Essay about Heart of Darkness: Psychoanalytic Criticism

Sigmund Freud today is honored as the founder of modern psychoanalysis. His concept of the human psyche has been used to analyze everything from individual psychologies to the structure of Hamlet. But although Freud is often parodied, cited, and imitated in popular literature, his theories have fallen out of favor in the academic discipline of psychology he was so influential in founding. Courses in psychology devote a paucity of attention to Freud, and literary and cultural studies courses are more often apt to include a primer on the ego, id, and superego, versus psychology classes that attempt to train practitioners in the field. Historian Paul Robinson writes that the applicability of Freud to literary analysis is a symptom of his lack of scientific rigor: "In one respect, Freud might seem to be alive and well in the contemporary intellectual world. I am thinking of the prestige that psychoanalysis still enjoys in literary studies... [critic] Frederick Crews wrote: 'No sadder proof exists of the rift between literature and science than this new adherence to a Freudianism that is rapidly losing authority outside the circle of literary theory'" (Robinson, Introduction, 1993:1). This paper will attempt to explore why this is the case: why has Freud fallen out of favor in the field he founded. Why are the primary strengths of psychoanalytic theory viewed as lying within the field of literary theory

Reading a narrative from a psychoanalytic perspective can prove to be a sometimes frustrating experience. Psychoanalysis often disregards the actual texts and verbal context of a piece of literature in favor of the Freudian and Lacanian ideas, which seek to find encrypted motifs in the depths of every creation in order to reveal the author’s unconscious mind. Nevertheless, the critiques of psychoanalytic interpretation of literature claim that such interpretations focus on the content of the text at the expense of the literary form and temporal dimension, which can reduce the literary plots to lifeless machinations. Furthermore, psychoanalytic interpretation of a text may tell us less about the author’s unconscious mind and more about the

Sigmund Freud, the famed Austrian neurologist, pioneered the process of psychoanalysis, which was intended to be a clinical method to treat neurosis and other forms of psychopathology. However, it has also found use in analyzing stories, dreams, and myths. Freud’s method of developing latent thoughts through manifest content will be demonstrated in the following paper, which focuses on a Zuñi folktale called “The Ugly Wild Boy Who Drove the Bear Away from South-Eastern Mesa.”

Dreams are not always a picture that you make up in your mind, but it is a way to symbolize hopes for the future. Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Dream Within a Dream” discovers the difference between the real and the imaginary. During his lifetime, Poe was rife with horrors and tragedies that informed him to write stories until he passed away at the age 40. Therefore, for Edgar Allen Poe’s “A Dream Within a Dream”, the discussion within this essay will revolve around what the story is about, what figures of speech was used, and what the purpose/meaning of his poem is. As said previously, “A Dream within a Dream” is one of Poe’s poems that distinguishes the line between reality and fantasy.

Dream interpretation has been compared to the decipherment of ancient pictographic scripts. However, although they do resemble, dream interpretation lacks some aspects that decipherment of scrips has, putting results from dream interpretation into an ambiguous ground. The main difference lies in that deciphers were able to agree because they studied the history, culture, and language of the geographical area from where the scripts came; “it is precisely here that Freud’s analogy breaks down: Analysts have nothing corresponding to the already-known salutations and names.”(MacMillan 123) This argument also leads to an important observation about Freud’s theories, that they underestimate the possibility of culture shaping a person’s dreams. Freud

Through psychoanalytic theory, the mind likes to play a lot of games on the victim such as dreams of reality, poems and riddles of the past, and isolation creating the best and worst out of them. Upon the first novel, dreams take control of the mind to unleash the most inner desire. An

Ever since Sigmund Freud developed psychoanalysis theory, its applicability has been extended beyond therapy to literature. In the interpretation of dreams, Sigmund Freud coins the term the oedipus complex in reference to the greek mythology of Oedipus the king. The application of psychoanalysis to myth is treated by Dowden with scepticism and he states that the only significance of the psychoanalytic approach is in its recognition of how fundamental the images that recur in the myth are (Dowden, 1992, p.23). This essay will argue that Dowden’s treatment of the theory of psychoanalysis is valid but needs to be supplemented with a more comprehensive view of psychoanalysis and the various arguments for scepticism towards psychoanalysis.

The Novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is about an Ivory agent, Marlow, who is also the narrator of his journey up the Congo River into the heart of Africa. Marlow witnesses many new things during his journey to find Mr. Kurtz. In Apocalypse Now, the narrator is Captain Willard, who is also on a journey to find Kurtz. The Kurtz in the movie however is an American colonel who broke away from the American army and decided to hide away in Cambodia, upon seeing the reality of the Vietnam War. The poem “The Hollow Men” talks about how humans’ “hollowness” affects their lives and often leads to the destruction of one’s life. These three works all deal with similar issues, and are related to one another in many ways, and also share

During this semester, we studied many English literature theories. We started with New Criticism and ended last week with cultural studies. By far, the most interesting one for me was Psychoanalysis because it helped me understand the possible reasons behind actions and behaviors. Sometimes we read literature without even thinking why things unfold the way they do but after reading the psychoanalysis theories by Sigmund Freud along with some readings by Parker and Tyson I have found myself understanding texts differently. I am going to expose how psychoanalysis relates to the following texts: A&P short story, Passing by Nella Larsen, The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald and the movie The Crying Game by Neil Jordan.

    In Lacanian psychoanalysis, telling stories is essential to the analysand's (re)cognition of trauma. Julia Kristeva refers to the analysand's narrative as an instance of "'borderline' [neurotic] discourse" which "gives the analyst the impression of something alogical, unstitched, and chaotic" (42). She then explores the pleasure (jouissance) that the analysand experiences in the course of Lacan's talking cure. For the analysand, the pleasure is in the telling: "[T]he analyst is struck by a certain maniacal eroticization of speech, as if the patient were clinging to it, gulping it down, sucking on it, delighting in all the aspects of an oral eroticization and a narcissistic safety belt

Heart of Darkness is not only the title of Joseph Conrad’s novella, it is also a main theme. This is portrayed through different images of darkness, black and evil throughout his story. The setting is often used with images of darkness; even as Marlow tells his tale, it is night. This ‘darkness’ is inside many concepts of the novella such as Africa, women, black people, maps, the ivory trade corporation and Kurtz. Through these images on his journey, Marlow has a realization about the inner darkness of man, and thus brings out the theme, and title, Heart Of Darkness.

Freud said that the Ego is the mediator between the Id and Superego and the outside world. For the Ego to do its job, it has to delay the desires of the Id until it is socially acceptable to give the Id the needs. So our conscious-driven Ego is a balance of the Id and Superego, evening out our primal needs

Freud’s findings on the hidden portion of the human mind, have been now widely accepted by the most schools of psychological thought. Known as “the father of psychoanalysis,” Freud’s work has been greatly dominant in the accepted imagination, popularizing such concepts as the unconscious, defense mechanisms, Freudian omissions and dream symbolism, while as well making a long-lasting impress on several fields as literature and movie, Marxist and Feminist theories, literary criticism, philosophy and psychology.

The psychoanalytic lens provides a method for interpreting text from a view of understanding a story’s dynamics, underlying thoughts, fascinations, or images that explain a character’s motives. When reading literature through the psychoanalytic lens, one searches for how structure and images explain psychoanalytic concepts that help determine the psychological stance of a character. We look at these allusions through the psychoanalytic lens, we see that the allusions unveil the underlying emotions the characters feel.

Psychoanalytic criticism is often used in literary analysis because of its emphasis on interpretation. Interpretation, which includes the process of deciphering and analysing, allows the discovery of hidden meanings that can be found in the literature. Such hidden meanings can be found by either focusing on the literature itself, or on the author. From the two types of psychoanalytic theories, for this