The document discusses psychoanalytic literary criticism. It explains that psychoanalytic criticism sees literature as expressing unconscious desires through symbols and imagery, similar to dreams. Freud believed literature could be interpreted like dreams to understand unconscious meanings. Later critics like Jacques Lacan developed structuralist psychoanalytic theories based on how language and signifiers shape human desire and identity. The document provides examples of how psychoanalytic criticism might analyze works by interpreting symbols and themes related to psychoanalytic concepts like the Oedipus complex. It aims to teach students about key figures, ideas, terms, and methods in the psychoanalytic approach to literary criticism.

1. Modern
Literary
Studies
Dr. Abdel-Fattah Adel
Part (5)

2. Class (5) Items
Quick Info
Main ideas
Key Terms and Concepts
Sample Analysis
Representative Readings

3. Part (5)
Objectives By the end of this part, you will be able to:
1. Explain the distinctive features of the psychoanalytical
approaches.
2. Realize the importance of the psychoanalytical approaches.
3. Name the main critics in the psychoanalytical approaches.
4. Describe the main ideas of the psychoanalytical approaches.
5. Define the main concepts and terms used in the
psychoanalytical approaches.
6. Compare some different aspects of the psychoanalytical
approaches.
7. Analyze some representative writings of the psychoanalytical
approaches.
8. Analyze sample analysis of the psychoanalytical approaches.

4. 1. Answer the following questions:
1. Who are the main critics of psychoanalytical Criticism?
2. What are the main ideas of Freudian Criticism?
3. What are the main ideas of Lacanian Criticism ?
2. Write about the following terms/concepts:-
1. Unconsciousness
2. Oedipus Complex
3. Ego/ID
3. Explain a sample analysis of:
1. Freudian Criticism
2. Lacanian Criticism
4. Write about the following critical works:
5. Comment on the following passages from:
1. “The Interpretation of Dreams” by
2. “The Instance of the Letter In the Unconscious, or Reason since
Freud” by
Part (5) Questions

5. Intro
•Subject
•Psychoanalytical
Criticism

6. Main Ideas

7. Psychoanalysis
• Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
• Carl Jung (1875-1961)
• Jacques Lacan (1901-1981)

8. Sigmund Freud:
The Unconscious
• Sigmund Freud's book, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900),
described a discovery that would become the centerpiece of a
new discipline called psychoanalysis.
• His discovery was that the human mind contains a dimension
that is only partially accessible to consciousness and then only
through indirect means such as dreams or neurotic symptoms.
• The "unconscious is a repository of repressed desires, feelings,
memories, and instinctual drives.
• For Freud, our mental lives derive largely from biological drives.

9. Freudian
Psychoanalysis
Neo-
Freudianism
Lacanian
Object Relations
Psychology
American
School

10. Jacques Lacan
• Neo-Freudianism enjoyed great popularity in France in the 1960s and 1970s and continues to be
a viable school of literary criticism.
• In the 1950s and 1960s, Lacan developed a structuralist theory of psychoanalytical based on
the linguistic theory of Saussure.
• Against object relations theory, Lacan argues that the ego is constructed through imaginary
percepts and narcissistic fantasies, and it remains blind to its determination by the drives, the
unconscious, and its placement and construction in/by language.
• Before language assigns us an "I," we possess no sense of self.
• It is language that gives us identity (while simultaneously taking it away in the sense of
something pregiven or internal).
• Lacanian criticism shifts attention to language and sees it and the unconscious as almost
identical.
• Human desire is carried by signifiers which stand in for a lack that can never be filled in.
• It is in the signifiers then, in language itself, that the unconscious, what of the unconscious one
can know, resides.

11. Psychoanalytic
Literary
Criticism

12. Literary Theory:
Psychoanalytic
Criticism
Watch the video from the beginning till the (01.47) minute, to find the answer for these questions
1. What is the relationship between dreams and literature to Freud and Lacan? How was Carl Jung
different?
2. What is the object of Psychoanalytic literary Criticism?
3. What are the levels of psychoanalysis in literature?

13. Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism
• Psychoanalytic literary criticism begins with Freud himself, whose "The Uncanny," in part
a reading of Hoffman's horror story "The Sandman," can be said to inaugurate the critical
genre.
• Freud notices that literary texts are like dreams; they embody or express unconscious
material in the form of complex displacements and condensations.
• The same rule that he prescribes for dream interpretation also applies to literature: it is
not a direct translation of the unconscious into symbols that "stand for" unconscious
meanings. Rather, literature displaces unconscious desires, drives, and motives into
imagery that might bear no resemblance to its origin but that nonetheless permits it to
achieve release or expression.
• Literature, as fiction, might even be said to demonstrate these very processes of
representation-through-indirection at work.

14. Key Terms and Concepts

15. The Unconscious

16. Oedipus Complex
Freud believed that all children experience an “Oedipus
Complex” as a rite of passage to adult gender identity. All male
children experience an early attachment to the mother. Similarly,
the female child experiences an early attachment to the the father.

17. Ego/Id

18. Sample Analysis

19. Freud reading of
"The Sandman"
• In "The Uncanny," Freud presented a reading of Hoffman's
horror story "The Sandman," can be said to inaugurate the
critical genre.
• For Freud fear of castration takes the form not of a literal
image, but of a metaphoric substitute that displaces the
protagonist's anxiety onto a fear of losing his eyes, a fear that
is available for interpretation only because language displays
the latent connection.

20. Nathaniel
Hawthorne's fiction
• All of Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction, for
example, might be read in this light as
embodying the Oedipal conflict between a son
and a threatening father.
• (as between Reverend Dimmesdale and
Chillingsworth in The Scarlet Letter).

21. Hemingway’s
A Farewell to Arms
• In Hemingway's novel A Farewell to Arms, Arms is about
both bodily "arms" and military "arms".
• The hero wishes to escape from the military into the arms of
his love Catherine, but he is obliged to say farewell to her
arms in the end.
• The novel maps out the trajectory of development as Lacan
describes it: the male child must learn to renounce the
imaginary moment of fulfilled desire with the mother in
order to accept separation and to enter the Symbolic Order.

22. Representative Readings

26. 1. Answer the following questions:
1. Who are the main critics of psychoanalytical Criticism?
2. What are the main ideas of Freudian Criticism?
3. What are the main ideas of Lacanian Criticism ?
2. Write about the following terms/concepts:-
1. Unconsciousness
2. Oedipus Complex
3. Ego/ID
3. Explain a sample analysis of:
1. Freudian Criticism
2. Lacanian Criticism
4. Write about the following critical works:
5. Comment on the following passages from:
1. “The Interpretation of Dreams” by
2. “The Instance of the Letter In the Unconscious, or Reason since
Freud” by
Part (5) Questions