hi everyone welcome back to our literature class and today we are going to focus on the psychological approaches to literary criticism now when i say psychological approaches we are not just talking about one specific approach in psychology but we're dealing with a lot of compilations or combinations of different approaches from different prominent psychologists now for us to be able to uh have a handle of what psychoanalytic theory or psychology in literature in general one of the most prominent that we need to take a look at is psychoanalytic criticism psychoanalytic criticism argues that literary texts like dreams express the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the author the text or the literary text is seen like a dream in a dream or or in filipino the the panagine is always unconscious always repressed always an expression of things that you cannot probably or may not do in the conscious level probably because of certain judgment or probably because of certain desires that you don't want society to know and so on and so forth hence it's in the unconscious these are what is being repressed and what the psychoanalytic critics of literature is very interesting how does the author uh reflect or mirror unconsciously those uh desires of him or her present in the literary text that is the main trust of psychoanalytic theory number one the literary work is a manifestation of the author's own unconsciousness what does it mean for a literary work to be a manifestation of the author's own unconsciousness it means that what the author does or does not explicitly talk about in the conscious are manifested in writing probably with the use of words the images and the symbols probably with the events that the author want to happen wanted to happen in his or her life but did not happen or cannot do but instead manifest it in writing the next uh point is that the psychoanalytic theory sees characters as projections of the author's psyche psyche is such a big term in psychology and when you say psyche we're talking about the human being's overall being it means the the mind the soul the spirit like the the realm of the will so to speak it's your psyche okay some would reduce it to terminology just like the soul some would say it's the mind but a behavioral science way of putting it is the psyche the psyche is who you are not just physically but who you are in your mind who you are in your intricacies in your in your desires in your emotions in your feelings and and in your thought processes this is the cycle number three it seeks evidence of unresolved emotions psychological conflicts guilt ambivalences and so forth within the author's literary work so there is an assumption or you know a conjecture that the author has so many unresolved issues from the past and because those were not resolved in the life and time of the author it is then projected in the literary text the assumption is that there are things that were not okay not resolved not manifested publicly we in reality hence it is in the text number four the text is a reflection of the author's childhood trauma family life sexual conflicts fixations and others okay um freud is very heavy on sexuality very heavy on uh the sexual um psyche or the sexual being of a person and how it shapes informs uh conditions so to speak the life of a person okay because it's one of the most common uh human emotions or human encounters or human uh desire so to speak sexual desire and and it it has governed a lot of our decisions our behavior our motivations and the things that we don't want to talk about okay so that is the assumption that the text is a reflection of the author's childhood trauma family life sexual conflict fixations and so on and so forth now the last part here says psychoanalytic criticism like formalism is not concerned about the intentions of the author in writing the text or what we call the intentional fallacy but what the author never intended or the repressed desire okay so there's a comparison now with uh formalism and uh psychoanalytic theory in formalism we know that there's what we call the intentional fallacy or the author or the movement rather being against the intention of the author it's not about the author's intention in writing but in psychoanalytic theory or in psychological approach in literature uh it goes beyond that not just the intention of the author but the things that the author cannot talk about the repressed desires of the author are presented in the text okay hence it's not intentional it is always the unconscious one prominent person that we keep on repeating is sigmund freud and freud just a quick background is an austrian neurologist okay so he is in the you know the field of studying the mind and uh all of the mental processes and how it affects our behavior and freud believed that the unconscious sexual drives were the basis for all human behavior and that dreams were important indicator for understanding human behavior okay so freud capitalizes on the idea or the concept of sexuality and how sexuality being the most repressed common human behavior or common human desire of course there are other human desires but not common for example it's not common for everyone to kill it's not common for everyone to to murder someone it's not common for everyone to commit suicide but it's common for everyone to have sexual desires okay hence he capitalizes on that human behavior called sex or uh in other terms libido according to sigmund freud okay so usually uh manifests in dreams or other unguarded or unexplained behavior such as a sleep of the tongue or what we call the freudian sleep or other manifestations like uncontrolled actions mannerisms gestures these are things that freud uh focuses on in psychoanalytic theory we keep on repeating two important terminologies the conscious and the unconscious and it's important for us to have an operational uh definition of what these two things are when you say conscious it's the part of the mind that interacts with the outside world meaning what is public meaning what is uh manifested in front of people that's the conscious what you do how you behave in public the unconscious on the other hand are the impulses the instincts that dictate our behavior without us knowing it in short these are things that you are not conscious of but still manifests