Psychoanalytical Criticism

Psychoanalysis Is the process of using what we know about the 3 parts of someone’s personality to analyze the ways that person behaves. Psychoanalysts focus on correcting patterns of behavior that are destructive The goal of psychoanalysis is to help us resolve our psychological problems (called disorders or dysfunctions)

Psychoanalytical criticism is… Based on the theories of Sigmund Freud It shows how human behavior is relevant to our experience of literature One of Freud’s most radical insights was the notion that human beings are motivated by unconscious desires, fears, needs, and conflicts

Psychoanalysts are concerned with the unconscious MInd

What is the Unconscious Mind? The unconscious is the storehouse of those painful experiences and emotions, wounds, fears, guilty desires, and unresolved conflicts we do not want to know about We develop our unconscious mind at a very young age through the act of repression Repression is the expunging of the conscious mind of all our unhappy psychological events What is the Unconscious Mind?

What is the Unconscious Mind? Our unhappy memories do not disappear in the unconscious mind; rather, they exist as a dynamic entity that influences our behavior What is the Unconscious Mind?

Sigmund freud says… Your personality is made up of three parts: The Id The Superego The Ego

The Id Part of the personality that contains primitive impulses like thirst, anger, hunger, and the desire for instant gratification We are born w/this As newborns, it allows us to get our basic needs met Based on the “pleasure principle” b/c it wants whatever feels good at the time, w/no consideration for other circumstances

The Id It’s like the devil sitting on your shoulder, telling you just to do it, whatever it is It’s immature, primal, and selfish It’s associated w/toddlers and childhood It doesn’t know any better…

Is the opposite of the Id The superego Is the opposite of the Id This is your conscience, the parent, the angel on the other shoulder It’s the moral part of you It helps you distinguish right from wrong

The superego It develops due to the moral and ethical restraints placed on us by our caregivers Is learned through parental instruction and living in society Learned through parental scolding and criticism and education

The Ego The mediator Maintains a balance between our impulses (the id) and our conscience (superego) The ego takes the desires of the id and filters them through the reason based in the superego and comes up with an action that satisfies both entities It gets that others have needs and that sometimes being impulsive/selfish can hurt us in the end The ego realizes that the id must be satisfied, but that there are certain socially acceptable ways to go about satisfying it