Traditional Freudian Criticism

Second Edition 2005

Along the lines of sigmund freud’s own forays into literary criticism, such as his remarks on the Oedipal scheme in Hamlet (1899), his theoretical essay "Creative Writers and Day-dreaming" (1908), and his psychobiographical essay "Dostoevsky and Parricide" (1928), several of Freud’s contemporaries as well as later writers produced studies of literary figures and literary works that established elementary models of psychoanalytic criticism. Such models typically assumed relative transparency between the fictional product and the creative artist: read psychoanalytically, the literary work disclosed the author’s unconscious fantasies. The aim of this criticism was typically psychobiographical; the exact, manifest terms of the narrative were subordinated to those patterns of wish and defense revealed by analytic discovery of "latent content." The best examples of this style of criticism (still in practice) refuse to subordinate art to neurosis and deploy the tools of psychoanalysis to explore precise terms of language, metaphor, and character.

After Freud, the best-known pioneer of traditional psychoanalytic criticism is probably Ernest Jones (1879–1958). Jones was the author of almost 200 essays in theory and applied psychoanalysis, including articles on dreams, literature, religion, war neuroses, female sexuality, Ireland, chess, ice-skating, and the common cold. He was instrumental in introducing Freud to the English-speaking world and presided over the origins of the British psychoanalytic establishment. He was the author of the first full biography of Freud (1957), the standard account until later biographies were produced by Ronald W. Clark (1980) and Peter Gay (1988).

Jones’s early monograph On the Nightmare (1910)demonstrates a bold effort to apply psychoanalytic perspectives to history and legend, sketching analyses of witches, vampires, Druids, and speculative etymology (mares, horses, and the linguistic m[a]r root). (Jones himself suffered throughout his life from vivid nightmares [see Brome].) His essay on "The Theory of Symbolism" (1916)is an energetic and shrewd effort to regularize Freud’s ideas as stated in The Interpretation of Dreams and elsewhere: to articulate elementary structures of symbolic representation in dream and literature. Jones connected symbols with primitive sensorial residues of "primary process" mentation anchored in repressed, unconscious representations of the body, sexual life, family relations, and death: a reservoir of images common to human development and liable to regressive attention during periods of stress, dreaming, or creative activity. The potent puppet, Punchinello, for instance, is a phallic symbol (93)—the most common. Although Jones, like Freud, resisted the impulse, ultimately his argument implies a "dictionary of symbols," albeit highly overdetermined (97–98); there are about 100 commonly symbolized concepts (102–3). He is especially attentive to the linguistic, etymological origins of symbols. (jacques lacan, in his insistence on the letter rather than the corpus in symbolism, still gives a substantial nod to Jones’s essay [ "Function" 81 ].)

Hamlet and Oedipus (1949), developed from an essay Jones originally wrote in 1910 into a slim book, is an elaboration of Freud’s very brief remarks in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900, 264–66)on Oedipal motivations behind the prince’s delay in avenging his father’s foul murder. Whereas Freud used the example of Hamlet to support the Oedipus complex (Hamlet cannot punish Claudius, who has effected the patricide devoutly wished), Jones implicitly extends the psychoanalytic reading into a clinical analysis of deep ambivalence toward the mother. For some literary critics, Jones’s reading is vitiated by his speculations about Hamlet as a child: one chapter is titled "Tragedy and the Mind of the Infant." But Jones is candid about his assumptions: "No dramatic criticism of the personae in a play is possible except under the pretence that they are living people, and surely one is well aware of this pretence" (18).

Although Jones’s work on Hamlet made him the best known of early Freudian literary critics (Laurence Olivier consulted him for the 1950 film version), another of Freud’s first-generation followers covered more literary and theoretical ground. Otto Rank (1884–1939) was one of Freud’s brightest disciples. He eventually left over theoretical and personal disputes; for example, he favored "birth trauma" over castration as the originary model of personal deprivation. Author of an essay entitled "The Artist," which he presented to Freud in 1905, Rank maintained his interest in art throughout his life. The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909)is a remarkably erudite compilation of core motifs in cultural myths: the hero, the double, and the theme of incest. His vast mythological and literary research was in the service of grounding the Oedipus complex for psychoanalysis—although he eventually unsettled this ground with his ideas about birth trauma and pre-Oedipal separation anxiety.

Rank’s essay on the Doppelgänger (1914, The Double, 1925)uses literary examples from E. T. A. Hoffman, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Robert Louis Stevenson, oscar wilde, Guy de Maupassant, and edgar allan poe, aligning brief biographical sketches with theoretical emphasis on narcissism and projection: the double is both a reflection of self-love and a rival. His massive work on the incest-motif, Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage (1912, The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend, 1992), is a broad survey of Oedipal dynamics in European and world literature and mythology.

