A Letter to His Parents by Dr. Jose Rizal
PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
Psychoanalytic criticism: * It adopts the methods of reading. It argues the literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the author. * A literary work is a manifestation of the author’s own neuroses. * It usually assumes that all such characters are projections of the author’s psyche. * It validates the importance of literature. * Seeks evidence of unresolved emotions, psychological conflicts, guilt, ambivalences and may result to a disunited literary work. * The author’s own childhood traumas, sexual conflicts and fixation can be traced within the behavior of the characters in his/her literary work.
Key terms in Psychoanalytic criticism by Freud:
1. repression. Every human has to undergo a repression of the pleasure principle by the reality principle; for some, even whole societies, repression may become excessive and make us ill. The paradox at the heart of Freud's work is that we come to be what we are only by massive repression of the elements that have gone into our making. A vital conception in Freud's thought is that that which is repressed will 'return' in some way --- among the ways are parapraxis and psychic disorders.
2. sexuality The zoning of pleasure -- through oral, anal and phallic stages; a gradual organization of the libidinal drives. The object of drives is flexible, changeable. Freud considered the biologically appropriate 'phallic' stage to be the proper, mature phase. The drives can be 'hung up', as it were, on objects, which are thus fetishized, wrongly experienced as the goal of the drive.
3. self. The early years of child's life are not those of a unified subject but are a complex, shifting field of libidinal force in which the subject has no centre of identity and has indeterminate boundaries with the external world. The self which emerges, however, from the Oedipus complex (see below) is while more stable, a split subject, torn between
Psychoanalytic criticism: * It adopts the methods of reading. It argues the literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the author. * A literary work is a manifestation of the author’s own neuroses. * It usually assumes that all such characters are projections of the author’s psyche. * It validates the importance of literature. * Seeks evidence of unresolved emotions, psychological conflicts, guilt, ambivalences and may result to a disunited literary work. * The author’s own childhood traumas, sexual conflicts and fixation can be traced within the behavior of the characters in his/her literary work.
Key terms in Psychoanalytic criticism by Freud:
1. repression. Every human has to undergo a repression of the pleasure principle by the reality principle; for some, even whole societies, repression may become excessive and make us ill. The paradox at the heart of Freud's work is that we come to be what we are only by massive repression of the elements that have gone into our making. A vital conception in Freud's thought is that that which is repressed will 'return' in some way --- among the ways are parapraxis and psychic disorders.
2. sexuality The zoning of pleasure -- through oral, anal and phallic stages; a gradual organization of the libidinal drives. The object of drives is flexible, changeable. Freud considered the biologically appropriate 'phallic' stage to be the proper, mature phase. The drives can be 'hung up', as it were, on objects, which are thus fetishized, wrongly experienced as the goal of the drive.
3. self. The early years of child's life are not those of a unified subject but are a complex, shifting field of libidinal force in which the subject has no centre of identity and has indeterminate boundaries with the external world. The self which emerges, however, from the Oedipus complex (see below) is while more stable, a split subject, torn between