PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH

PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH

Study Materials for MPhil students of Indian Universities

Dr. S. Sreekumar

1.  Aims and Principles

ÖOf all the critical approaches to literature, this has been one of the most controversial, the most abused and the least appreciated.

ÖThe crucial limitation of the psychological approach is its aesthetic inadequacy.

ÖIt can seldom account for the beautiful symmetry of a well-wrought poem or of a fictional masterpiece.

A. Abuses and misunderstandings of the Psychological approach

There is nothing new about the psychological approach.

Q Aristotle used it in setting forth his definition of tragedy as combinging the emotions of pity and terror to produce catharsis.

Q Sir Philip Sidney, with his statements about the moral effects of poetry, was psychologising literature.

Q Romantics like Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley with their theory of imagination was psychologising literature.

During the twentieth century psychological criticism is associated with a particular school of thought: the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud and his followers. From this association have derived most of the abuses and misunderstandings of the modern psychological approach to literature.

Abuses

1. The practitioners of psychological criticism push their theories too hard ignoring the other factors and highlighting only the psychological aspects.

2. Psychological criticism has at times degenerated into a special type of occultism (belief in the efficacy of various practices—including astrology, alchemy, divination, and magic—regarded as being based on hidden knowledge about the universe and its mysterious forces).

3. Many critics of the psychological school have been either literary scholars who have understood the principles of psychology imperfectly or professional psychologists who have had little feeling for literature as art.

4. Conservative scholars and teachers of literature are shocked by such terms as anal eroticism, phallic symbol, and Oedipal complex.

5.  They are also confused by clinical diagnosis of literary problems (for example, the interpretation of Hamlets character as a “severe case of hysteria on a cyclothymic basis” [a person’s mood alternates between mild depression and mild mania]

Freud’s theories

a.Most mental processes are unconscious.

b.All human behaviour is motivated by sexuality.

c.The prime psychic force is libido, or sexual energy.

d.Because of the powerful social taboos attached to certain sexual impulses, many of our desires and memories are repressed.

Freud assigned mental processes to three psychic zones:

] The id,

] the ego,

] the super ego.

The diagram reveals the vast portion of the mental apparatus that is not conscious. It also helps to clarify the relationship between ego, id, and superego, as well as their collective relationship to the conscious and the unconscious. With this diagram as a guide, we may define the nature and functions of the three psychic zones. 

  

♣  The ID   

This is the reservoir of libido, the primary source of all psychic energy. Freud considers it to be the pleasure principle. It has no consciousness or semblance of rational order. It is the “obscure inaccessible part of our personality”. It is “a chaos, a cauldron of seething excitement with no organization and no unified will”. The laws of logic do not hold good for the id. The id knows no values, no good or evil, no morality.

è The id is the source of all our aggression and desires. It is lawless, asocial, and amoral.

è Its function is to gratify our instincts for pleasure without regard for social conventions, legal ethics, or moral restraint.

è Unchecked, it would lead us to any lengths, to destruction and even self-destruction, to satisfy its impulses for pleasure.

è The id as defined by Freud is identical in many respects to the Devil as defined by theologians.

♣  The Ego

è The ego protects us from the dangerous potentialities of the id.

è It is a regulation agency. This is the rational agent of the psyche.

è The ego lacks the strong vitality of the id. But it regulates the strong drives of the id so that they may be released in non-destructive behavioural patterns.

è A large part of the ego is unconscious. But it comprises what we call the conscious mind.

è Whereas the id is governed by the pleasure principle, the ego is governed by the reality principle.

è The ego serves as intermediary between the world within and the world without.

♣  The Superego

è It is another regulating agency.

è Its primary function is to protect society.

è Largely unconscious, it is the moral censoring agency.

è It represents the higher things in human nature.

è Acting either directly or indirectly through the ego, it serves to repress or inhibit the drives of the id, to block off and thrust back into the unconscious those impulses toward pleasure that society regards as unacceptable, such as overt aggression, sexual passions, and the Oedipal instinct.

è Whereas the id is dominated by the pleasure principle and the ego by the reality principle, the superego is dominated by the morality principle.

è  We might say that the id would make us devils, that the superego would have us behave as angels, and that it remains for the ego to keep us healthy human beings by maintaining a balance between these two opposing forces.

The psychological approach in Practice

a. Hamlet: The Oedipus complex.

An English disciple of Freud, Ernest Jones provided the first full scale psychoanalytic treatment of a work of art. In his Hamlet and Oedipus , Jones applies the Freudian principles to Hamlet’s problems.

Hamlet’s delay in killing his uncle, Claudius, is to be explained in terms of internal rather than external circumstances.

Hamlet suffered from repressed oedipal feelings. He does not avenge his father’s death as quickly as practicable. He does not fulfil this duty until absolutely forced to do so by physical circumstances. He does it after his mother is dead.

Hamlet also shows a physical revulsion of sex. His revulsion is directed against Ophelia.

The ghost represents the conscious ideal of fatherhood. This is socially acceptable.

Hamlet’s view of Claudius represents Hamlet’s repressed hostility toward his father as a rival for his mother’s affection.

He cannot bring himself to kill Claudius because to do so he must, in a psychological sense, kill himself.

His delay and frustration in trying to fulfil the ghost’s demand for vengeance may therefore be explained by the fact that as one part of him tries to carry out the task, the other flinches inexorable from the thought of it.

LIMITATIONS OF THE APPROACH

To some critics it may seem incredibly far fetched. But some of the analyses are based on evidences and supported by actual case histories. Regardless of their factual validity, such theories had a great influence in modern thinking.

Q The danger is that the serious student may become theory ridden, forgetting that Freud’s is not the only approach to literary analysis.

Q To see a great work of fiction or a great poem primarily as a case study is often to miss its wider significance and perhaps event the essential aesthetic experience it should provide.

Q A number if great works do not lend themselves readily to the psychoanalytical approach and even those that do cannot be studied exclusively from the psychological perspective.

Q Literary interpretation and psychoanalysis are two distinctive fields, and though they may be closely associated, they can in no sense be regarded as part of one discipline.

Q The literary critic who views art through the lens of Freud is liable to see art through a glass darkly.

Q Q However those who reject psychoanalysis as neurotic nonsense deprive themselves of a valuable tool in understanding not only literature but human nature and their individual selves as well.

Dr. S. Sree Kumar