Archetypal criticism
•Maud Bodkin’s 1934 work Archetypal Patterns in Poetry and later the works of Northrop Fry developed Jungian psychoanalysis in literary studies.
•Bodkin identified heaven and hell, the oedipal, rebirth, father-figures, the hero as literary archetypes.
•Fry argued that literature drew upon transcendental genres such as romance (summer), tragedy (autumn), irony/satire (winter) and comedy (spring).- Anatomy of Criticism
Feminist psychoanalysis
Focused upon the issues of identity, sexuality, the structure of family and mother- daughter relationship (in contrast to the classical psychoanalysis where the focus is upon father-son relationship.)
Nancy Chodorow: Reproduction and Mothering (1978)- focuses on the mother-daughter relationship.
She says that the mother sees a daughter as her double- an extension of herself.
Daughters therefore, find it difficult to make their own identity.
The ‘core’ identity of women, Chodorow identifies as narcissism, lack of self –control, weak ego boundaries- because of the inability to discover autonomy from the mothers.
So the daughter turns to the father- who represents the outside world.
Structuralist Psychoanalysis
Jacques Lacan – in 1930s- advocated a ‘return to Freud’
Lacan’s psychoanalysis is a combination of Freudian theories with the linguistics of Saussure and Emile Benveniste.
Lacan’s work in Ecrits (1977) and The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1977) – highly influential.
Lacan, Language and the Unconscious
Like Freud, Lacan begins with childhood and gives a model of identity formation- a three stage process or ‘orders’ as Lacan calls them.
1.The Imaginary: child makes his first identification with the reflection in the mirror. It sees and associates coordinated limbs and movements in the mirror and thus forms a sense of the self. The child does not see a distinction between himself and the mother and in the same manner it does not see any distinction between himself or the reflection.
This mirror stage, according to Lacan, is a homologue for the mother/child symbolic relation.
2. The symbolic: this is when the child acquires language, a moment when the child enters social relations. In language , the child discovers that there are different names in the society. – Father, mother, and child. She is ‘mother’ in the language and she is different from ‘I’. The child discovers endless chain of signifiers. There is a first sign of difference. the child discovers that he is different from others, and he cannot desire the mother. There is a name (father) even when the father is not present. – I will tell your father. An absent father acquiring a threatening presence.
3. The Real: this is the order that both Imaginary and the symbolic try to control. This is where the illusion of the child from the imaginary is at odd with the sense of otherness from the symbolic.
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