Chapter 2: Psychoanlytic Criticism

In modern times, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) has become a legendary figure in the history of science. He is remembered as the founder of psychoanalysis, a method for understanding human motivation and a technique for healing the psyche. Whether we realize it or not, psychoanalytic concepts have become part of our everyday lives, most notably when we discuss the unconscious, dreams and psychological defenses. The disadvantage of common usage is that most of us acquire a simplistic idea of what these concepts mean. It is not uncommon for many of these ideas to be smirked away because they have been reduced to psychobabble and have become impossible to understand and perhaps meaningless. Therefore, the challenge of this summery is to convey a concise and clear understanding of Fraud’s theory of psychoanalysis, given the intricacy and complexity of his work and its contribution to critical theory.

According to Tyson, (1999b), the “unconscious is the storehouse of those painful experiences and emotional wounds, fears, guilty desires, and unresolved conflicts we do not want to know about because we feel we will be overwhelmed by them” (p. 15). Freud showed that the individual is basically a nonrational being, driven by such emotional forces as “sexual instincts” and “repressed wishes.” His work was groundbreaking in that he proposed that awareness existed in layers and that there were thoughts occurring “below the surface.” He did some work with hypnosis but turned his attention to dreams, which he called the “royal road to the unconscious”. This had a significant impact on positivism, the belief that people could ascertain real knowledge concerning themselves and their environment and judiciously exercise control over both through rational choice. Freud suggested that believing we have “free will” is a delusion; instead, there is an elaborate system of defenses preventing the contents of our unconscious from becoming conscious. Tyson (p. 18) defines a few of the more interesting psychological defenses:

· Selective perception – hearing and seeing only what we feel we can handle

· Selective memory – modifying our memories so that we don’t feel overwhelmed by them or forgetting painful events entirely

· Denial – believing that the problem doesn’t exist or the unpleasant incident never happened

· Avoidance – staying away from people or situations that are liable to make us anxious by stirring up some unconscious – i.e., repressed – experience or emotion

· Displacement – “taking it out” on someone or something less threatening than the person who caused our fear, hurt, frustration, or anger, and

· Projection – ascribing our fear, problem, or guilty desire to someone else, and condemning them for it, in order to deny that we have it ourselves”

Much of the pain we experience is rooted in our family relationships with mother, father, and siblings interacting in a dynamics pattern of exchanges that continue to influence our behavior and choices as adults. In Freud's controversial doctrine of infantile sexuality, adult sexuality is an end product of a complex process of development that begins in childhood. There are a number of stages we experience associated with a variety of body functions or areas (oral, anal, and genital zones), and corresponding to various stages in the relation of the child to adults, especially to parents. Of crucial importance of the Oedipal complex in boys and Electra complex in girls, which occurs at about four to six years of age, because at this stage of development “the child for the first time becomes capable of an emotional attachment to the parent of the opposite sex that is similar to the adult's relationship to a mate; the child simultaneously reacts as a rival to the parent of the same sex. Physical immaturity dooms the child's desires to frustration and his or her first step toward adulthood to failure. Intellectual immaturity further complicates the situation because it makes children afraid of their own fantasies. The extent to which the child overcomes these emotional upheavals and to which these attachments, fears, and fantasies continue to live on in the unconscious greatly influences later life, especially love relationships (Arlow & Herma, 2004)”

Freud’ postulated that everyone was born with the potential to be bisexual. While he did not view homosexuality as a sickness, he did see it as a result of psychosexual development.

In a now-famous letter to an American mother in 1935, Freud wrote:

"Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty too....

"If [your son] is unhappy, neurotic, torn by conflicts, inhibited in his social life, analysis may bring him harmony, peace of mind, full efficiency whether he remains a homosexual or gets changed...." (reprinted in Jones, 1957, pp. 208-209, from the American Journal of Psychiatry, 1951, 107, 786).

Among the Freudian theories is the seduction theory that involves imagined (interns of the Oedipus complex), and the real seduction of a child. Basically the argument is not seduction experience per se which is significant, but that learning which takes place after an initial seduction scene, the first sexual experience being important in providing a fantasy for subsequent masturbation (Hart 1981). Concerns about homosexual man and women being “potential seducers” of children are of course compounded by the frequent confusion of homosexuality with pedophilia. The pedophile (derived form the Greek for “child lover”) sexually prefers children of either sex for erotic gratification. Probably the most known theory that explains the cause of homosexuality is based on the psychoanalytic concept of fixation of the Oedipus conflict. Accordingly, to this theory, the male child who reaches the stage of development where he separates psychology form his mother and identifies with his father will become heterosexual. If the boy grows up with a domineering mother who prevents his detachment from her or with a distant or hostile father who discourages identification, he will turn out homosexual. It is important to point out that parent may be distant and hostile to a child he may perceive as effeminate or gay, while a mother may be perceived as dominant for protecting her child.

Arlow, J. A., & Herma, J. L. (2004). Psychoanalysis [Electronic Encyclopedia]. Richmond, VA: Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Standard

Tyson, L. (1999). Chapter 2: Psychoanalytic Criticism. In Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc.