Psychoanalytic literary criticism, which was mainly
developed from the works of Sigmund Freud
and Jacques Lacan,
is still one of the key literary theories to
study and understand any literary text. Traditionally
there are some canonical literary texts that are favorites to the
psychoanalytic critics like Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Here in my present paper I
will try to make a psychoanalytic literary criticism of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
At first, I will try to define what is psychoanalytic literary criticism and
then try to make a psychoanalytic reading of Hamlet applying the key ideas of
psychoanalytic criticism.
What is Psychoanalytic literary
criticism?
Psychoanalytic
literary criticism can simply be defined as an approach to literature which aims
to apply some of the techniques of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of
literary works. The psychological principles which are used in Psychoanalytic
literary criticism were mainly developed by Sigmund Freud and Jacques
Lacan. Psychoanalytic criticism adopts the methods of
"reading" employed by Freud and later theorists to interpret texts.
It argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious
desires and anxieties of the author, that a literary work is a manifestation of
the author's own neuroses. One may psychoanalyze a particular character within
a literary work, but it is usually assumed that all such characters are
projections of the author's psyche.
The
key concepts which are used in Psychoanalytic criticism include but not limited
to unconscious, repression, sublimation, super-ego, id, Infantile sexuality,
Oedipus complex, libido, oral, anal, and phallic, transference, projection,
Freudian slip, dream work, displacement ,etc.