Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature

1
Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature

1. Structure of the Mind, Child Development
   Oedipus Complex
2. Dream and Sexual Symbols
3. Psychological Diseases

2
The dream-work . . .

• Dreams-- the royal road to the unconscious.
• Transforms the 'latent' content of the dream,
  the. 'forbidden' dream-thoughts,
• into the 'manifest' dreamstories -- what the
  dreamer remembers.

3
Freuds Interpretation of Dream

• 1st wish fulfillments---the disguise is
  successful and the dream proceeds undisturbed,
• 2nd anxiety dreams --the disguise is
  absent or insufficient the forbidden wish
  emerges, causes anxiety, and the dreamer wakes up
  
• 3rd content is disturbing but the feeling
  is not -- the wish is particularly well disguised
  by a misalliance of content and feeling

4
Four Elements of Dream

• condensation, displacement, consideration of
  representibility, and symbolization/secondary
  revision.
• Examples
• switches a person's hatred of Mr. Appleby to that
  of a rotting apple.
• Dream
• Spellbound

5
Sexual symbols

• (Frued's notion of symbolism the whole world can
  be absorbed narcissistically, the sexual drives
  can attach themselves to anything the senses
  perceive.)
• Examples Rene Margritte