Psychoanalytic Criticism

Psychoanalytic criticism is a method of interpretation based on psychological principles. Human behavior is always guided by their psychology. When we understand their psychology, we will know the deeper reality about them. The great 20th century psychologist, Sigmund Freud developed the theory of human psychology. He is the father of psychological theories. He talked about the conscious, sub-conscious and unconscious states of mind. He also developed the concepts of id, ego and super ego. He invented many other concepts such as oedipal complex, castration complex, sibling rivalry, dream displacement, dream condensation, repression and many other ideas. Psychoanalytic criticism tries to analyze all these elements found in the characters.

 Here, we mainly discuss the origin of the unconscious, defenses, anxiety and core issues, dreams and their symbols, meaning of death and sexuality and location psychoanalysis. According to psychoanalysis, unconscious is the storehouse of fears, needs, worries, guilty desires, troubles, wounds, and unsolved conflicts. We have many evil desires and fears. We try to control those guilty desires by our conscious mind but they are not erased. They are stored in the unconscious level. Therefore, unconscious is the storehouse of our mental wounds. Similarly, we try to control ourselves from these mental troubles and guilty desires in the conscious level. This effort is called the defenses. When we cannot control ourselves from these guilty desires, we enter into the stage of anxiety. They make us anxious. At that time, we have many hidden mental troubles which are called core issues. If the guilty desires are not fulfilled in our reality, they appear in our dreams. Our dreams are always guided by our psychology. Therefore, dreams have also important symbols. When we talk about dreams in psychoanalytic criticism, we should also know about dream displacement and dream condensation. Dream displacement means to replace the safe person in our sexual dream instead of unsafe person like close relatives. Dream condensation means to have the horrible dreams because of our mental troubles. All these ideas are the, subjects of psychoanalytic criticism. So, psychoanalysis is a method 0f interpretation that analyses all these elements.

            Sibling rivalry and Oedipus complex are related to family relationships while inferiority complex could be found in any relationships of hierarchy. Defense mechanism belongs to our psychological effort to defend ourselves from some difficult situation.

  Sibling rivalry is a kind of ego between brother and sisters in a family, Generally, We find sibling ego to get more love from their parents. If the parents love one child more than the other, the other becomes envious from the love one gets. Both of the children suffer from some kind of psychological trouble of the ego. The child who gets more love becomes afraid that he could lose love at any time. And the child, who gets less love from the parents, becomes envious to the other who has got more. As a result, they develop some kind of rivalry between them. This hidden psychological enmity between the siblings is called sibling rivalry in the theory of psychoanalysis. In the same way, Oedipus complex is another psychological trouble we find in family relations. Directly put, it is a kind of unconscious attraction between the children and their opposite sexed parents. According to classical psychoanalysis, human beings are sexual animals. Sigmund Freud says that there is some unconscious sexual attraction between the children and their opposite sexed parents. This unconscious sexual attraction between them is called Oedipus complex. Psychoanalysis contends that this unconscious attraction plays very important role even in the daily activities of them.

Next, inferiority complex is also a psychological trouble hidden in the mentality of some people who feel themselves inferior. It is the feeling of inferiority which causes detrimental humiliation in the person. It also causes the loss of self-esteem, and the unstable self. Inferiority complex is also as important as other psychological traumas. Finally, the defense mechanism is our psychological effort to save us from the unnecessary nervousness. Defense mechanism includes defense, anxiety and core issues. In other words, defenses are the processes to keep the troubles repressed. The process of defenses includes selective perception, selective memory, denial, avoidance, displacement, projection, and regression. If our defense mechanism became effective, we become normal and seem unaffected, but if the mechanism could not work, we enter into the stage of anxiety. At the time of anxiety, the defenses our defense mechanisms are broken as cannot work. We experience loneliness, frustration, depression, low self-esteem (loss of confidence), unsecure self, etc. In other words, anxiety manifests many core issues.