2.2.1.1: Freudian Psychoanalytic

Freud, the father of modern psychiatry and psychoanalysis, was the first to render an opinion about literature and the value of using a psychological lens upon character and plot. His particular interest was in dreams and what they might reveal about characters’ suppressed desires, such as Oedipal fantasies. Readings of Oedipus Rex are often done under the Freudian influence: Upon his birth, an oracle of Apollo tells King Liaus and Queen Iocasta that their newborn son will eventually murder his father and marry his mother. Believing that they can out maneuver the oracle, the royal father pierces and binds the infant’s feet (lest he somehow crawl away), and leaves him exposed on a hillside where the child is meant to die of neglect and exposure. But even casual readers of mythology know that divine oracles cannot be avoided; enter the shepherd who rescues the baby and presents him to the local king and queen, who happen to be childless. Oedipus grows into an adult and is told of an oracle that predicted he would murder his own father and marry his mother, and rightfully horrified by this news, he flees his homeland. On the road he meets with an older rider and his retinue, and an argument ensues which results in Oedipus rendering vigilante justice upon the older man’s head, via a blunt strike.

As the audience, we already know that the man he has killed is, in fact, his birth father, the same who had attempted to murder him in a dramatic reenactment of Ouranos', Kronos’ and Zeus’ murderous family dynamic. We also realize that without knowing it, he will fulfill all other predictions, as repellent as they are to the audience and the character, once he finally recognizes them.

Freudian literary analysis (psychoanalysis theory) explores why this theme is so fascinating to viewers. The theory argues that humans are subjected to taboo desires that are often played out in our dreams and in our myths, such as the Oedipal Conflict: the desire of a young boy to attain and hold his mother’s affections all to himself, and to exclude his father (his rival) from that relationship. Freudian analysis expresses that young boys often outgrow the desire as they wrestle with the guilt they feel for wishing their fathers away. However, when circumstances such as separation trauma or abuse intervene, the Oedipal Conflict may transfer into the Oedipus Complex, in which the boy or young man acts out the taboo fantasies, either by an inappropriate sexual relationship with his mother or a mother-substitute, or by engaging in violence toward his father or father-substitute. We see this dynamic played out in Hamlet as the young prince is wretched between his anger at his mother–who has chosen an inappropriate replacement for the recently deceased King Hamlet–his guilt at his own murderous feelings toward his uncle/step-father who is also a stand-in for his absent father, and his desire to return to his previously emotionally intimate relationship with his mother, who was closer in age to her son than to her first husband.

Freud’s theories maintain a focus on a male-centric world, especially within his problematic theory of “penis envy,” a theory he ascribed to women whom, Freud assumed, coveted or desired to appropriate the organ. A quick trip through the Classical art and statuary of a museum might confirm such an idealization, but it’s also weakly founded at best, and false at worst. While the focus on the male-centric worldview finds some footing with Classical mythology and the male-centered pantheon, the theories of Freud are clearly limited due to his own self-acknowledged limited insight into literature and the minds of storytellers, or mythmakers. Freud’s fixation with the phallus eventually returned to the source when someone questioned his ever-present cigar, prompting him to finally qualify his theory that, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” a quote which is nearly as famous as he is.

A few years later, German psychoanalyst and neo-Freudian, Karen Horney, responded to Freud’s assertion that women often secretly wished for a phallus of their own, by arguing that it isn’t the phallus they desire, but the male power privilege they covet, and proposed that men actually experience envy of the female womb and it’s live-creating capacity. She argued that men experienced this “womb envy” more often than women experienced any version of “penis envy” since, "men need to disparage women more than women need to disparage men" (Horney).

Advice to Student Writers

Freud’s interest in unconscious desires and the vehicle that conveys them–dreams–stems from his assertion that dreams are “the guardians of sleep” where they become “disguised fulfillments of repressed wishes” (Freud). To Freud, dreams are the “royal road” to the personal unconscious of the dreamer and have a direct relation to literature, which often has the structure of a dream (Eagleton 136). Yet Freud was also open about a fairly significant blind spot in his knowledge: he knew little about literature nor the creative process that generated it. He viewed the process of writing with an extension of fantasies and daydreams, which he equated to children’s play (Freud “Creative” 652). Such a simplistic equation misses the intellectual rigor required for composing complex narratives such as mythology. Of myths and folklore, he wrote: “it is extremely probable that myths, for instance, are distorted vestiges of the wishful fantasies of whole nations,the secular dreams of youthful humanity” (655). The challenge of applying a purely Freudian literary analysis to a work of literature is the risk of losing the art of it. Freud viewed the creative process as an extension of a neurosis, essentially classifying it as a psychological “problem,” a word he uses frequently to discuss the act of creative writing.

Applying a Freudian analysis to a work of literature works effectively if there are clear psycho-social or psycho-sexual issues or character behaviors present, but it should be used to open and extend an analysis, rather than run it into a blind alley, as much of Freud’s own analysis does.