What is Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism?1

The history of psychoanalytic literary criticism is as old as psychoanalysis, but it has undergone considerable change since Freud's famous readings of Hamlet (1900), the novels of Dostoevsky (1928), and the story of Moses (1939). The methodology of psychoanalytic literary criticism introduced by Freud and adopted by most psychoanalysts and non-analysts through the greater part of the 20th century is founded on the idea that writers create stories and characters that reflect their own unconscious psychology. A text is a mirror of the unconscious mind of the writer, much as dreams are creations of the unconscious mind that are disguised in order to escape repression (“censorship”), thus gaining access to preconscious and conscious awareness (our remembered dreams). Through readings of this sort, psychoanalytic literary criticism brought established analytic formulations to bear on the text, for instance, constellations of feeling understandable in terms of the Oedipus complex, castration anxiety, the incest taboo, oral, anal, and phallic stages of psychosexual development, and the like.

The best known, and most widely studied, early examples of this type of formulaic Freudian reading are Ernest Jones's (1949) reading of Hamlet (in which he concludes that Hamlet is unable to fulfill his duty to kill his uncle because that murder is too closely linked in his repressed unconscious to his forbidden oedipal wishes to murder his father and marry his mother); and Marie Bonaparte's (1933) study of Edgar Allen Poe, which owed much to Freud's (1908) “Creative Writers and Day-dreaming.”

As psychoanalytic theories of early childhood development grew more nuanced, so did the range of concepts that psychoanalysts used to decode literary texts. This resulted in readings that were no less formulaic in the way they made use of analytic concepts, but they did draw on a wider range of psychoanalytic ideas (for example, Phyllis Greenacre's “The Mutual Adventures of Jonathan Swift and Lem