Psychoanalytic literary criticism has it's roots in the theories called Freudian psychology (psychoanalysis) set by the Austrian neurologist, philosopher and psychotherapist Sigmund Freud. Although Freud is widely recognized by his theories of unconscious, the defence mechanism of repression and psychoanalysis, his early studies also included researches on the animals, hypnosis and dream analysis. After he found hypnosis to be inadequate for the majority of his patients, instead he made them talk about their own problems which was later called the "talking cure" and which also established the basis for psychoanalytic method.
Psychoanalysis seems to be the final destination for Freud after he tried several methods of treatment on his patients. He, being a neurologist himself, initially used the method of psychoanalysis in order to treat psychological or emotional illnesses and to explain human behaviors. Besides, he wrote several essays on some works of literature like Gradiva by Wilhelm Jensen, Hamlet by Shakespeare and the myth of Oedipus. In these essays, Freud tried to analyse the psychology of the characters and the authors as if they were nobody but a patient on his couch. Then, the literary texts started to be used as materials in order to illustrate several concepts in psychoanalysis by the following psychiatrists and neurologists like Carl Jung and Jacques Derrida. We find out that Freud's theory succeeded to influence a wide range of people; beginning from his professional colleagues like Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan to the producers and directors like Stanley Kubrick and more than a dozen of theoretical orientations came out. And psychoanalytic reading developed in literature as a literary criticism.
The method of psychoanalytic reading included the interpretation of the texts as if they were what a patient said during a psychotherapy session. Norman N. Holland describes the method of psychoanalysis in his essay "The 'Unconscious' of Literature: The Psychoanalytic Approach" in the following words:"... one considers it [the text] as though it were a dream or as though some ideal patient could speak from the couch...As in regular explication, one proceeds in steps." (136)That is to say, when we sit to approach a novel, a poem or a short story psychoanalytically, we need to accept the author as a patient in the couch and the literary text as the words he uses in order to tell us his dream. But at this moment one will probably ask why do we associate the text to a dream? The answer is, because the construction of dreams highly resemble the construction of works of literature. Marie Bonaparte explains the resemblance in her essay:"the same mechanisms which, in dreams or nightmares, govern the manner in which our strongest, though most carefully concealed desires are elaborated, desires which are most repugnant to consciousness, also govern the elaboration of the work of art." (1988, p.101)
Acording to her, both dreams and literary texts are devised and elaborated by the same mechanism which still needs to be worked on to a great extend. This mechanism also adds more to the subjectivity of a given dream (or a text, for our purposes) making it a must to take the individuality of the patient (the author) into consideration. So, the text is supposed to be burden with the imageries stemming from its creator's unconscious, in a way more or less masked. It is either the author's unconscious that tries to convey itself in the text, or the author that re-embodies himself in the characters he created. In any case, we will discover two layers of meaning; one of them being the manifest (the visible meaning on the page) and the second one being the latent (the meaning behind the obvious). After all, before we start dealing with the text we need to decide what we will focus on as psychoanalytic literary criticism enables one to concentrate on the text, the audience, the characters or the author himself. Focusing on the text means that the language of the text and the symbols included (or disguised) will be examined in detail while the response of the audience will be given the utmost importance when focused on the audience. Concentration on one or more of the characters will bring along the analysis of the characters' behavior and motivations as if they are real-life people. Psychoanalytic literary criticism, when focused on the life of the author, leads us to what is called "psychobiography" which understands the text as a piece of writing that supplies parallelism and proof for the life of the author.
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