Introduction to Psychoanalytic Criticism & Jacques Lacan
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Introduction to Psychoanalytic Criticism
When one attempts to find out the authorial intent in the text or trying to understand the character, one is, in one way or other, entering into the domain of psychology and such attempts to read literature have been done since the time of classical criticism. However, tools of psychology to analyze the text have developed in twentieth century with, significantly, Freud.
Much of the emphasis of psychoanalytical criticism is to read, in literature, sexuality and three major elements of literary discourse: the writer, the characters and the reader. Also, psychoanalytical criticism deals with different levels of consciousness: unconsciousness and sub-consciousness literary text.
Unconscious has been held at a primary level in psychoanalytical criticism. For The Unconscious being radically new discovery, it gathered the attention from everywhere. Before this discovery, mind was understood as being a linear, straight, one-dimensional object.
With Freud, mind became a more critical discourse that changed the way various disciplines worked including science and humanities. Basically and initially, the psychoanalytical criticism concerned itself with sexuality and its connection various happening in the body and mind; however, with time it has moved beyond that.
It has been believed that reality lies at the unconscious level and that consciousness acts as a filter which segregates the thoughts which are suppresses and exposed in public. Many a time, suppressed thoughts take help of fantastic elements and comes out in dreams.
Related to this thought, literature was considered to be fantasy which is a product of suppressed thought coming out on paper in form of fiction just as it happens in dreams.
So, through the analysis of the fiction, psychoanalytical critics try to find out the thoughts buried in the unconscious of the writer, particularly in relation to sexuality. However, such practices were later critiqued and challenged by theorists like Jacques Lacan and Carl Jung.
Psychoanalytical criticism, apart from being a separate theory, has also been used by various other theories such as Marxism, Postcolonialism, etc. and have also given birth to new school of thoughts like Feminist psychoanalytical theory. Though it begins with Freud, as an official discipline, but later other theorists took his project further and also various other theorists broke away with him and beget their own psychoanalytical theories.
Jacques Lacan
Lacan is another psychoanalyst who reworks on Freud in connection with poststructuralist theories, which refuses the concept of objectivity and, as Lacan would want us to believe, that subjectivity is the truth—the, for instance, subjects who say: “I play football,” doesn’t refer to himself or the ego but the one that plays the football; therefore, the player is subjected to ‘I’ that is used to refer him—nothing more than that. In doing so, he challenges, condemns and appreciates Freud.
Importantly, Lacan maintains a strong position in favour of the concept of the Unconscious. It is around this concept that his theories revolve. Lacan introduces three terms related to the human mind: imaginary, symbolic and real.
The Imaginary Phase
The imaginary phase exists before the process of ‘Oedipus Complex’ takes place, the time, as Freud also mentions, when the child doesn’t separate him/herself from the body of the mother.
In this phase, the child isn’t aware of his individual self that exist outside the mother’s body; and, hence, doesn’t understand his/her relationship with his surroundings. The phase is called ‘imaginary for the child imagines his own world outside his real existence.
The Symbolic Phase
Second phase is called the ‘symbolic’ phase. At the end of the imaginary phase, the child encounters the mirror phase, in which he discovers himself as being a distinct and separate personality from the mother. This realization that occurs by seeing oneself in the mirror (not a real one) gets extends into the ‘symbolic’ phase.
‘Symbolic phase’ is symbolic for it is the phase of social and moral constructs and, particularly, for being the phase of language. Language, as we understand from poststructuralist discourses, is always symbolic and never literal, becomes the central point of Lacanian psychoanalytical theory.
The Real Phase
The real phase refers to an experience that will cease to become real if articulated through language because, as has been mentioned earlier, language in itself not real.
Here, Lacan is talking about ‘common consciousness’ that exist, in all, pre-mirror stage. The real, in fact, for Lacan means something that cannot be brought into what we perceive a real.
