Dysfunctional Love and Behaviour

2017

Psychoanalysis is one of the modern theories that are used in English literature. It is a theory that is regarded as a theory of personality organization and the dynamics of personality that guides psychoanalysis. It is known that the closet connection between literature and psychoanalysis has always been deployed by the academic field of literary criticism or literary theory. Among the critical approaches to literature, the psychoanalysis has been one of the most controversial and for many readers the least appreciated. In spite of that it has been regarded one of the fascinating and rewarding approach in the application of interpretative analysis. This psychological interpretation has become one of the mechanisms to find out the hidden meaning of a literary text. It also helps to explore the innate conglomerate of the writer’s personality as factors that contribute to his experience from birth to the period of writing a book. The goal of psychoanalysis was to show that behaviour w...

Comparative Drama, 1973

2013

From the critic’s analysis of the author to the text’s analysis of the critic and from thepsychoanalysis of literature to the literature of psychoanalysis, what this paper seeks to offer is a dynamic perspective on the ways in which psychoanalytic criticism expanded and developed novel ways of approaching the literary text. It looks to show how the psychoanalytic reading of literary texts has been perpetually repositioning and reconsidering itself, how the roles between the object and the subject of analysis have been reversed and how the function of interpretation has shifted from a tool of diagnosis to a complex relation between text and interpreter. The main changes in the field are explored in light of three key themes: the perspective on the unconscious in literary study, the roles of the instances involved in the analytical/critical praxis and the relation between literature and psychoanalysis. After reviewing the previous models of critical analysis and their shortcomings, the focus is then turned towards some of the newer developments in the field. The examples from various types of critical readings serve to illustrate, not only the openness of this interdisciplinary approach, but also the plurality which characterizes it.

isara solutions, 2019

During the last two centuries, literature has been filled with newer innovative theories of analysis and criticism. In fact, these theories enable us to examine through newer ways of interpretation and evaluation a work of art for tracing deeper hidden otherwise unthought-of meanings. Among these newer methods, we have psychoanalysis as one of the significant theories of evaluation and interrogation. While commenting on the development of the theory of psychoanalysis, we can't ignore especially the main contribution made initially by Sigmund Freud and later Jacques Lacan with whom this school is specially associated. This school of psychoanalysis as a psychological theory was developed in the late 19 th and the 20 th centuries by these two well-known sound psychologists. However, the credit of establishing psychoanalysis as a full-fledged school primarily goes to Sigmund Freud and Lacan later simply modified and reoriented what Freud devised and developed during his entire career. This paper will put forward some reflections on psychoanalysis with special reference to these two psychoanalysts-Sigmund Freud & Jacques Lacanand thus this humble endeavour will enable us to know how this school of analysis works in literature as a theory.

The Example of Charles Mauron, 1984

1999

Literature Compass, 2006

Why has Shakespeare proved such profitable ground for psychoanalytic study? Part of the answer lies in the affinity between theatre, not just Shakespeare's, and psychoanalytic practice, an affinity recognized by Freud when he adapted Aristotle's idea of catharsis to his own "talking cure." This essay traces psychoanalytic criticism of Shakespeare from its origins in the work of Freud and Ernest Jones through studies by Jung, Rank, Lacan, Norman Holland, and others. In conclusion, the author presents a practical example of psychoanalytic Shakespeare criticism: a reading of The Tempest drawing on the object relations school of D. W. Winnicott.

2016

Examiner/examined, analyst/analysand, subject/object, sane/mad, science/art: the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature appears to conform to this binary logic, with the first term in each set clearly privileged over the second. The realm of the literary is populated with an impressive assortment of mad characters and mad authors: killers, junkies, drunkards, the paranoid, the depressed, the suicidal, the abandoned or the simply alienated. Literature inhabits and is inhabited by the pathological, or so it must have seemed to the armies of psychoanalytic critics who repeatedly turned to it. We seek to deconstruct this particular binary view of literature-as-madness, psychoanalysis-as-saneness by showing how a critic's preoccupation with the pathology of an author can sometimes expose his/her own unconscious complexes, desires or fears. With this in mind, we thus momentarily turn the examiner into the examined.