Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism with Others

Who: Sigmund Freud and his followers of Carl Jung and Jacques Lacan

What: A literary approach where critics see the text as if it were a kind of dream, where the text represses its real content behind obvious content. The process of changing from real to obvious content is known as the dream work, and critics analyze the language and symbolism of a text to reverse the process of the dream work and arrive at the underlying real thoughts.

Where: Hamburg, Germany. Freud was formulating his psychoanalytic beliefs there, and he reasoned that the same process that can be used to interpret dreams can be used to interpret literature.

When: Initially proposed in the 1890s, became popular in the 1920s and after.

Why: As hypothesized by many psychologists, certain events (mostly childhood events) are re-pressed by the holder. Only by talking about the past are these events brought up and re-solved. Characters in literary works can have a deep, underlying experience that affects how they deal with people or events. If one is to understand the present, then it is necessary to understand the past as that may very well have affected that person.

Marxist: economic conditions determine social conditions
Feminism: tries to show how women were suppressed and how this affected them.
New Historical: ideas frameworked within its historical era, based on cukture and events.
Formalism: analyze grammar, syntax, and literary devices.
Deconstructionism: text can be analyzed by more than one viewpoint