Psychoanalytic Criticism Sigmund Freud

Psychoanalysis was founded by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) who was a neurologist in Vienna. He used determinism and structuralism to show there was a structure in the mind just like in language.

To begin, I will begin by defining the different parts of the psyche. The consciousness, the conscience and the unconscious. Coming from the unconscious, a censorship works on the conscience, whereas a kind of repression coming from the conscience works on the unconscious. It is a two-way process that occurs in the subject’s mind to prevent him from bringing out any events, feelings or thoughts to the consciousness. It is a mechanism of defense. When some things-wishes, fears, anxiety, memories, desires, etc.-make people suffer, it is easier to lock them up in their unconscious. There are also other elements to take into account when talking about the psyche: the ego, the super-ego and the id. The ego is conscious of a little part of the psyche; it has to be able to include the exterior world and try to fight against the super-ego and the id. The id is a set of primitive drives and desires that tries to manifest itself in the ego but is repulsed by the mechanism of defense of the ego. The super-ego is a principle of reality that exerts pressure on the ego: it could be guilt, law, parental injunction… but when the child grows, he exerts self censorship and inhibition on himself.

Since Plato, the human being has been determined as a reasonable animal with a reason and a will that control the more obscure of his passions. However Freud’s way of thinking disrupted this analysis: the existence of an unconscious engenders the fact that the subject does not master his ego and does not know him profoundly. All thoughts are not unconscious but derive from the unconscious in a way. It is the same for actions.

Freud found several mechanisms, put aside repression, that the subject experiences: transference (when the patient redirects his emotions towards the psychoanalyst instead of towards the parental figure) and projection (when the patient does not recognize characteristics of himself in himself but in other persons) aiming at avoiding to admit certain information; screen memory (a futile memory to cover a more significant one), slips (repressed data expresses unexpectedly), forgetting of words (because of their associations to a traumatic event) or parapraxis (unintended actions) are means for the unconscious to bring out pieces of information

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