Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature

1. Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature Structure of the Mind, Child Development & Oedipus Complex Dream and Sexual Symbols Psychological Diseases

2. The dream-work . . . • Dreams-- the royal road to the unconscious. • Transforms the 'latent' content of the dream, the. 'forbidden' dream-thoughts, • into the 'manifest' dreamstories -- what the dreamer remembers.

3. Freud’s Interpretation of Dream • 1st: wish fulfillments---the disguise is successful and the dream proceeds undisturbed, • 2nd: anxiety dreams --the disguise is absent or insufficient; the forbidden wish emerges, causes anxiety, and the dreamer wakes up • 3rd: content is disturbing but the feeling is not -- the wish is particularly well disguised by a misalliance of content and feeling

4. Four Elements of Dream • condensation, displacement, consideration of representibility, and symbolization/secondary revision. • Examples: • switches a person's hatred of Mr. Appleby to that of a rotting apple. • “Dream” • Spellbound

5. Sexual symbols: • (Frued's notion of symbolism: the whole world can be absorbed narcissistically, the sexual drives can attach themselves to anything the senses perceive.) • Examples: Rene Margritte