Psychological Strategy is an essay that attempts to convey the importance of a psychological approach to understanding the meaning attached to a literature piece. This approach explores the motivations of a writer, his characters, and that of the audience, drawing on Sigmund Freud’s theories and other psychoanalytic theories to understand fully the meaning conveyed in such text. These meanings may include male or female preferences and unconscious feelings and desires.
Psychological theories have found application in various fields since Sigmund Freud’s theories on the structural form of the psyche- id, ego, and the superego- came into existence at the start of the 20th century and literature is no exception. When analyzing text, we must pay attention to the psychological aspects behind the piece of literature under review. This approach is mainly based on the notion that every human activity is partly dependant upon the unconscious part of him and these affect his behavior and feeling, and for an author, this can be manifested in his work (Meyer 1542).
Among the theories that are considered when giving a psychological approach to literary analysis is the subject that Freud called the Oedipus complex– based on a male person’s rivalry with his father for his mothers’ love, the female version, which sets the stage for a daughter’s rivalry with her mother for the father’s love, is known as the Electra complex. These subjects not only apply to medieval literature; they are still much relevant today as they were when they first came out almost a hundred years ago and illustrate the unconscious feelings that an author may harbor while writing his literature.
The Oedipus complex is exhibited by Sophocles in his play, Oedipus the King, where King Oedipus kills his father and later marries his mother. This illustrates Sophocles’ unconscious rivalry with his father for the mother’s love and he would have undertaken the same act as the King, the King is merely a reflection of Sophocles (Meyer 1543). The Oedipus complex further finds application in Ernest Jones’ analysis of Hamlet as he uses this psychoanalytic model to explain why Hamlet does not immediately kill the man (Claudius) who killed his father and married his mother. Claudius merely fulfils Hamlet’s unconscious wish and killing him would be tantamount to killing himself.
The Oedipus and Electra complexes can be used to understand a written work more deeply as psychoanalysis methods enables one to get the story from the author’s perspective. This is because when writing, the author not only conveys what he consciously knows, his unconscious voice also influences the contents of the text and this is usually more accurate as can be seen from the analyses of Oedipus the King and Hamlet. However, psychoanalytic methods of analyzing text are not limited to the Oedipus and Electra complexes, many other methods that employ Freud’s theories and the unconscious voice have been used to successfully identify the author’s motivation, such as in Chopin’s The Story of an Hour.
Therefore, it is observed from the examples that a psychological interpretation of literature is a very important procedure in understanding the conscious and unconscious motives and feelings of an author and the meaning of events. Besides the writer, such an approach can also convey information about the audience that is drawn to the literature under review. The characters in a piece of writing are a representation of the author and this extends to the audience.
Work Cited
Meyer, Michael. The Compact Bedford introduction to Literature. 6th Ed. Boston New York: Bedford/ St. Martins, 2003.