suggesting that the powers motivating men and women are

mainly

and

normally

unconscious.

Freud, then, powerfully developed an old idea: that the human mind

is essentially dual in nature. He called the predominantly passional, irrational, unknown, and unconscious part of the psyche the

id,

or "it."

The

ego,

or "I," was his term for the predominantly rational, logical,

orderly, conscious part. Another aspect of the psyche, which he called the

superego,

is really a projection of the ego. The superego almost

seems to be outside of the self, making moral judgments, telling us to make sacrifices for good causes even though self-sacrifice may not be quite logical or rational. And, in a sense, the superego

is

"outside," since

much of what it tells us to do or think we have learned from our parents, our schools,.or our religious institutions.

What the ego and superego tell us

not

to do or think is repressed,

forced into the unconscious mind. One of Freud's most important contributions to the study of the psyche, the theory of repression, goes something like this: much of what lies in the unconscious mind has been put there by consciousness, which acts as a censor, driving under- ground unconscious or conscious thoughts or instincts that it deems unacceptable. Censored materials often involve infantile sexual desires, Freud postulated. Repressed to an unconscious state, they emerge only

in disguised forms: in dreams, in language (so-called Freudian slips), in creative activity that may produce art (including literature), and in neurotic behavior. According to Freud, all of us have repressed wishes and fears; we all have dreams in which repressed feelings and memories emerge disguised, and thus we are all potential candidates for dream analysis. One of the unconscious desires most commonly repressed is the childhood wish to displace the parent of our own sex and take his or her place in the affections of the parent of the opposite sex. This desire really involves a number of different but related wishes and fears. (A boy — and it should be remarked in passing that Freud here concerns himself mainly with the male — may fear that his father will castrate him, and he may wish that his mother would return to nursing him.) Freud referred to the whole complex of feelings by the word "oedi-pal," naming the complex after the Greek tragic hero Oedipus, who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother. Why are oedipal wishes and fears repressed by the conscious side of the mind? And what happens to them after they have been censored? As Roy P. Easier puts it in Sex, Symbolism, and Psychology in Literature (1975), "from the beginning of recorded history such wishes have been restrained by the most powerful religious and social taboos, and as a result have come to be regarded as 'unnatural,'" even though "Freud found that such wishes are more or less characteristic of normal human development": In dreams, particularly, Freud found ample evidence that such wishes persisted.... Hence he conceived that natural urges, when identified as "wrong," may be repressed but not obliterated.... In the unconscious, these urges take on symbolic garb, regarded as nonsense by the waking mind that does not recognize their significance. (14) Freud's belief in the significance of dreams, of course, was no more original than his belief that there is an unconscious side to the psyche. Again, it was the extent to which he developed a theory of how dreams work — and the extent to which that theory helped him, by analogy, to understand far more than just dreams

