The Importance Of Freudian Approach In Literature

2. 3 The importance of Freudian approach in literature There are certain psychoanalytic concepts expressed by Sigmund Freud that can be applied to interpret literary texts. Most of the literary texts, like dreams, articulate the secret unconscious desires and concerns of the author, that a literary work is expression 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 outcrops of the author’s psyche. The interesting side of this approach is that it confirms the importance of literature, as it is built on a literary key for the making out. Lois Tyson points out, aspects of psychoanalysis have become so embedded in our culture that terms such as “sibling rivalry, inferiority complexes, and defense mechanisms are in such common use that most of us feel we know what they mean without ever having heard them defined.”

Freud himself wrote:

The dream-thoughts which we first come across as we proceed with our analysis often strike us by the unusual form in which they are expressed; they are not clothed in the prosaic language usually employed by our thoughts, but are on the contrary represented symbolically by means of similes and metaphors, in images resembling those of poetic speech.” Like psychoanalysis itself, this critical endeavor seeks facts of unresolved emotions, psychological conflicts, guilt, ambivalences, and so forth within what may