Psychoanalytic Criticism

Psychoanalytic criticism adopts the methods of "reading" employed by Freud and later theorists to interpret texts. It argues that literary texts, like dreams, express secret unconscious desires and anxieties. Earlier approaches to psychoanalytic criticism argued that a literary work is a manifestation of the author's own neuroses. However, it is now more common for psychoanalytic criticism to focus on the motivations and conflicts that determine the predicaments of characters within a work of literature.

One interesting facet of this approach is that it validates the importance of literature, as it is built on a literary key for the decoding. Freud himself wrote, "The dream-thoughts which we first come across as we proceed with our analysis often strike us by the unusual form in which they are expressed; they are not clothed in the prosaic language usually employed by our thoughts, but are on the contrary represented symbolically by means of similes and metaphors, in images resembling those of poetic speech" (26).

Like psychoanalysis itself, this critical endeavor seeks evidence of unresolved emotions, psychological conflicts, guilts, ambivalences, and so forth within what may well be a disunified literary work. Again, the earlier approach to psychoanalytic criticism would seek to show how the author's own childhood traumas, family life, sexual conflicts, fixations, and such are traceable within the behavior of the characters in the literary work. The more contemporary approach would focus more on how the characters’ childhood traumas, family life, sexual conflicts, fixations, etc. shape their behavior with the literary work. In either case, psychological material will be expressed indirectly, disguised, or encoded (as in dreams) through principles such as "symbolism" (the repressed object represented in disguise), "condensation" (several thoughts or persons represented in a single image), and "displacement" (anxiety located onto another image by means of association).

Psychoanalytic criticism is similar to New Criticism in not concerning itself with "what the author [or character] intended." Rather, what the author [or character] never intended (that is, repressed) is sought. The unconscious material has been distorted by the censoring conscious mind.

Psychoanalytic critics will ask such questions as, "What is Hamlet's problem?" or "Why can't Brontë seem to portray any positive mother figures?"