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The psychoanalytical interpretation of literature, as I see it, is characterized by one distinguishing premise: it perceives the text as a symptom and aims at an understanding of the hidden cause or root of that symptom. I am tempted to say that such an interpretation of literature involves a rational understanding, awareness or intellectual treatment with a therapeutic goal. Such an approach means that the elements of a text are not given a primary or independent function in its total expression of intellectual and emotional insight. Instead, they are seen as secondary manifestations and are ultimately taken as signs and symptoms of what is viewed as the primary phenomenon. This phenomenon is the hidden psychological structures of the text or the fictitious characters, and most often this seems to amount to repressed or sublimated erotic energies.
The basic therapeutic attitude I see in psychoanalytic literary research may also involve a danger of a moralism that is alien to a work of art. The purpose of a therapeutically established awareness is the control, treatment and restoration of a “healthy balance” within a personality. Applied to the texts: The irrational experiences and attitudes of the fictitious characters of the text may, through such treatment, be revealed to