Psychoanalytic Theories

Semester 2 
Module III
Psychoanalytic Theories

The existence of the unconscious is central to all psychoanalytic theories. Individuals move through developmental stages early in life, and traumas or experiences during that process may have a lasting effect on personality. Literary and other cultural texts may have a psychological impact on readers or meet a psychological need in them. 

Prescribed Essay:
Jacques Lacan. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Foundation of I as Revealed in Psychoanalysis Experience.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. USA: Blackwell, 1998. Pp. 178-183.

Psychoanalysis is based on the notion that human beings are motivated by unconscious fears, needs, conflicts and desires. For the psychoanalysts sexual behaviour is a product of our culture and the origin of our sexual being is in the nature of the affirmation or disruption of our sense of self that occurs in childhood.

            

I. Schools of Psychoanalytical Thought

·         Classical Psychoanalysis

·         Analytical Psychology

·         Archetypal Psychology

·         Post-Structuralist Psychoanalysis

II. Major Concepts

·         Anxiety

·         Archetypes

·         Castration Complex

·         Collective Unconscious

·         Conflict

·         Conscious

·         Displacement

·         Dreams and Dream Symbols

·          Latent and Manifest

·         Drives

·          Pleasure-principle

·         Reality-principle

·         Foreclosure

·         Freudian Slips

·         Gaze

·         Graph of Desire

·         Id, Ego, Superego

·         Lack

·         Latent Content

·         Mirror Stage

·          Imaginary, Symbolic, Real

·         Neurosis and Neurotic Repetition

·         Oedipal Complex

·         Phallocentrism

·         Preconscious

·         Repression

·         The Oedipus Complex

·         Unconscious

III.  Major Figures

·         Sigmund Freud

·         Carl Jung

·         James Hillman

·         Karen Horney

·         Jacques Lacan

·         Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guttari

·         Julia Kristeva

IV.Major Works

·         Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychology of Everyday Life

·         Jacques Lacan – Ecrits, “Desire and Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet”, “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious.”

·         Julia Kristeva- The Revolution in Poetic Language

·         Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guttari- Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

  V.Sample Reading

·         “The Purloined Letter.”- http://alternation.ukzn.ac.za/docs/15.2/17%20Pillay.pdf

·         The Great Gatsby- www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ells/article/download/.../15223

·         Beloved- http://performance.millikin.edu/LiteratureCasebooks/beloved/essays/Cox-psychological-essay1.pdf