Psychoanalytic Theories in Children Literature

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Psychoanalytic Theories in Children Literature

1. Introduction

     What is psychoanalysis? We are sure that question has been wandering inside your head. So, what is the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature, especially children literature (since it becomes the main discussion of this paper)? Through this paper, we will help you getting clearer understanding about all of that.

     As we know, the founder of psychoanalysis theory was Sigmund Freud. He was (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) an Austrian neurologist1who became known as the founding father of psychoanalysis. According to his profession, we can simplify the definition of psychoanalysis; it is a talking cure, which the language and narrative are fundamental to the curing process. For further information, according to Merriam Webster’s definition:

Psychoanalysis: (noun)

A system of psychological theory and therapy that aims to treat mental disorders by investigating the interaction of conscious and unconscious elements in the mind and bringing repressed fears and conflicts into the conscious mind by techniques such as dream interpretation2 and free association.

     Psychoanalytic is the adjective form of psychoanalysis. To make it simple, this theorydesignates accordingly three things:

1. A method of mind investigation and especially of the unconscious mind;

2. A therapy of neurosis inspired from the above method;

3. A new stand-alone discipline which is based on the knowledge acquired from applying the investigation method and clinical experiences.

     Psychoanalysis was actually a psychotherapy method to cure mental illness and the disorders of nervous system, like brain damage, amnesia, aphasia, migraines and any other damage related to the brain, spinal cord, and nerves. In creating psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology4 through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst, Freud developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association and discovered transference, establishing its central role in the analytic process.The importance of free association is that the patients spoke for themselves, rather than repeating the ideas of the analyst; they work through their own material, rather than parroting another's suggestions'.Freud developed the technique as an alternative to hypnosis5, because he perceived the latter as subjected to more fallibility, and because patients could recover and comprehend crucial memories while fully conscious. However, Freud felt that despite a subject's effort to remember, a certain resistance kept him or her from the most painful and important memories. He eventually came to the view that certain items were completely repressed, and off-limits, to the conscious realm of the mind. He also used dreams as one of his techniques at that time. 

     Dream interpretation is the process of assigning meaning to dreams. He argued that the motivation of all dream content is wish-fulfillment, and that the instigation of a dream is often to be found in the events of the day preceding the dream, which he called the day residue6. In the case of very young children, Freud claimed, this can be easily seen, as small children dream quite straightforwardly of the fulfillment of wishes that were aroused in them the previous day (the dream day7). 

2. Content

      Now we move to the psychoanalytic theories in literature. Sigmund Freud was also someone who appreciated culture, art and a bookworm during his youth. He loved reading a lot of literary works and it leads us to a fact that he used literature as his research field at the time he used it also as the illustration to prove his theories which he developed. Through some prominent literary works, such as Hamlet8 (William Shakespeare), Oedipus (Sophocles) and The Brother Karamazov10 (Dostoyevsky), he found some types of humans matched his theories.In a nutshell, the key to understanding the history of psychoanalytic literary criticism is to recognize that literary criticism is about books and psychoanalysis is about minds. Therefore, the psychoanalytic critic can only talk about the minds associated with the book.

     Psychoanalytic literary criticism is a way of analyzing and interpreting literary works that relies on psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanalytic theory was developed by Sigmund Freud to explain the workings of the human mind. In this field of literary criticism, the major concepts of psychoanalytic theory, such as the idea of an unconscious and conscious mind, the divisions of the id, ego, and superego, and the Oedipus complex13, are applied to literature to gain a deeper understanding of that work.

     The object of psychoanalytic literary criticism, at its very simplest, can be the psychoanalysis of the author or of a particularly interesting character in a given work. In this directly therapeutic form, the criticism is very similar to psychoanalysis itself, closely following the analytic interpretive process discussed in Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams and other works. Critics may view the fictional characters as a psychological case study, attempting to identify such Freudian concepts as Oedipus complex, penis envy14, Freudian slips15, Id, ego and superego (unconscious and conscious)23and so on, and demonstrate how they influenced the thoughts and behaviors of fictional characters.