that made him unusual, important, and influential beyond the perimeters of medical schools and psychiatrists' offices.^ The psychoanalytic approach to literature not only rests on the theories^ of Freud; it may even be said to have begun with Freud, who was PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM WHAT IS PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM? 504 505 interested in writers, especially those who relied heavily on symbols. Such writers regularly cloak or mystify ideas in figures that make sense only when interpreted, much as the unconscious mind of a neurotic disguises secret thoughts in dream stories or bizarre actions that need to be interpreted by an analyst. Freud's interest in literary artists led him to make some unfortunate generalizations about creativity; for example, in the twenty-third lecture in Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1922), he defined the artist as "one urged on by instinctive needs that are too clamorous" (314). But it also led him to write creative literary criticism of his own, including an influential essay on "The Relation of a Poet to Daydreaming" (1908) and "The Uncanny" (1919), a provocative psychoanalytic reading of E. T. A. Hoff-mann's supernatural tale "The Sandman." Freud's application of psychoanalytic theory to literature quickly caught on. In 1909, only a year after Freud had published "The Relation of a Poet to Daydreaming," the psychoanalyst Otto Rank published The Myth of the Birth of the Hero. In that work, Rank subscribes to the notion that the artist turns a powerful, secret wish into a literary fantasy, and he uses Freud's notion about the "oedipal" complex to explain why the popular stories of so many heroes in literature are so similar. A year after Rank had published his psychoanalytic account of heroic texts, Ernest Jones, Freud's student and eventual biographer, turned his attention to a tragic text: Shakespeare's Hamlet. In an essay first published in the American Journal of Psychology, Jones, like Rank, makes use of the oedipal concept: he suggests that Hamlet is a victim of strong feelings toward his mother, the queen. Between 1909 and 1949 numerous other critics decided that psy- chological and psychoanalytic theory could assist in the understanding of literature. I. A. Richards, Kenneth Burke, and Edmund Wilson were among the most influential to become interested in the new approach. Not all of the early critics were committed to the approach; neither were all of them Freudians. Some followed Alfred Adler, who believed that writers wrote out of inferiority complexes, and others applied the ideas of Carl Gustav Jung, who had broken with Freud over Freud's emphasis on sex and who had developed a theory of the collective unconscious. According to Jungian theory, a great work of literature is not a disguised expression of its author's personal, repressed wishes; rather, it is a manifestation of desires once held by the whole human race but now repressed because of the advent of civilization. It is important to point out that among those who relied on Freud's models were a number of critics who were poets and novelists

he writes, "one considers it as though it were a dream or as though some ideal patient [were speaking] from the couch in iambic pentameter." One "looks for the general level or levels of fantasy associated with the language. By level I mean the familiar stages of childhood development — oral [when desires for nourishment and infantile sexual desires overlap], anal [when infants receive their primary pleasure from defecation], urethral [when urinary functions are the locus of sexual pleasure], phallic [when the penis or, in girls, some penis substitute is of primary interest], oedipal." Holland continues by analyzing not Robert Frost but Frost's poem "Mending Wall" as a specifically oral fantasy that is not unique to its author. "Mending Wall" is "about breaking down the wall which marks the separated or individuated self so as to return to a state of closeness to some Other" — including and perhaps essentially the nursing mother ("Unconscious" 136, 139). While not denying the idea that the unconscious plays a role in cre- ativity, psychoanalytic critics such as Holland began to focus more on the ways in which authors create works that appeal to our repressed wishes and fantasies. Consequently, they shifted their focus away from the psyche of the author and toward the psychology of the reader and the text. Holland's theories, which have concerned themselves more with the reader than with the text, have helped to establish another school of critical theory: reader-response criticism. Elizabeth Wright explains Holland's brand of modern psychoanalytic criticism in this way: "What draws us as readers to a text is the secret expression of what we desire to hear, much as we protest we do not. The disguise must be good enough to fool the censor into thinking that the text is respectable, but bad enough to allow the unconscious to glimpse the unrespectable" (117). Holland is one of dozens of critics who have revised Freud signifi- cantly in the process of revitalizing psychoanalytic criticism. Another such critic is R. D. Laing, whose controversial and often poetical writings about personality, repression, masks, and the double or "schizoid" self have (re)blurred the boundary between creative writing and psychoanalytic discourse. Yet another is D. W. Winnicott, an "object relations" theorist who has had a significant impact on literary criticism. Critics influenced by Winnicott and his school have questioned the tendency to see reader/text as an either/or construct; instead, they have seen reader and text (or audience and play) in terms of a relationship 508 taking place in what Winnicott calls a "transitional" or "potential space"^ — space in which binary terms like real and illusory, objective and^ subjective, have little or no meaning. PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM WHAT is PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

