Psychoanalytical criticism

Abstract

Psychoanalysis was developed in the late nineteenth century by Sigmund Freud as a method of studying the growth of the human personality. In particular he was interested in the function of sexuality within that process. Freud’s theory regarded the Oedipus complex as constituting the relations essential to our development into social beings; but he also employed it to explain breakdowns in the normal pattern of sexual and emotional development. Essentially, it is a mechanism for effecting the transition from childhood to mature independence, enabling the adult to engage in a network of social relations. In the case of a boy, his early intimate involvement with his mother’s body produces an unconscious incestuous desire, which also in effect casts his father in the role of his rival. However, through fear of castration, the boy represses this desire into his unconscious, submits to his father, casts himself off from his mother and identifies more and more with his father, who comes to symbolise his own future manhood. If the Oedipus complex is not successfully overcome in this way, however, the boy may become fixated on his mother, and in Freud’s view this may lead either to an inability to form proper sexual relationships with women, or to homosexuality.