Less well known than Jones or Rank, Ella Freeman Sharpe (1875–1947) deserves mention because of her unique attention to language, especially metaphor. Sharpe came to psychoanalysis from literature, which she had been teaching. Many of her literary analyses follow Freud’s: her essay "The Impatience of Hamlet" (1929) continues Jones’s study (the early version published in 1910) and deepens it to consider pre-Oedipal issues, as well as the therapeutic functions of art: "The poet is not Hamlet. Hamlet is what he might have been if he had not written the play of Hamlet" (205). At her death she was working on a large treatment of Shakespeare’s late career, a portion of which was published as "From King Lear to The Tempest" (1946). This fragmented essay is full of brilliant speculations and amplifies Freud’s identification of the tripartite mother-imago in Lear(see Freud, "The Theme of the Three Caskets," 1913). Sharpe’s literalism opens her to charges that she writes the worst sort of psychoanalytic criticism, as when she writes of "child Lear" howling in rage at his mother’s pregnancy, or the King’s retinue of knights as a symbol for feces, or the Bard himself as an angry, defecating infant (246). Yet her criticism was sharper than its reductions. She was well aware of the problem of treating characters as people or patients. At its best her own critical language marries the metaphors of Shakespeare and psychoanalysis to construct provocative readings of particular passages. Such analyses proceed from a deeply Freudian appreciation of metaphor and add a crucial developmental element to Jones’s (1916) theoretical account in "Psycho-Physical Problems Revealed in Language: An Examination of Metaphor." "My theory," she stated, "is that metaphor can only evolve in language or in the arts when the bodily orifices become controlled. . . . A subterranean passage between mind and body underlies all analogy" (156). Later enthusiastic iterations of this concept may be found in Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body (1966).

One of the fullest early developments of Freudian analysis of a single author was produced by Marie Bonaparte (1882–1962). Perhaps best known for her largess in helping Freud and his family escape the Nazis in 1938, Princess Bonaparte wrote an immense study of Edgar Allan Poe (1933). Freud wrote a brief preface to the work, which is a thorough effort to relate biographical details to all aspects of the artist’s literary production. Bonaparte relied heavily on Freud’s theoretical relation of the poet to the dreamer ( "Creative Writers and Day-dreaming," 1908) and translated backwards from literature to unconscious wishes and fears, producing reductive psychosexual allegories. Hers is a primary-process criticism that seeks to collapse conventional forms of literary representation in favor of regressive translations to unconscious origins. She views Poe as a writer who transformed private traumata into fiction, principally the death of his mother when he was two. His artistic goal was to resurrect a living bond to a dead woman, a project simultaneously thrilling and terrifying. Bonaparte was especially attentive to characters, creatures, landscapes, and architecture as split or overdetermined representations of obsessive figures and themes. Her book is an extensive elaboration of Freud’s dreamwork (condensation, displacement, symbolism): for example, maternal images appear in "The Black Cat" split into wife, cats, and the house itself; and Montresor’s vaults in "A Cask of Amontillado" are corporeal avenues of the maternal body. Bonaparte’s Poe is a pathological, "sadonecrophilist" genius haunted by obsessive fantasies he could not comprehend but only repeat. More recent psychoanalytic approaches to the mystery of Poe, studies that essentially rely on Bonaparte even as they deride her apparent crudeness, are Daniel Hoffman’s Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (1972)and Lacan’s "Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’" (1972). This style of psychobiography achieved more sophisticated application in works by Phyllis Greenacre on Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll and by Leon Edel on henry james.

Probably the best contemporary illustration of traditional Freudian criticism is the early work of Frederick Crews (b. 1938). Along with harold bloom and Norman Holland, Crews encouraged by instruction and example much of the psychoanalytic criticism practiced in America since the mid-1960s. His seminal book on Nathaniel Hawthorne (1966) rescued that writer from conventional moralistic allegory and attended seriously to the dark landscape of sexual ambivalence that energizes his fiction. "The form of [Hawthorne’s] plots," writes Crews, "often constitutes a return of the repressed" (17). Hawthorne’s fascination with Puritans and the cultural history of guilt reflects his own unconscious impulses, which tend primarily to be Oedipal (79). In "Young Goodman Brown," for instance, Brown flees his wife’s arms into a demonic forest full of sexual symbols and barely disguised primal-scene fantasies, a site that figures his own incestuous desires and fears of retribution (99–106). Crews offers finely tuned analyses of metaphor, image, and character, pressed toward psychobiographical conclusions about Hawthorne’s "incomplete resolution of early Oedipal feelings" (241). For the most part, Crews’s Hawthorne is carried by his fantasies rather than being the master of them: in "Rappaccini’s Daughter," which allegorizes deep anxieties about genital sexuality into botanical imagery, "we can almost credit Hawthorne with a pitiless symbolic anatomy of an adolescent mind" (134). The critic judges the author’s artistry to be ultimately hobbled by the obsessive power of his regressive fantasies. "All Hawthorne’s serious fiction," Crews concludes, "amounts to a version of the same unconscious challenge; not one of his characters stands apart from the endless and finally suffocating debate about the gratification of forbidden wishes. . . . We must admire the art and separately regret the life. And yet it is a fact that the two are inextricable" (270–71).

Beginning in the mid-1970s, Crews developed a radical disaffection with psychoanalysis: see his critical reviews of Norman Holland’s Dynamics of Literary Response(in Out of My System) and Erik Erikson’s History and the Historical Moment(in Skeptical Engagements), as well as the vigorous repudiations in several other essays in Skeptical Engagements. Although he came to reject the claims of psychoanalysis to scientific or interpretive validity, Crews retained a relatively generous attitude toward his book on Hawthorne. Instead of using Freud to explain Hawthorne’s sexual fascinations, however, Crews later pointed to similar themes in both writers and located each in a Zeitgeist of "the psychological atmosphere of Romanticism" (Skeptical xiii–xiv).

David Willbern

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