     There are three, and curiously, Freud spelled them out in his very first remarks on literature in the letter to Fliess of October 15, 1897 in which he discussed Oedipus Rex22. He applied the idea of oedipal conflict to the audience response to Oedipus and to the character of Hamlet, Hamlet's inability to act, and he speculated about the role of oedipal guilt in the life of William Shakespeare. Those are the three people that the psychoanalytic critic can talk about: the author, the audience, and some character represented in or associated with a text. From the beginning of this field to the present, that cast of characters has never changed: author, audience, or some person derived from the text.Those are the three minds that the psychoanalytic critic addresses.

Sigmund Freud and the Unconscious

     The unconscious mind is part of a theory developed by Sigmund Freud regarding the storage of memories and experiences. Freud suggested that all memories exist in the unconscious mind, dormant and unremembered but still helping to direct the actions of the individual and shape his or her personality. These unremembered experiences are often painful and troubling, and the unconscious mind acts as a safeguard in the individual's own mind.

Freud's Three Levels of Mind

     Before we can understand Freud's theory of personality, we must first understand his view of how the mind is organized. According to Freud, the mind can be divided into three different levels: 

     The conscious mind includes everything that we are aware of. This is the aspect of our mental processing that we can think and talk about rationally. A part of this includes our memory, which is not always part of consciousness but can be retrieved easily at any time and brought into our awareness. Freud called this the preconscious.

The preconscious mind is the part of the mind that represents ordinary memory. While we are not consciously aware of this information at any given time, we can retrieve it and pull it into consciousness when needed.

     The unconscious mind is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that outside of our conscious awareness. Most of the contents of the unconscious are unacceptable or unpleasant, such as feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict. According to Freud, the unconscious continues to influence our behavior and experience, even though we are unaware of these underlying influences.

     Many of us have experienced what is commonly referred to as a Freudian slip. These misstatements are believed to reveal underlying, unconscious thoughts or feelings. Consider this example:

James has just started a new relationship with a woman he met at school. While talking to her one afternoon, he accidentally calls her by his ex-girlfriend's name.

     If you were in this situation, how would you explain this mistake? Many of us might blame the slip on distraction or describe it as a simple accident. However, a psychoanalytic theorist might tell you that this is much more than a random accident. The psychoanalytic view holds that there are inner forces outside of your awareness that are directing your behavior. For example, a psychoanalyst might say that James misspoke due to unresolved feelings for his ex or perhaps because of misgivings about his new relationship.

     This unconscious theory from Freud also leads us to a fact that his theory of personality (id, superego and ego) work together to create complex human behaviors. This theory of personality can bring us to the conclusion of why most authors of children literature build the characters by considering the unconscious mind or the id of personality which can be seen a lot in most children’s personalities. It is becausethe id is the only component of personality that is present from birth. This aspect of personality is entirely unconscious and includes of the instinctive and primitive behaviors. The id is driven by the pleasure principle, which strives for immediate gratification of all desires, wants, and needs. If these needs are not satisfied immediately, the result is a state anxiety or tension.

     Freud viewed the unconscious as a repository for socially unacceptable ideas, wishes or desires, traumatic memories, and painful emotions put out of mind by the mechanism of psychological repression. However, the contents did not necessarily have to be solely negative. In the psychoanalytic view, the unconscious is a force that can only be recognized by its effects—it expresses itself in the symptom. For example, William Shakespeare psychology condition in his third period, from 1601 to 1608, as one in which he felt that the time was out of joint, that life was a fitful fever. His father died in 1601, after great disappointments. His best friends suffered what he calls, in Hamlet, "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." The great plays of this period are tragedies, among which we may instance Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. There are also some writers who create great works during their sadness, as the matter of writing to bear the hurt and pain they feel. This thing works the same with other artists like painters who sexually depressed, yet they expressed it publicly (it contrasts with the moral, ego thingy) they express it through paints and canvas. This is what we can call as sublimation method of expressing the unconscious mind (until it creates art and literary works).

Bruno Bettelheim and the Oedipus Complex 

     The Oedipal complex is a term used by Sigmund Freud in his theory of psychosexual stagesof development16 to describe a boy's feelings of desire for his mother and jealously and anger towards his father. Essentially, a boy feels like he is in competition with his father for possession of his mother. He views his father as a rival for her attentions and affections.The Oedipal complex occurs in the phallic stage of psychosexual development between the ages of three and five. The term was named after the character in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex who accidentally kills his father and marries his mother.

