The Basics of Freudian Analysis
(special
thanks to Jessica Samuel & Channing Ritter for this information!)
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.
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.
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.