A Basic Model of How Society and the Individual’s Psychology Relate

Pleasure Principle: tells us to do what feels good

Civilization:

Reality Principle: tells us to subordinate pleasure to what needs to be done

This is the conflict that will always need to be solved. As you will see below, similar forces act within each of us as well.

Some Key Terms in Freudian Theory

1. Conscious Mind: The part of the mind we are all aware of, where we do all of our thinking, etc.

2. Unconscious Mind: The part of the mind, inaccessible to the conscious mind, where desires and fears are often repressed.

3. Id: The unconscious center of wants and needs, pleasures and desires. These can range from food and shelter to love, acceptance and sex. The necessary denial of the Id often results in frustration – though we are not consciously aware of this.

4. Superego: The conscious awareness of wants and needs, pleasures and desires.

5. Ego: A sort of mixture of the Id and Superego, the ego controls both by acting as the arbiter of desires vs. acceptable possibilities.

6. Sublimation: The psychological process wherein one takes desires that cannot or should not be fulfilled and redirects that energy into something useful or productive. If you look at the model above, you can see why this would be important. Also, it would explain much about why authors would be subconsciously processing their unconscious desires and frustrations through their writings.

Routes to what is in the Unconscious Mind

In terms of literary analysis, think of the following as being expressed in the writing of an author, almost always without intent or even awareness on the part of the author. Our job would be to try to figure out the repressed or sublimated desires and fears as they are expressed through the author’s writing.

Symbolic Interpretation: The notion that we can find clues to a person’s subconscious by carefully studying the symbolic representations in his/her unconscious expressions. Writing, dreams, and language choices are common places we can look for those symbols. Below are tools we can use to interpret these expressions.

1. Condensation: a whole set of images are packed into a single image. For example, all of person’s fears about relationships and social acceptance could be condensed into the single image of a wedding ring which recurs in dreams or throughout a novel.

2. Metaphor: pretty much what you’ve always thought it was and very much an example of condensation. For example, consider the quote, “Love is a rose, and you better not pick it.” Here, all of the qualities of a rose, including the smell, look, and thorns are condensed into the image, which would then be seen as good and bad.

3. Displacement/Metonym: the meaning of one image/symbol gets combined into something associated with it, which then takes the place of the original image. A good way to picture this is to think of The President of the United States – we often refer to him and his office as The White House, a single image which combines and takes the place of all the sub-images (the president’s office, his staff, his power, his responsibilities, etc…).

4. Parapraxes (Freudian Slips): errors in speech, reading, and writing that are not coincidences or accidents, thereby revealing something that is repressed in the subconscious. For example, a person could be hungry while writing and instead of writing the phrase, “pair of shoes,” he/she writes, “pear of shoes.” Of course, this COULD BE an honest mistake, but Freudian Theory suggests that it is not, and we should view it as a hidden desire that has forced itself out into the conscious mind.