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Psychoanalytical Criticism - Sigmund Freud

It is with considerable intellectual excitement that we inaugurate this publication, dedicated to the intricate and often unsettling dialogue between the literary arts and the profound depths of the human psyche. Our guiding spirit in this endeavour is none other than Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the Viennese neurologist whose theorie for better or worse, irrevocably altered the landscape of how we understand ourselves, our societies, and the stories we tell.

The newsletter Psychoanalytical Criticism - Sigmund Freud seeks to illuminate the complex interconnections between literature and the discourses of insanity. We shall examine the potent relationship between writing and the formation of identity, and scrutinise the interwoven threads of social, medical, and historical constructions of madness. Our investigation will lead us into the labyrinth of selfhood, asking how it is shaped by language, distorted by gender expectations, and articulated—or shattered—by madness.

Introduction 

To the uninitiated, the application of psychoanalytic theory to a sonnet or a novel might seem an eccentric, even reductive, exercise. However, Freud himself understood that the pathways of the unconscious mind are not dissimilar to the structures of a story. Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism is not merely about diagnosing fictional characters; it is a form of criticism that uses the techniques and theories of psychoanalysis as a lens to interpret literature. It proceeds from the foundational premise that the human mind, with its conflicts, desires, and fears, is the primary source of creative expression.

Literature, in this view, becomes a controlled space where the chaotic contents of the unconscious can be safely explored, disguised, and enacted. The writer’s creativity is a form of dreaming while awake, and the literary work itself is a manifestation of deep psychological processes.

Key Concepts:

To navigate this terrain, one must be equipped with the fundamental vocabulary of Freudian thought. Below is a detailed glossary of essential terms.

• The Unconscious

Ø 

Explanation: This is the cornerstone of Freud’s entire edifice. The unconscious is a vast, dynamic region of the psyche lying beneath the conscious mind. It is a repository for thoughts, memories, desires, and fears that are too threatening, painful, or socially unacceptable to be admitted into conscious awareness. It is not passive; it exerts a constant and powerful influence on our conscious thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. In literary terms, a character’s overt motives (conscious) may be driven by hidden, repressed forces (unconscious), creating depth, tension, and tragedy.

• Repression

Ø  Explanation: This is the primary defence mechanism of the psyche. It is the process of actively forgetting, ignoring, or pushing unresolved conflicts, unadmitted desires, or traumatic past events out of conscious awareness and into the dungeon of the unconscious. The underlying assumption is that when a wish, fear, or memory is too difficult to face, we repress it. However, this does not eliminate it. The repressed material remains alive and active, perpetually seeking a return, often in disguised forms—through dreams, slips of the tongue (parapraxes, or "Freudian slips"), and, crucially, through creative writing and artistic expression.

• The Oedipus Complex

Ø  Explanation: Perhaps Freud's most (in)famous concept, and one central to understanding identity formation. Freud proposed that during the phallic stage of development (around ages 3-5), a male child conceives a deep-seated sexual desire for his mother and a concomitant wish to eliminate his father, who is seen as a rival. This creates immense psychic conflict, fuelled by love for the father and fear of his retaliation (castration anxiety). The complex is eventually resolved when the child identifies with the father and internalises societal norms. Freudian critics, like Ernest Jones, have used this to interpret literary works, most famously Hamlet, arguing that Hamlet’s paralysis stems from his unconscious identification with his uncle Claudius, who has actually done what Hamlet himself (burdened by an Oedipus complex) had secretly desired: killed the father and possessed the mother.

• Libido, Eros, and Thanatos

Ø  Explanation: The libido is the psychic energy associated with the sexual drive, the force behind our desires. Freud later expanded this into a more generalised concept of life instincts, which he termed Eros (from the Greek god of love). Eros represents the drive toward life, creation, propagation, and unity. Its opposite is Thanatos (from the Greek personification of death), the death instinct. Thanatos is the drive towards aggression, destruction, and a return to an inorganic state. This fundamental tension between creation and destruction, love and aggression, is a powerful engine for drama and conflict in literature.

• The Psychic Apparatus: Id, Ego, Superego

Ø  Explanation: Freud later proposed a tripartite model of the psyche:

§  The Id: The completely unconscious, primitive part of the mind. It is the seat of our basic biological drives and instincts (sex, hunger, aggression). It operates on the pleasure principle—it seeks immediate gratification without any regard for reality, consequences, or morality. A character wholly consumed by the id would be a monstrous, impulsive creature.

§  The Ego: The largely conscious part that mediates between the demands of the id, the constraints of the real world, and the morals of the superego. It operates on the reality principle, employing reason and strategy to satisfy the id's desires in socially acceptable ways. The ego is the hero navigating a difficult world.

§  The Superego: The internalised representative of societal and parental values, our conscience. It strives for perfection, judges our actions, and produces feelings of pride or, more often, guilt. A character dominated by a harsh superego might be crippled by anxiety or act with rigid, unforgiving morality.

• Dream Work: Condensation and Displacement

Ø  Explanation: Freud called dreams the "royal road to the unconscious." However, the unconscious wish cannot appear directly; it is censored by the ego. Therefore, it undergoes a process of transformation called dream work.

§  Condensation: Multiple dream thoughts, figures, or anxieties are combined and compressed into a single dream image. For example, a dream character might have the face of a teacher, the job of your father, and the voice of a film star, representing a composite of authority figures.

§  Displacement: The psychic intensity or importance of a subject is detached from its real object and transferred onto a seemingly unimportant one. A deep anxiety about one’s career might be displaced into a dream about misplacing your car keys. In literature, this operates through symbolism and metaphor.

