Psychoanalytic criticism views literature through the lens of Sigmund Freud's theories of the mind. According to this reading of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman unconsciously uses defense mechanisms like denial, avoidance, and regression to protect his fragile identity and avoid admitting his and his son's failure in the business world. Marxist criticism sees the play as critiquing capitalism's promotion of consumerism and false ideals of self-worth through economic success, which keeps Willy striving to live up to his predatory brother and buying what he cannot afford.

1. Psychoanalytic Criticism

2. • The human mind consists of consciousness and the unconscious.
• The Unconscious controls most of our actions.
• Destructive desires are repressed to protect society and the
individual.
• Remark: According to psychological critics, Hamlet suffers from
Oedipus complex.

3. Defense Mechanisms:
• Defense mechanisms are the means by which the unconscious keeps
the repressed repressed to protect our identity and personality.
Defense mechanisms include: selective hearing and selective
memory, denial, avoidance, projection, displacement, and regression.
• Denial: It is a defense mechanism. In denial we deny that a problem
exists to protect our identity and personality.
• Avoidance: it is a defense mechanism. In avoidance we avoid
whatever may harm our identity and personality.

4. • Projection: It is a defense mechanism. In projection we accuse
someone of having a problem that it is we who have it to protect our
identity and personality.
• Displacement: it is a defense mechanism. In displacement we blame
someone weak for problem caused aby someone strong to protect
our identity and personality.
• Regression: it is a defense mechanism. In regression we return to a
real or imaginative point in life to protect our identity and personality.

5. Apply the psychoanalytic school to Arthur
Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.”
A psychoanalytic reading of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman
might examine the defense mechanisms used to protect Willy’s
identity. Willy Loman unconsciously uses denial, avoidance and
regression to protect his identity and to avoid admitting his own and
his son’s failure in the business world.

6. Marxist Theories
What are the main tenets of Marxism?
1. Our social being determines our consciousness.
2. Political, Religious, educational, literary, philosophical, and cultural
institutions depend on economy.
3. The ruling ideas in any culture are the ideas of the ruling class.
4. When ideal functions to mask its own failure, it becomes a false
ideal, or false consciousness, whose real purpose is to promote the
interests of those in power.
5. Things have use value, exchange value, and sign exchange value.

7. 6. A Marxist reading would focus on the ways in which the
psychological problems are produced by the material/historical realities
within which the family operates.
7. It would describe the American dream as a false ideal which tells
Willy that his self-worth is earned only by economic success and that
keeps him looking up to his predatory brother Ben.

8. Apply Marxist criticism to Arthur Miller’s
“Death of a Salesman”
According to Marxist critics, because the survival of capitalism, which is
a market economy, depends on consumerism, it promotes sign-
exchange value as our primary mode of relating to the world around us.
It creates a kind of insecurity in the individual and makes him believe
that his self-worth is earned only by economic success. In “Death of a
Salesman,” such ideology keeps Willy looking up to his predatory
brother Ben. It also keeps the Lomans buying on credit what they can’t
afford .
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