?^

Psychoanalytic theorists influenced by Winnicott see the transi- tional or potential reader/text (or audience/play) space as being like the space entered into by psychoanalyst and patient. More important, they also see it as being similar to the space between mother and infant: a space characterized by trust in which categorizing terms such as knowing and feeling mix and merge and have little meaning apart from one another. Whereas Freud saw the mother-son relationship in terms of the son and his repressed oedipal complex (and saw the analyst-patient relationship in terms of the patient and the repressed "truth" that the analyst could scientifically extract), object-relations analysts see both relationships as dyadic — that is, as being dynamic in both directions. Consequently, they don't depersonalize analysis or their analyses. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that contemporary literary critics who apply object-relations theory to the texts they discuss don't depersonalize critics or categorize their interpretations as "truthful," at least, not in any objective or scientific sense. In the view of such critics, interpretations are made of language — itself a transitional object — and are themselves the mediating terms or transitional objects of a relationship. Like critics of the Winnicottian School, the French structuralist theorist Jacques Lacan focuses on language and language-related issues. He treats the unconscious <wa language and, consequently, views the dream not as Freud did (that is, as a form and symptom of repression) but rather as a form of discourse. Thus we may study dreams psychoanalytically in order to learn about literature, even as we may study literature in order to learn more about the unconscious. In Lacan's seminar on Poe's "The Purloined Letter," a pattern of repetition like that used by psychoanalysts in their analyses is used to arrive at a reading of the story. According to Wright, "the new psychoanalytic structural approach to literature" employs "analogies from psychoanalysis... to explain the workings of the text as distinct from the workings of a particular author's, character's, or even reader's mind" (125). Lacan, however, did far more than extend Freud's theory of dreams, literature, and the interpretation of both. More significantly, he took Freud's whole theory of psyche and gender and added to it a crucial third term — that of language. In the process, he both used and significantly developed Freud's ideas about the oedipal stage and complex. Lacan points out that the pre-oedipal stage, in which the child at first does not even recognize its independence from its mother, is also a prcverbal stage, one in which the child communicates without

the medium of language, or — if we insist on calling the child's com- munications a language — in a language that can only be called literal. ("Coos," certainly, cannot be said to be figurative or symbolic.) Then, while still in the pre-oedipal stage, the child enters the mirror stage. During the mirror period, the child comes to view itself and its mother, later other people as well, as independent selves. This is the stage in which the child is first able to fear the aggressions of another, to desire what is recognizably beyond the self (initially the mother), and, finally, to want to compete with another for the same, desired object. This is also the stage at which the child first becomes able to feel sympathy with another being who is being hurt by a third, to cry when another cries. All of these developments, of course, involve projecting beyond the self and, by extension, constructing one's own self (or "ego" or "I") as others view one — that is, as another. Such constructions, according to Lacan, are just that: constructs, products, artifacts — fictions of coherence that in fact hide what Lacan calls the "absence" or "lack" of being. The mirror stage, which Lacan also refers to as the imaginary stage, is fairly quickly succeeded by the oedipal stage. As in Freud, this stage begins when the child, having come to view itself as self and the father and mother as separate selves, perceives gender and gender differences between its parents and between itself and one of its parents. For boys, gender awareness involves another, more powerful recognition, for the recognition of the father's phallus as the mark of his difference from the mother involves, at the same time, the recognition that his older and more powerful father is also his rival. That, in turn, leads to the understanding that what once seemed wholly his and even indistinguishable from himself is in fact someone else's: something properly desired only at a distance and in the form of socially accept able substitutes. The fact that the oedipal stage roughly coincides with the entry of the child into language is extremely important for Lacan. For the linguistic order is essentially a figurative or "Symbolic order"; words are not the things they stand for but are, rather, stand-ins or substitutes for those things. Hence boys, who in the most critical period of their development have had to submit to what Lacan calls the "Law of the Father" — a law that prohibits direct desire for and communicative intimacy with what has been the boy's whole world — enter more easily into the realm of language and the Symbolic order than do girls, who have never really had to renounce that which once seemed continuous with the self: the mother. The gap that has been opened up for boys, which includes the gap between signs and what they substitute — the gap marked by the phallus and encoded with the boy's sense of his maleness — has not opened up for girls, or has not opened up in the same way, to the same degree. For Lacan, the father need not be present to trigger the oedipal stage; nor does his phallus have to be seen to catalyze the boy's (easier) transition into the Symbolic order. Rather, Lacan argues, a child's recognition of its gender is intricately tied up with a growing recognition of the system of names and naming, part of the larger system of substitutions we call language. A child has little doubt about who its mother is, but who is its father, and how would one know? The father's claim rests on the mother's word that he is in fact the father; the father's relationship to the child is thus established through language and a system of marriage and kinship — names — that in turn is basic to rules of everything from property to law. The name of the father ( nom au pere, which in French sounds like non du pere) involves, in a sense, nothing of the father — nothing, that is, except his word or name. Lacan's development of Freud has had several important results. First, his sexist-seeming association of maleness with the Symbolic order, together with his claim that women cannot therefore enter easily into the order, has prompted feminists not to reject his theory out of hand but, rather, to look more closely at the relation between language and gender, language and women's inequality. Some feminists have gone so far as to suggest that the social and political relationships between male and female will not be fundamentally altered until lan- guage itself has been radically changed. (That change might begin di- alectically, with the development of some kind of "feminine language" grounded in the presymbolic, literal-to-imaginary, communication be- tween mother and child.) Second, Lacan's theory has proved of interest to deconstructors and other poststructuralists, in part because it holds that the ego (which in Freud's view is as necessary as it is natural) is a product or construct. The ego-artifact, produced during the mirror stage, seems at once unified, consistent, and organized around a determinate center. But the unified self, or ego, is a fiction, according to Lacan. The yoking together of fragments and destructively dissimilar elements takes its psychic toll, and it is the job of the Lacanian psychoanalyst to "deconstruct," as it were, the ego, to show its continuities to be contradictions as well. WHAT IS PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM? 5io PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

