the Norton anthology of theory and criticism: Psycho analysis
psychoanalysis – terms and concepts have filtered into literary cultural criticism and theory.
common ground is that critics and psychoanalysis are all in the business of deciphering cryptic symbolic texts (or dreams).
according to Freud dreams are censored by the consciousness. These processes are:
secondary revision or collaboration
these explain why dreams emerge as nonsense. psychoanalyst has to make sense of these dream texts. this entails that nonsense is meaningful and distortion is creative.
Carl Jung – particularly influential for critics who have made inventories of archetypes.e.g. garden and desert, water and fire, hero and monster, river journey and ordeal, birth and death – that are believed to be stored in humanities collective unconscious.
2 examples of psychopoetics:
Harold Bloom – "anxiety of influence"
French feminism – ecriture feminine
Bloom – believes that each major poet in the Anglo-American tradition suffers a productive anxiety of influence.the new poet selects a role model both to imitate and to compete against.contrast theories of the romantic an d neoclassical period where influence was entirely beneficial.with the rise of the subjective lyric poem influence became baleful - involving the poet's primal repression of the precursor plus defences against these parent figures, including – masochistic reversals, sublimations, introjections, regressions, and projections.these are all entail what Bloom calls ("misprision") = "mistaking".distortion is inescapable and necessary to be creative.
Bloom has been criticised for focusing on competition instead of collaboration, for favouring the Canon over the less well-known, and for omitting nearly all writing by women.
the theory of ecriture feminine derives from the psychoanalyst Jacques Laclan and revised by the French feminist Helene Cixous.in this model the "Imaginary order" is the mother-centred stage and the "Symbolic order" is the separation between herself and the mother - introduction of the law and patriarchal social codes, loss and associated desire.
ecriture feminine is opposed to patriarchal discourse with its rigid grammar boundaries and categories, tapping into the imaginary stage it gives voice to the unconscious, the body the non-subjective(sic) and polymorphous drives.although such female writing can be produced by males (Genet, Joyce) it is a writing positioned against patriarchal values and practices.
in both of these theories the 'Oedipus complex' plays a key role. Bloom's theory of the 'anxiety of influence' presents a parallel rivalry to the Oedipal rivalry.
ecriture femininee attempts to reconceive the pre-Oedipal sphere as a positive source of creativity and liberation, rather than seen as an infantile domain of the irrational which we must leave behind.
Anti-Oedipus book – by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. (Marxist and feminist theorists) is a book that criticises many aspects of Freud's work e.g. that the nuclear family is viewed as the universal framework for normal development. according to the book Freud subjugates the disruptive unconscious to the patriarchal hegemeny of family, law, capitalism.
the book sees subjectivity as truly complex and an open-ended process of becoming, in which multiple contradictory positions and roles coexist.
