PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO LITERATURE(7)

Psychological approach to literature

The Psychological Approach: Freud

Freud’s Theories:

1. Freud emphasized the unconscious aspects of the human psyche
2. Most of the individual’s mental processes are unconscious
3. All human behavior is motivated ultimately by sexuality (However, some of Freud’s own disciples have rejected this, including Jung and Adler)

the summary of all human behaviour is motivated by sexuality is :

The time has arrived for me to attempt to summarize what I have said. We started

out from the aberrations of the sexual instinct in respect of its object and of its aim and

we were faced by the question of whether these arise from an innate disposition or are

acquired as a result of experiences in life. We arrived at an answer to this question from

an understanding, derived from psycho-analytic investigation, of the workings of the

sexual instinct in psychoneurotics, a numerous class of people and one not far removed

from the healthy. We found that in them tendencies to every kind of perversion can be

shown to exist as unconscious forces and betray their presence as factors leading to the

formation of symptoms. It was thus possible to say that neurosis is, as it were, the

negative of perversion. In view of what was now seen to be the wide dissemination of

tendencies to perversion we were driven to the conclusion that a disposition to

perversions is an original and universal disposition of the human sexual instinct and that

normal sexual behaviour is developed out of it as a result of organic changes and

psychical inhibitions occurring in the course of maturation; we hoped to be able to show

the presence of this original disposition in childhood. Among the forces restricting the

direction taken by the sexual instinct we laid emphasis upon shame, disgust, pity and the

structures of morality and authority erected by society. We were thus led to regard any

established aberration from normal sexuality as an instance of developmental inhibition

and infantilism. Though it was necessary to place in the foreground the importance of the

variations in the original disposition, a co-operative and not an opposing relation was to

be assumed as existing between them and the influences of actual life. It appeared, on the

other hand, that since the original disposition is necessarily a complex one, the sexual

instinct itself must be something put together from various factors, and that in the

perversions it falls apart, as it were, into its components. The perversions were thus seen

to be on the one hand inhibitions, and on the other hand dissociations, of normal

development. Both these aspects were brought together in the supposition that the sexual

instinct of adults arises from a

After having explained the preponderance of perverse tendencies in psychoneurotics

by recognizing it as a collateral filling of subsidiary channels when the main current of

the instinctual stream has been blocked by ‘repression’,

of sexual life in childhood. We found it a regrettable thing that the existence of the sexual

instinct in childhood has been denied and that the sexual manifestations not infrequently

to be observed in children have been described as irregularities. It seemed to us on the

contrary that children bring germs of sexual activity with them into the world, that they

already enjoy sexual satisfaction when they begin to take nourishment and that they

persistently seek to repeat the experience in the familiar activity of ‘thumb-sucking’. The

sexual activity of children, however, does not, it appeared, develop pan passu with their

other functions, but, after a short period of efflorescence from the ages of two to five,

combination of a number of impulses of childhood into a unity, an impulsion with a single aim.1 we proceeded to a consideration2

enters upon the so-called period of latency. During that period the production of sexual

excitation is not by any means stopped but continues and produces a store of energy

which is employed to a great extent for purposes other than sexual—namely, on the one

hand in contributing the sexual components to social feelings and on the other hand

(through repression and reaction-forming) in building up the subsequently developed

barriers against sexuality. On this view, the forces destined to retain the sexual instinct

upon certain lines are built up in childhood chiefly at the cost of perverse sexual impulses

and with the assistance of education. A certain portion of the infantile sexual impulses

would seem to evade these uses and succeed in expressing itself as sexual activity. We

next found that sexual excitation in children springs from a multiplicity of forces.

Sigmund Freud

Summary :