okay this is what we call the unconscious it can be in a dream no one can control someone's dream of course there are studies that says uh there are ways of controlling your dream but it has always been you know debated on because dream is always the field of the unconscious the things that you probably cannot control that's why it is being repressed and manifested in your dreams the foundation of freud's contribution to modern psychology is his emphasis on the unconscious aspect of the human psyche i want to quote from sigmund freud himself he said let me read this the oldest and best meaning of the word unconscious is the descriptive one we call unconscious any mental process the existence of which we are obligated to assume because for instance we infer it in some way from its effects but of which we are not directly aware if we want to be more accurate we would modify the statement by saying that we call a process unconscious when we have to assume that it was active at a certain time although at the time we knew nothing about it in short it is manifesting but we are not conscious about it that we cannot control it that we do not have any say about it it's just there and first to be able to understand these things uh the mental processes that sigmund freud is uh talking about it is important for us to look at these different uh premises i have here three that would clarify our discussion on psychoanalytic theory number one most of the individuals mental processes are unconscious number two that all human behavior is motivated ultimately by what we would call sexuality freud designates the prime psychic force as this term called libido or sexual energy so the libido according to sigmund freud or that prime psychic force is basically what motivates ultimately most of our intentions our decisions our behavior because of this um sexual energy that we are repressing okay and this sexual energy can be uh expressed in for example lusts or fantasies or desires or longings or let's say attachment towards someone may not be always literally sexual but that emotional attachment can still be you know uh motivated by that psychic force because it's in our system that that psychic energy or that psychic force is always longing for something pleasurable and according to freud most of it if not all of it are rooted in this thing called the libido or or that psychic sexual energy quickly let me read the last premise here uh that because of the powerful social taboos attached to certain sexual impulses many of our desires and memories are repressed that is actively excluded from conscious awareness so it means that what is what what's at play in the act of repressing our desires is of course the social construct the expectation of society the rules and laws and regulations and policies around us would cause us to behave on a certain manner and instead of freely expressing our desires we repress it we hide it okay we we leave it in our minds and in and probably in you know in the dark corners of our room when we're alone because the world will not look at us the same when we express these desires in public it's also uh significant for us to understand the self in three components as premised by psychology particularly with sigmund freud of course you are familiar with this three the id the ego and the super ego needless to go deeper but let me just quickly uh and passingly talk about it the id is what we know as the pleasure principle it's the source of aggression and desire okay let me read this quickly the id is the reservoir of libido the primary source of all psychic energy it functions to fulfill the primordial life principle which freud considers to be the pleasure principle without consciousness or semblance of rational order the id is characterized by a tremendous and amorphous vitality the id is in short the source of all our aggressions and desires it is lawless a social and immoral its function is to gratify our instincts for pleasure without regard for social conventions legal ethics or moral restraint what about the ego this is the rational governing agent of the psyche though the ego lacks the strong vitality of the id it regulates the instinctual drives of the id so that they may be released in non-destructive behavioral patterns and though a large portion of the ego is unconscious the ego nevertheless comprises what we ordinarily think of as the conscious mind and the superego or the other regulating agent that which primarily functions to protect society the superego largely unconscious the superego is the moral censoring agency the repository of conscience and pride it is as freud says in the anatomy of mental personality the representative of all moral restrictions the advocate for the impulse toward perfection in short it is as much as we have been able to apprehend psychologically of what people call the higher things in human life uh one of the things that we keep on repeating in in psychology in literature is the idea of repression and repression is the mind's essential strategy for hiding desires and fears in other books in other psychological references it's called the defense mechanism but in behavioral sciences in general we call it repression and repression has so many manifestations in fact what i'm about to present is just part of the the bigger picture there are so many manifestations of repression but i want to reduce to some of the major ones number one sublimation channeling unacceptable urge into something artistic or another outlet next is denial one simply falsifies reality flatly and directly refusing to accept it next is projection repressed desires are avoided it's the avoidance of repressed desire what you don't want you see in others you project it towards others next intellectualization a strategy for avoiding uncomfortable emotions by rationalizing them reaction formation one is convinced that the opposite of a terrible situation is actually the case thinking of the opposite and and embracing it the last one is frozen sleep of course uh needless to explain uh the slip of the tongue is basically what comes out of our mouth if we are cornered with a specific situation that would shock us or or would push us to you know to our corners and and be unguarded at that moment but hopefully you learned something today there so my name is percy and happy reading