Contemporary Literature

Universitas Respati Yogyakarta

By: Adesti Komalasari, S.Pd., M.A.

Psychoanalytic
Assumption
Why Psychoanalytic?
When people are
reading any books,
listening to any
kind of music with
any kind of lyrics,
and watching any
kind of movies, the
psyche condition of
people work the
most.
People will use the
Psychoanalytical
Perspective first
among other perspectives.

Psychoanalytic criticism
may focus on the writer's
psyche, the study of the
creative process, the study
of psychological types and
principles present within
works of literature, or the
effects of literature upon its
readers
The Key is UNCONSCIOUSNESS or one's
mind hidden part: the part
of the mind containing
memories, thoughts, feelings, and ideas that the person is not generally aware of
but that manifest themselves

in dreams and dissociated

acts. (Encarta, 2009).
This handout will provide
two kinds of Psychoanalytic
Criticism Model, proposed
by Sigmund Freud and
Jacques Lacan. Sigmun
Freud is known as 'a father
of behavioral theory' while
Jacques Lacan was a
French psychoanalyst and
philosopher who influenced
literary criticism, contemporary art and feminism.

Sigmund Freud
(1856 - 1939)

Inside this issue:

Why Psychoanalytic?

Freud's model of the

psyche:

Lacan's model of the

psyche:

Psychoanalytic Literary
Criticism

The Focuses of Psychoanalytic literary criticism

Circle of Knowledge

The Fish

Freud's model of the psyche:

Id - completely unconscious
part of the psyche that
serves as a storehouse of our
desires, wishes, and fears.
The id houses the libido, the
source of psychosexual energy.

Ego - mostly to partially

conscious part of the psyche
that processes experiences
and operates as a referee or
mediator between the id and
superego.

Superego - often thought of

as one's "conscience"; the
superego operates "like an
internal censor
[encouraging] moral judgments in light of social pressures"

Psychoanalytic Assumption

Lacan's model of the psyche:

Imaginary - a preverbal/
verbal stage in which a child
(around 6-18 months of age)
begins to develop a sense of
separateness from her mother
as well as other people and
objects; however, the child's
sense of sense is still incomplete.

Jacques Lacan
(19011981)

Symbolic - the stage marking

a child's entrance into language (the ability to understand and generate symbols);
in contrast to the imaginary
stage, largely focused on the
mother, the symbolic stage
shifts attention to the father
who, in Lacanian theory,
represents cultural norms,
laws, language, and power
(the symbol of power is the
phallus--an arguably "genderneutral" term).

Real - an unattainable stage

representing all that a person
is not and does not have.
Both Lacan and his critics
argue whether the real order
represents the period before
the imaginary order when a
child is completely fulfilled-without need or lack, or if the
real order follows the symbolic order and represents our
"perennial lack" (A disability
to return to a state of wholeness that existed before language).

Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism

Children are
completely egoistic; they
feel their needs intensely
and strive ruthlessly to
satisfy them. (Sigmund
Freud)
But at least they are
honest. (Adesti
Komalasari)

Psychoanalytic Criticism argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret
unconscious desires and anxieties of the
author, that a literary work is a manifestation of the author's own neuroses. One may
psychoanalyze a particular character within
a literary work, but it is usually assumed
that all such characters are projections of
the author's psyche.
this critical endeavor seeks evidence of
unresolved emotions, psychological conflicts, guilts, ambivalences, and so forth
within what may well be a disunified literary work. The author's own childhood traumas, family life, sexual conflicts, fixations,
and such will be traceable within the behavior of the characters in the literary
work. But 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 per-

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sons represented in a single image), and

"displacement" (anxiety located onto another image by means of association).
Psychoanalytic critics will ask such questions as, "What is Hamlet's problem?" or
"Why can't this author seem to portray any
positive mother figures?"
All psychoanalytic approaches to literature
have one thing in commonthe critics
begin with a full psychological theory of
how and why people behave as they do
outside of the realm of literature, and they
apply this psychological theory as a standard to interpret and evaluate a literary
work.

Contemporary Literature

Psychoanalytic literary criticism can focus on one or

more of the following:
the author: the theory is
used to analyze the author
and his/her life, and the
literary work is seen to
supply evidence for this
analysis. This is often
called "psychobiography."

comes a tool that to explain the characters behavior and motivations.

The more closely the theory seems to apply to the
characters, the more realistic the work appears.

the characters: the theory

is used to analyze one or
more of the characters; the
psychological theory be-

the audience: the theory is

used to explain the appeal
of the work for those who
read it; the work is seen to

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embody universal human

psychological processes
and motivations, to which
the readers respond more
or less unconsciously.
the text: the theory is used
to analyze the role of language and symbolism in
the work.

"What does it
matter how many
lovers you have if
none of them gives
you the universe?"
(Jacques Lacan)

Business Name

The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely.
Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled and barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
--the frightening gills,

fresh and crisp with blood,

that can cut so badly-I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
--It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
--if you could call it a lip
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,

or four and a wire leader

with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier
lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and
snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels--until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

REFERENCES:

http://www.kristisiegel.com/theory.htm#psycho

http://public.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/psycho.crit.html

http://www2.cnr.edu/home/bmcmanus/psychcrit.html

http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/08/ajb/tmve/
wiki100k/docs/Psychoanalytic_literary_criticism.html

http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/virtualit/poetry/
critical_define/crit_psycho.html