Sigmund Freud and Freudian Criticism

• Psychoanalytic Theory: Exactly how it sounds. An approach to literature that uses concepts from psychoanalysis, although how this is applied may vary. Do we, for example, psychoanalyze Hamlet the character or the play as a whole?
• Unconscious: larger than the conscious mind, this is where Freudian slips and neurosis originate (according to Freud). It cannot be accessed directly, which is why one needs psychoanalysis.
• Manifest vs latent content: the manifest portion of a dream is what the dreamer remembers. The latent is the unconscious desires that psychoanalysis must uncover. Freud also applies this technique to literary works.
• Condensation: the way dreams combine and condense multiple things (recent experiences, childhood memories, bodily sensations, etc) into a single dream (or work of literature).
• Displacement: "Rather than dreaming directly about a source of anxiety, unconscious desire, or fear, that emotional content gets displaced onto something less significant to the dreamer" (Stevens 214).
• Overdetermination: Dreams and literary works may both originate from multiple sources, included those from the unconscious of the dreamer or artists.
• Wish fulfillment: this is what dreams basically are, according to Freud.
• Oedipus complex: a stage in Freudian male development in which the boy has a strong attachment to their mothers and murderous impulses towards their father. These primal desires can lead to Freudian slips and other issues. It is one of many examples of Freud drawing upon literature and mythology to explain his theories.
  • The Electra Complex comes from Jung.
• Penis envy: "one of Freud's most notorious and discredited ideas" (Stevens 215), but one that persists in a lot of cultural and literary texts.
• Ego, Id, superego: Freudian theory of the psyche.
  • Ego: "I" = the conscious mind
  • Id: "it" = the unconscious mind
  • Superego: the check preventing you from acting on the erotic and violent urges of the id.
• The uncanny: the feeling of unease produced by something that is once familiar and strange, with its familiarity making its strangeness more disturbing.
• Drives: fundamental drivers of human behavior: erotic/libido; death drive/instinct for violence. The two are in constant conflict and the repression of them creates civilisation See also Chapter 2 and 6 on figures of speech

Carl Jung and Jungian Criticism

• Archetypes

Jacques Lacan and Lacanian Criticism

• Marxism
• Structuralist
  • Signifier
  • Signified

Lacan's Three Realms of Experience

• Imaginary: mental images
• Symbolic: language and signification (he is drawing on Saussure's structuralism for much of this).
• Real: the realm that cannot "be captured in language, inaccessible to us because we're trapped in the imaginary and symbolic realms" (Stevens 261).

Lacanian resources

• [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OnhOXq7m4w| School of Life intro to Lacan's life and philosophy]
• [http://www.iep.utm.edu/lacweb/| Entry for Lacan in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
• [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lacan/| Entry for Lacan in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
• [https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/4w75en/jacques-lacan-was-sort-of-a-dick-323| Vice article: "Jacques Lacan Was Sort of a Dick" by Eugene Wolters (Oct 7, 2014)] This includes a good video of Slavoj Žižek using Lacanian ideas to offer a reading of coke.
• [https://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/psychoanalysis/lacandevelop.html| Purdue Lit Theory resource site on Lacan] with a separate entry on his concept of [https://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/psychoanalysis/definitions/real.html| "The Real"]

Julia Kristeva

• Intertextuality
• Dialogism
• The Abject: "something that blurs the boundaries of the self and other or of the animal and human, such as waste, corpses, and bodily fluids. The experience of the abject produces disgust and unease because it reminds people fo their animal nature and mortality" (Stevens 257).

Other Key Writers

• Hélène Cixous
  • l'écriture féminine
• Larua Mulvey
  • psychoanalytic feminist film theory
• Slavoj Zizek

More Keywords

• Phenomenology
• Hermeneutics
  • Horizons of Expectations
• Reader Response Criticism
  • implied author
• Cognitive Approaches
  • Cognitive Studies
  • Theory of mind