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Psychoanalytic literary criticism
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===Early applications=== Freud wrote several important essays on literature, which he used to explore the psyche of authors and characters, to explain narrative mysteries, and to develop new concepts in psychoanalysis (for instance, ''[[Delusion and Dream in Jensen's Gradiva]]'' and his influential readings of the [[Oedipus]] myth and [[Shakespeare]]'s ''[[Hamlet]]'' in ''[[The Interpretation of Dreams]]''). The criticism has been made, however, that in his and his early followers' studies 'what calls for elucidation are not the artistic and literary works themselves, but rather the psychopathology and biography of the artist, writer, or fictional characters'.<ref>Waugh, p. 200</ref> Thus 'many psychoanalysts among Freud's earliest adherents did not resist the temptation to psychoanalyze poets and painters (sometimes to Freud's chagrin').<ref>Peter Gay, ''Freud: A Life for Our Time'' (London 1989) p. 764</ref> Later analysts would conclude that 'clearly one cannot psychoanalyse a writer from his text; one can only appropriate him'.<ref>Adam Phillips, ''On Flirtation'' (London 1994) p. 45</ref> Early psychoanalytic literary criticism would often treat the text as if it were a kind of dream. This means that the text represses its real (or latent) content behind obvious (manifest) content. The process of changing from latent to manifest content is known as the dream work and involves operations of concentration and [[Displacement (psychology)|displacement]]. The critic analyzes the language and symbolism of a text to reverse the process of the dream work and arrive at the underlying latent thoughts. The danger is that 'such criticism tends to be reductive, explaining away the ambiguities of works of literature by reference to established psychoanalytic doctrine; and very little of this work retains much influence today'.<ref>J. Childers/G. Hentzi eds., ''The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism'' (New York 1995) p. 247</ref>
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