     Bruno Bettelheim17 is a classical Freudian gives the example of Oedipus complex which occurred in Cinderella story. It is unpleasantly to eventually find Oedipus complex in such a Children literature work. But it is about finding the hidden message which indirectly affects the children (if they find one). Just like a saying, what we read what we become. So this is why there is literary criticism; to criticize such a literary work apart of its internal elements. If we recall to the story of poor Cinderella living with her stepmother and sisters, the parent figure, which is not actually Cinderella’s mother represents the oedipal desire of children to eliminate the parent of their own sex and thus pave the way for the relationship they unconsciously desire with the parent of other sex. According to his explanation, Cinderella’s situation at the beginning of the story represents the self-disgust a child feels about her desire to be loved by the parent of the opposite sex. 

     Bettelheim also explains about castration anxiety18 in Cinderella story. The slipper lost near the end of the story represents castration anxiety which centers on her imagining that originally all children had penises and that girls somehow lost theirs (Freud, 266), just as Cinderella loses her slipper. The slipper represents the vagina and the prince symbolically offers her femininity in the form of the golden slipper-vagina. This thing is described the male acceptance of the vagina and love for the woman as the ultimate male validation of the desirable of her femininity.

Explorations:

     Choose a fairytale you remember particularly enjoying as a child. After reading a psychoanalytical commentary about the tale, like Bettelheim’s Uses of Enchantment19, consider what your response might tell you about your preoccupations or fantasies as a child. To what degree is it relevant that you might not have been conscious of the unconscious aspects of this text?

1. We use Little Red Riding Hood to give responses toward Bettelheim’s Uses of Enchantment essay. “You’ve got to go by the mill, which you can see right over there, and hers is the first house on the right“(Perrault 343). This line explains the girl with red hood just told the stranger she met about her destination. Then the stranger, which is a bad wolf walked to the location (grandma’s house of the girl) to replace her granny so that this bad wolf could eat her. According to Bruno Bettelheim, author of The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairytales, when a young village girl utters these words to a stranger, they transform into a subconscious death wish aimed at the family matriarch21 in order for the girl to bed her father. In his book, Bettelheim utilizes widely known Freudian beliefs to argue the meaning behind every detail in Charles Perrault’s classic version of Little Red Riding Hood. Specifically, he manipulates Little Red’s irresponsible, yet innocent, response to a stranger as her unconscious id struggling with an Oedipus complex. The story’s commonly understood moral is to warn youth against talking to strangers, however, Bettelheim is an unreliable source that creates substance where it is simply not found. This irresponsible side of the girl is relevant that we might not have been conscious that there is the irresponsible side from the girl. This is because she was warned by her mother to not talking to strangers, yet she did it.

2. We also used Snow White and Beauty and the Beast as some other explorations regarding to Bettelheim’s Uses of Enchantment essay. In Bruno Bettelheim's essay, The Uses of Enchantment, he explains the fairy tale of Snow White in a way which makes the reader think critically. He makes the reader explore their mind to better understand a tale in a way, which they have not explored.

     This essay begins with Bettelheim talking about "Narcissus, who was a Greek god who loved only himself, so much that he became swallowed up by his self-love." (Bettelheim p202) With this statement Bettelheim begins to explain his reasoning with his Freudian or oedipal perspective with this story. He explains this using Snow White and the wicked stepmother. The wicked stepmother becomes jealous when Snow White begins her transcend into a women. Snow White is becoming a beautiful woman and the wicked stepmother is becoming older and older, making her less attractive. Snow White is becoming older, more attractive and noticed. This sets up a competition for the fathers' love between stepmother and daughter, creating what Bettelheim says is the oedipal complex.The analogous stage for girls is known as the Electra complex in which girls feel desire for their fathers and jealousy of their mothers. Belle in Beauty and the Beast is also another example of Electra complex. We can see how Belle can be so brave in asking permission to the Beast to come back to her house in a matter of her lovely father is lying on bed, bearing his sickness. Belle also tries to attract her father’s attention to ask for a simple gift (a rose), unlike the other 2 sisters of her who ask lavish stuff. We can sense her love toward her father by being a sweet daughter. There is no other powerful thing, but love in this world until in this case, a human can be so brave in facing a beast which can be so mad (anytime) and do harm to her. So both Belle and Snow White have Electra complexes while the first one is willingly to serve herself into a beast’s dinner plate and the latter one is trying to attract her father’s attention (in order to protect herself from her wicked stepmother).

