Psychoanalytic Criticism on Emily Dickinson

Psychological criticism is known as the type of criticism that analyses the writer’s work within the realms of Freud’s psychological theories. Such approach can be used when trying to reconstruct an author’s position throughout their literary writings, as well as understanding whom the author was and how their mind created such works. When considering the work of Emily Dickinson, psychoanalytic criticism comes into play with the role of explaining the many meanings behind her poetry, as to make the reader relate to such poetry on a deeper level or not to who she was as a human being.

Many critics believe that using a psychological criticism approach to understand an author’s literary work leaves common sense behind. For them, such analysis disregards the environment in which an author created their work, as well as disregarding that men and women read differently. One of the main critics of such approach, Karl Popper, states that the creators of psychoanalysis such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Marx “couched their theories in terms which made them amenable only to confirmation.“ What that means is that for Popper, considered one of the greatest philosophers of science in the 20th century, psychoanalysis is a pseudoscience because its statements cannot be testable, thus not falsifiable. When a theory cannot be falsifiable, it ends up representing only one side of the spectrum, because if one states, for example, that Emily Dickinson’s poetry is filled with remarks of her childhood and confined adulthood, there would be no counter argument to refute such statement.

By considering such arguments, psychoanalysis can be said to have no ultra fundamental meaning when assessing an author’s work. For former advocate of this analysis, Frederic...

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