The Psychological Approach: Freudl.

The Psychological Approach: Freud
l. AIMSA AND PRINCIPIES
Of all the critical approachest literature, the psychological has been one of the most controversial, the most abused, and for many readers the least appreciated. Yet, for all the difficulties involved in its proper application to interpretive analysis, the psychological approach can be fascinating and rewarding. Our purpose in this chapter is three fold: (1) to account briefly for the misunderstanding of psychological criticism; (2) to outline a psychological theory often used as an interpretive tool by modern critics; and (3) to show by examples how readers may apply this mode of interpretation to enhancet heir understanding and appreciation of literature.
The idea of enhancement must be understood as a preface to our discussion. It is axiomatic that no single approach can exhaust the manifold interpretive possibilities of a worthwhile literary work: each approach has its own peculiar limitations. For example, the limitations of the historical-biographical approach lie in its tendency to overlook the structural intricacies of the work. The formalist approaclu on the other hand, often neglects historical and sociological contexts that may provide important insights into the meaning of the work. In turn, the crucial limitation of the psychological approach is its aesthetic in adequacy: psychological interpretation can afford many profound clues toward solving a work's thematic and symbolic mysteries, but it can seldom account for the beautiful symme-try of a well-wrought poem or of a fictional masterpiece. Though the psychological approach is an excellent tool for reading beneath the lines, the interpretive craftsman must often use other tools such as the formalist approach for a proper rendering of the lines themselves.
A. Abuses and Misunderstandings of the Psychological Approach
In the general dense of the word, there is nothing new about the psychological approach. As early as the fourth century B.c., Aristotle used it in setting forth his classic definition of tragedy as combining the emotions of pity and terror to produce catharsis. The "compleat gentleman" of the English Renaissance, Sir Philip Sidney, with his statements about the moral effects of poetry, was psychologizing literature, as were such Romantic poets as Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley with their theories of the imagination. In this sense,t hen, virtually every literary critic has been concerned at some time with the psychology of writing or responding to literature.
During the twentieth century, however, psychological criticism has come to be associated with a particular school of thought, the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud (1856- 1939) and his followers. (The currently most significant of these followers, facques Lacan, will be discussed in subsequent chapters.) From this association have derived most of the abuses and misunderstandings of the modern psychological approach to literature. Abuses of the approach have resulted from an excess of enthusiasm, which has been manifested in several ways. First, the practitioners of the Freudian approach often push their critical theses too hard, forcing literature into a Procrustean bed of psychoanalytic theory at the expense of other relevant considerations (for example, the work's total thematic and esthetic context). Second, the literary criticism of the psychoanalytic extremists has at times degenerated into a special occultism with its own mystique and jargon exclusively for the in group. Third, many critics of the psychological school have been either literary scholars who have understood the principles of psychology imperfectly or professional psychologists who have had little feeling for literature as art: the former have abused Freudian insights through oversimplification and distortion; the latter have bruised our literary sensibilities.
These abuses have given rise to a widespread mistrust of the psychological approach as a tool for critical analysis. Conservative scholars and teachers of literature, often shocked by such terms as anal eroticism, phallic symbol, and Oedipal complex, and confused by the clinical diagnoses of literary problems (for example, the interpretation of Hamlet's character as a "severe case of hysteria on a cyclothymic basis"that is, a bipolar disorder), have rejected all psychological criticism other than the commonsense type as pretentious nonsense. By explaining a few of the principles of Freudian psychology that have been applied to literary interpretation and by providing some cautionary remarks, we hope to introduce the reader to a balanced critical perspective that will enable him or her to appreciate the instructive possibilities of the psychological approach while avoiding the pitfalls of either extremist attitude.
B. Freud’s Theories
The foundation of Freud's contribution to modern psychology is his emphasis on the unconscious aspects of the human psyche. Abrilliant creative genius, Freud provided convincing evidence, through his many carefully recorded case studies, that most of our actions are motivated by psychological forces over which we have very limited control. He demonstrated that, like the iceberg, the human mind is structured so that its great weight and density lie beneath the surface (below the level of consciousness). In "The Anatomy of the Mental Personality," Freud discriminates between the levels of conscious and unconscious mental activity:
The oldest and best meaning of the word "unconscious" is the descriptive one; we call "unconscious" any mental process the existence of which we are obligated to assume because, for instance, we infer it in some way from its effects but of which we are not directly aware. . . . If we want to be more accurate, we should modify the statement by saying that we call a process "unconscious" when we have to assume that it was aclive at a certain time, although at that time we knew nothing about it. (99-100)
Freud further emphasizest he importance of the unconscious by pointing out that even the "most conscious processesa re conscious for only a short period; quite soon they become latent, though they can easily become conscious again" (100). In view of this, Freud defines two kinds of unconscious:
one which is transformed into conscious material easily and under conditions which frequently arise, and another in the case of which such a transformation is difficult, can only come about with a considerable expenditure of energy, or may never occur at all. . . . We call the unconscious which is only latent, and so can easily become conscious, the "preconscious," and keep the name "unconscious" for the other. (101)
That most of the individual's mental processes are unconscious is thus Freud's first major premise. The second (which has been rejected by a great many professional psychologists, including some of Freud's own disciples for example, Carl Gustav jung and Alfred Adler) is that all human behavior is motivated ultimately by what we would call sexuality. Freud designates the prime psychic force as libido, or sexual energy. His third major premise is that because of the powerful social taboos attached to certain sexual impulses, many of our desires and memories are repressed (that is, actively excluded from conscious awareness).
Starting from these three premises, we may examine several corollaries of Freudian theory. Principal among these is Freud's assignment of the mental processes to three psychic zones: the id, the ego, and the superego. An explanation of these zones may be illustrated with a modification of Freud's own diagram (New lntroductory Lectures 78):
The diagram reveals immediately the vast portion of the mental apparatus that is not conscious. Furthermore, it helps to clarify the relationship between ego, id, and superego, as well as their collective relationship to the conscious and the unconscious. We should note that the id is entirely unconscious and that only small portions of the ego and the superego are conscious. With this diagram as a guide, we may define the nature and functions of the three psychic zones.
1. The id is the reservoir of libido, the primary source of all psychic energy. It functions to fulfill the primordial life principle, which Freud considers to be the pleasure principle. Without consciousness or semblance of rational order, the id is characterized by a tremendous and amorphous vitality. Speaking metaphorically, Freud explains this "obscure in accessible part of our personality" as " a chaos, a cauldron of seething excite ment [with] no organization and no unified will, only an impulsion to obtain satisfaction for the instinctual needs, in accordance with the pleasure principle" (103-4). He further stresses that the "laws of logic above all, the law of contradiction do not hold for processes of the id. Contradictory impulses exist side by side without neutralizing each other or drawing apart. . . . Naturally, the id knows no values, no good and evil, no morality" (104-5).