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Download Psychoanalytic Criticism and jane Eyre and more Study notes Psychology in PDF only on Docsity!

Psychoanalytic

Criticism

and

Jane

Eyre

WHAT IS PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM?

It seems natural to think about literature in terms of dreams. Like

The notion that dreams allow such psychic explorations, of course,

like the analogy between literary works and dreams, owes a great deal to the thinking of Sigmund Freud, the famous Austrian psychoanalyst who in 1900 published a seminal essay,

The Interpretation of Dreams.

But is

the

reader

who

feels

that

Emily

Bronte's

Wuthering

Heights

is

dreamlike — who feels that Mary Shelley's

Frankenstein

is night-

Western world thinks about itself. Psychoanalytic criticism has influ- enced the teachers our teachers studied with, the works of scholarship and criticism they read, and the critical and creative writers

we

read as

well.

What Freud did was develop a language that described, a model that

explained, a theory that encompassed human psychology. Many of the elements of psychology he sought to describe and explain are present in the literary works of various ages and cultures, from Sophocles'

Oedipus

Rex

to Shakespeare's

Hamlet

to works being written in our own day.

the

unconscious

mind.

Freud

didn't

invent

the

notion

of

the

unconscious; others before him had suggested that even the supposedly "sane" human mind was conscious and rational only at times, and even then at possibly only one level. But Freud went further, suggesting that the powers motivating men and women are

mainly

and

normally

unconscious.

Freud, then, powerfully developed an old idea: that the human mind

is essentially dual in nature. He called the predominantly passional, irrational, unknown, and unconscious part of the psyche the

id,

or "it."

The

ego,

or "I," was his term for the predominantly rational, logical,

orderly, conscious part. Another aspect of the psyche, which he called the

superego,

is really a projection of the ego. The superego almost

seems to be outside of the self, making moral judgments, telling us to make sacrifices for good causes even though self-sacrifice may not be quite logical or rational. And, in a sense, the superego

is

"outside," since

much of what it tells us to do or think we have learned from our parents, our schools,.or our religious institutions.

What the ego and superego tell us

not

to do or think is repressed,

?^