     With this, it helped us to better understand what was going on in the tale. The tale was not just about a wicked stepmother or a fearful-looking beast. These are complicated tales that involve critical reasoning between two people. One-person feels threatened by the other, in this case the wicked stepmother is feeling threatened by the young beauty of Snow White, while the other one is forced by fearful-looking beast to separate from her family. It shows us that there will always be the story we had not bargained for. 

Jacques Lacan and the Language of the Unconscious

The Unconscious is structured like a Language

      For Lacan language is the necessary first step by which the child enters culture but is also viewed as a sign system which organizes or shapes culture by directing what can be known and recognized and what cannot.  Language is conceived as the foundation of, or as encapsulating, culture.  Moreover, in Lacanian thought, the self and sexuality are socially constructed in that there can be no sexed self - no masculine or feminine person – prior to the formation of the subject in language. 

     Some feminists hate Lacan because of his fixation with the phallus, others love him because they claim that Lacan's thought provides a key to understanding the socialization and symbolization processes which have shaped woman's specificity through the ages.  Lacan thought that sexual identity is not based on biological gender, or any other innate factor, but is learned through the dynamics of identification and language.

    Lacan borrows some ideas of linguistics that Freud did not have access to.  The structure of language, as we know, its grammar, is a set of unspoken rules-ones speakers may even be unconscious of, for many people who have never formally learned grammar nevertheless speak grammatically. These rules of grammar allow people to make meaningful statements to one another. According to Lacan, then, the unconscious consists of something like those grammatical rules. It is a set of hidden codes or conditions that allow human beings to speak as and perceive them as individuals. For example, people see themselves as being in control when they say “I speak…”, which means I am the one who chooses what to say, but actually their meaning is circumscribed by other components of the entities they are part ort (I can be understood to be speaking only through my relationship with, and subjection to, the meaning of the verb “speak”). It is because people can speak only through a shared language, the “I” who speaks must always express a communalvision rather than a unique private one.Lacan sees the Cinderella story as the story of castration anxiety in the process of becoming themselves. 

Explorations:

     Choose a popular fairy tale that features a male hero, such as Jack and the Beanstalk or Puss in Boots. Do the happy endings of these tales also require their heroes to accept symbolically the power of the phallus? How are the endings of these tales like and unlike tales such as Cinderella, in which young women are the central characters?

1. We used Puss in Boots to explore more about Lacan theories. The happy ending of this tale requires a young boy, who is the son of a miller. When his father died, this young boy receives nothing but the cat and he often complains bitterly of his cat. It is because the other two older brothers of him fared very well. Then the cat helps him to make this young boy a Prince of unknown land after he agreed to give the cat a pair of boots. Then with all of the cat’s power, this young boy can be the Prince and marry the daughter of the noble lord from another kingdom. So yeah, we can see the happy ending from the main character after the cat requires agreement from the power of phallus (male). In this case is the King from another Kingdom. This ending shows similar thing that happened to Cinderella. While Cinderella is accepted to be the Queen of the Prince after she fits the slipper which belongs to her, the acceptance can be received only when the owner of the phallus (the Prince) is so helplessly falling in love to her. 

3. Conclusion

     We can conclude that psychoanalytic theories have helped the readers to understand the hidden message that is created through symbol and sentences made by the authors. As for children literature, it is important to understand this thing, since the hidden message may be noticed by the children. 

     How does all this relate to literature? Psychoanalytic criticism can tell us something about how literary texts are actually formed, and reveal something of the meaning of that formation.  There are four kinds of psychoanalytical literary criticism.  The focus of analysis can be (1) the author of the work; (2) the work's contents; (3) the work's formal construction; or (4) the reader. 

     Freud notes that literary texts are like dreams; they embody or express unconscious material in the form of complex displacements and condensations.  Literature is not a direct translation of the unconscious into symbols that “stand for” unconscious meanings.  Rather, literature displaces unconscious desires, drives, and motives into imagery that might bear no resemblance to its origin, but nonetheless expresses it.

That is the explanation about psychoanalytic theories in Children literature! I hope you are helped with that and get you a clearer understanding about it. Oh I forgot to mention the listed-terms to this post so if you find numbers after words, they are actually directed to the listed-terms pae in my paper. I don't have time to remove it down one by one, so, y eah...enjoy!