Psychoanalytic Criticism Of Sigmund Freud

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The Psychoanalytic criticism is a literary criticism that is used to interpret texts and their deeper meaning of psychology. Sigmund Freud is the founder of this literary criticism and it has been put into practice since its conception. It is used to psychologically analyze a certain author or a certain character in a work. Its purpose is to understand a work by treating the chosen character as a case study and to look for certain psychological tendencies in the actions or thoughts of the characters. Much of Freud’s theories come from the very famous play by Sophocles, Oedipus the King. In this play, Oedipus kills his father, and ends up marrying his mother, all being done unconsciously. Through this play, Freud derives his theory which is This directly resembles the mother fixation theory by Freud in that the child is unwilling to accept truth. In the mother fixation theory the son is not aware of his desires of his mother, and often times when they are adults they end up marrying someone very similar to their mother. Mother fixation is often time caused by not conquering the psychosexual developments. Oedipus may not have developed fully because he did not receive nurturing or any sort of identity in himself. This could be caused by not having a mother that truly cared for him since his real mother wasn’t present. This of course would all be unconscious since he did not know he was adopted. There are plenty of reasons for Oedipus to realize that Jocasta is his mother, but he pushes those reasons away. From the beginning he tried to run away from who he thought his parents were. He was desperately trying to prevent this awful event from occurring, but ended up marrying his biological mother as a result. To the people of the time, this seemed as mere irony. To us by using Freud’s theories, we are able to see that this ironic event could possibly be more than meets the eye. By using this criticism we are able to know that Oedipus was fated to marry his mother even though he thought it

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