Oedipus Complex: evolved out by analyzing a situation described by Greek playwright- Sophocles of the Greek king, Oedipus- who killed his father to marry his mother, without being aware of the true nature of either of the acts.
Texts are read for the ‘desires’ they have in them, the ‘drives’ in the characters and the ‘unconscious’ in them.
This move to explore the nature of human psyche by exploring deeper, hidden meanings of the texts and their characters is what we define as – PSYCHOANALYTIC
Sigmond Freud
He invented this new discipline, psychoanalysis
He said that language concealed, revealed or modified hidden desires, anxieties or fears.
Desires cannot be expressed explicitly because they are forbidden by the society. So, language and other forms of symbolic expression- gestures, sounds, facial expression or writing is used to discover it.
Freud was finding a link between language and the unconscious.
Structures of Human psyche
Id
Ego
Superego
Ego: conscious mind. We work with it, use it and are most aware of it. It mediates between the unconscious Id and the superego. Source of decision making.
Superego : our conscience. Drawn from social settings and cultural codes. It influences the way the conscious works.
Id: (Freud’s favorite territory) are of instincts, dreams, desires and all that which is not in the consciousness. This is the unconscious.
The process through which certain desires, especially the sexual, are pushed into the unconscious so that they do not influence our daily lives and our conscious mind is called Repression. Guilt, trauma such as death, abuse, are quickly shunned out of the conscious and are put into the unconscious which appear only at certain moments like dreams or during stress, images, jokes (slip of tongue) and even art.
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