Psychoanalytic Criticism

Question 1

Sublimation

Answer 1

Satisfying an impulse (e.g. aggression) with a socially acceptable or constructive substitute object.

Question 2

Ego

Answer 2

Consciousness

Question 3

Superego

Answer 3

Conscience

Question 4

Id

Answer 4

Unconscious drives

Question 5

Transference

Answer 5

Redirecting antagonism or resentment for one person onto someone else.

Question 6

Projection

Answer 6

This involves individuals attributing their own thoughts, feeling, and motives to another person (A. Freud, 1936). Thoughts most commonly projected onto another are the ones that would cause guilt such as aggressive and sexual fantasies or thoughts.

For instance, you might hate someone, but your superego tells you that such hatred is unacceptable. You can ‘solve’ the problem by believing that they hate you.

Question 7

Displacement

Answer 7

Displacement is the redirection of an impulse (usually aggression) onto a powerless substitute target (A. Freud, 1936). The target can be a person or an object that can serve as a symbolic substitute. Someone who feels uncomfortable with their sexual desire for a real person may substitute a fetish (e.g. metonymy)

Question 8

Condensation

Answer 8

When a number of things are combined or represented by a single image (symbolism, metaphor)

Question 9

Positivistic rationalism

Answer 9

Reason and intellect the form and pattern of intellectual virtue.

Question 10

How did Freud view art?

Answer 10

As a kind of ‘substitute gratification’, a beneficial illusion in contrast to reality, which serves as a narcotic, is dream-like and features inner dishonesty.

F. believed that the right way to deal with reality was to make ego independent of superego and the organizer of the id. But that reality could also be dealt with by daydreaming, neurosis which are considered less painful that reality itself.

Question 11

Describe the relationship between Freud and Romanticism

Answer 11

Both relegated ego as inferior to Id.
Believed in the hidden element of human nature, that is not always dark (Wordsworth, Coleridge) but can reflect hidden wisdom/power
Fascination with dreams 
Belief in sexual origin of art (Tieck)
The hidden versus the visible
Belief in the death drive

Differ in that Freud is also rationalistic and holds reason over romanticism.

Question 12

Mithridatic function

Answer 12

Tragedy is used to inure us to the greater pain that will inevitably be forced upon us by life

Question 13

The Pleasure-principle

Answer 13

People will seek to maximize their pleasures and minimize their pains

Question 14

Thanatos

Answer 14

The death drive appears in opposition and balance to Eros and pushes a person towards extinction and an ‘inanimate state’.

Freud saw drives as moving towards earlier states, including non-existence.

Question 15

Eros

Answer 15

the life drive towards health, safety and reproduction. Involves love, cooperation, compromise

Question 16

Repetition compulsion

Answer 16

Traumatic repetitions could be seen as the result of an attempt to retrospectively “master” the original trauma, a child’s play as an attempt to turn passivity into activity:

‘At the outset he was in a passive situation…but by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took on an active part’.