Psychoanalytic Criticism

Psychoanalytic criticism is a movement that applies the ideas of psychoanalysis to the interpretation of literature: it investigates the unconscious motives of creativity, the psychology of author and characters, dream symbolism, repression, and sublimation. Its premise is Sigmund Freud's doctrine of the unconscious, the Oedipus complex, the 'uncanny' (das Unheimliche), and art as the sublimation of drives (the essay on Leonardo da Vinci, 'Creative Writers and Daydreaming'). Carl Gustav Jung supplemented the approach with the theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious. Jacques Lacan reinterpreted Freud through structuralism ('the unconscious is structured like a language,' the 'mirror stage'), giving a new wave of literary theory. Psychoanalytic criticism was developed by Harold Bloom ('the anxiety of influence') and Julia Kristeva. In the Ukrainian context, psychoanalytic approaches to Taras Shevchenko were applied by Stepan Balei (the pioneering 'On the Psychology of Shevchenko's Creativity,' 1916) and Hryhorii Hrabovych.