Writing the Self: Literature, Madness, and Identity Formation

The act of writing is, in itself, a profound engagement with identity. One constructs a self on the page, a process that can either shore up a fragile ego or expose its fractures. Freudian theory provides a framework for understanding this process.

The Author's Unconscious: A traditional Freudian approach might treat the literary text as a symptom of the author’s own psychology. The work becomes a playground for the author’s repressed desires and unresolved conflicts. The famous application of this is Freud’s own reading of Hamlet, which he linked to Shakespeare’s own experience of grieving his father and the death of his son, Hamnet. The play, in this view, is a disguised working-through of the author’s Oedipal anxieties.

The Character's Psyche: More commonly, the critic analyses the fictional characters as if they were real patients, mapping their motivations and conflicts onto Freudian models. Why does a character self-sabotage? It may be a superego punishing an ego that has entertained an id-driven desire. Why the obsession with a particular object? It may be a symbolically displaced desire. This reading excavates the hidden psychological depths beneath the plot.

The Discourses of Insanity: Social, Medical, and Historical Constructions

Madness is never just a medical condition. It is a cultural construct, its definition shifting across history and society. Literature both reflects and shapes these discourses.

• Social Construction: Societies define madness by what they deem irrational, immoral, or disruptive. The "mad" individual is often the one who violates social norms—particularly around gender, as we shall see. Literature can reinforce these constructions (the raving, dangerous lunatic) or challenge them, presenting the "mad" character as a truth-teller whose vision sees through the hypocrisy of society (e.g., the Fool in King Lear).
• Medical Construction: The 19th century, Freud’s formative period, saw madness increasingly medicalised, moved from the realm of morality or superstition to that of science and pathology. Freud was a product of this, yet his "talking cure" also represented a move away from purely biological explanations, focusing instead on life history and repressed trauma. Literature of the period, from Charlotte Gilman’s "The Yellow Wallpaper" to the works of Dostoevsky, engages directly with the medical treatment of "hysteria" and "nervous disorders," often criticising its oppressive practices.
• Historical Construction: What was considered melancholia in the Renaissance is not identical to modern depression. The hysterical woman of the Victorian era is a specific historical figure. Psychoanalytic criticism must be historically aware, understanding that the forms madness takes are contingent on the time and place of their emergence.

The Gendered Self: Language, Hysteria, and the Female Voice

Nowhere is the interconnection between writing, identity, and madness more stark than in the context of gender. Freud’s theories, often criticised as deeply masculinist, were developed primarily through the study of female patients diagnosed with "hysteria"—a catch-all term for a suite of symptoms (anxiety, paralysis, hallucinations) that had no apparent physical cause.

Sigmund Freud listened to these women and concluded that their symptoms were not lies or biological flaws but the body’s language for expressing a psychic trauma that could not be spoken directly—a classic case of conversion, where a repressed psychological conflict is converted into a physical symptom. The hysteric’s body writes her distress where her voice cannot speak it.

For the female writer, then, writing could become a means to reclaim this voice. To write was to translate the silent, somatic language of hysteria into a shared, public discourse. It was a way to forge an identity against social and medical definitions that sought to silence her. Writers like Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf (who was intimately familiar with the medical discourse of her own "madness") explore this territory relentlessly. Their work demonstrates the struggle to articulate a self within a language and a society that often pathologises female passion, intelligence, and ambition as forms of insanity.

Beyond Freud - Jung and Lacan

While Freud is our focus, any student must be aware of the theorists who built upon and diverged from his work.

• Carl Jung: Freud’s protégé, Jung, broke away to develop Archetypal Criticism. He moved the focus from the personal unconscious to the collective unconscious—a psychic inheritance of universal, primordial patterns and images called archetypes (e.g., The Hero, The Mother, The Trickster). For Jung, literature is not a personal wish-fulfilment but a tapping into these shared archetypes, which evoke a powerful, universal response.
• Jacques Lacan: The most influential post-Freudian for literary theory, Lacan famously declared that "the unconscious is structured like a language." He fused psychoanalysis with linguistics. Key concepts include:

Ø  The Symbolic Order: The realm of language, law, and social structure, associated with the Name-of-the-Father.

Ø  The Imaginary: The pre-linguistic stage of identification with the mother, a realm of illusion and dyadic unity.

Ø  The Mirror Stage: The moment a child recognises its own image and begins to form an ego, though this ego is based on a misrecognition—an ideal-I that is forever alienated from the fragmented self within.

Ø  For Lacan, we are born into lack and desire, which language perpetually attempts to fill. Meaning is always deferred; the signifier (the word) never perfectly captures the signified (the concept). A Lacanian critic would thus look at a text not for hidden authorial desires, but for its gaps, slips, and contradictions—the points where language fails and the unconscious speaks. Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Purloined Letter" is a classic Lacanian text, where the letter itself becomes an unknowable signifier whose content is less important than the position it holds for each character, dictating their actions and desires.

Conclusion

The Freudian exploration of literature reveals it to be far more than mere entertainment. It is a crucial arena where the most fundamental struggles of the human condition are staged: the conflict between desire and prohibition, the construction of a self from the raw material of biology and society, and the constant, fraught negotiation between our conscious lives and the unseen depths of the unconscious. By examining the inter-relationships between writing, identity, and the historically constructed discourse of madness, we learn not only how to read texts more deeply, but also how to read the most complex text of all: ourselves.