The Catcher in the Rye Lecture Notes I

The Catcher in the Rye Lecture Notes I. Freud, Jung, and Psychoanalysis Psychoanalysis, a treatment of neuroses, was developed by Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, in 1890. Freud, who was working at a hospital in Vienna, noticed that some of his patients exhibited symptoms of illness without having any abnormal physical conditions to cause them. He believed that the cause of the symptoms was repressed desires and traumatic incidents from the individuals’ childhoods. According to Freud in his Topographic theory, each individual has a conscious, a preconscious, and an unconscious. The conscious contains thoughts and feelings of which an individual is presently aware. The conscious includes not only sensory perceptions, but thoughts and feelings as well. (Ex: I hear my dog barking. I think there is someone at the door.) The preconscious includes memories and thoughts of which an individual is not presently aware, but which can be recalled. (Ex: We keep the coffee mugs in the second cabinet from the right.) The unconscious is the sum of the individual’s repressed desires, fears, and traumas that, while an individual is never fully conscious of them, can be revealed through dreams, free association, or Freudian slips—mistakes in speech that reveal subconscious thoughts. (Ex: A man with an addiction to blackjack is counting items in his shopping cart, saying, “...eight, nine, ten, jack, queen, king...”) Freud believed that individuals with neuroses could be cured if they could uncover and accept the ideas they had repressed. This theory evolved into Freud’s Structural Theory, which is more widely known. The Structural Theory states that every individual has a psychic apparatus, and this apparatus consists of three parts: the id, the ego, and the superego. Almost all of the psychic apparatus is in the unconscious. The id is a person’s instinctual desires. These vary from the need to eat and sleep to the need to satisfy sexual appetites. The id demands immediate gratification at any cost. The superego serves as a counterbalance to the id. It consists of social conventions as well as an individual’s beliefs, values, and ideals. It reminds a person, both consciously and unconsciously, what actions are acceptable in society and which of the id’s demands are appropriate to meet. The ego is a person’s reason and the part of the psychic apparatus that balances the id with the superego. The ego creates feelings of guilt and shame when one of the desires in a person’s id is in opposition to the superego and the cultural norm. If the feelings of guilt and shame become too intense and painful, the ego may create a defense mechanism in the form of denial, passive aggression, delusion, hypochondria, projection, and, in more severe cases, repression. Repressed desires of the id may also express themselves in symbols, dream images, and Freudian slips. If they remain hidden and unexposed, they can develop into neuroses. Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and one-time protégé of Freud, also believed that therewere three parts to an individual’s personality. These were the shadow, the anima or animus, and the persona. The shadow, like the repressed parts of the id, consists of the qualities and characteristics of an individual that he or she consciously or unconsciously wants to ignore. These can be sexual desires, traumatic experiences, or secret fears. The anima or animus is the essence of an individual and the person he or she eventually wants to become. It is the personification of his or her drive, motivation, ambition, and values. It is also usually depicted as the opposite

Copyright © 2008 by Prestwick House Inc., P.O. Box 658, Clayton, DE 19938. 1-800-932-4593. gender: men have a female anima and women have a male animus. The final part of personality is the persona. The persona is the mask or facade a person presents to the world. The ultimate goal of each person is self-actualization, in which the shadow, persona, and anima/us become one. While Freud believed in the personal conscious and unconscious of each individual, Jung argued that there was also a collective unconscious. The collective unconscious consists of cultural symbols and archetypes that are unconsciously shared by all humanity. It is believed to contribute to programmed patterns of behavior and thought, in much the same way animals act by instinct. Jung offered as evidence of his theory the fact that certain symbols and the relationships between them have the same meaning to many people across cultures. For example, the color red has the same significance to people of all cultures. Since it is the color of the human life force, the blood, it represents passion, violence, and love. These symbols and archetypes appear in works of literature, and they evoke similar feelings in all views and readers.

II. Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism In psychoanalytic criticism, Freud and Jung’s ideas are adapted to an understanding of literature. Like speech, writing is a form of expression, and it exposes the repressed desires and fears of the author. Psychoanalytic theory posits that all texts have two types of content: manifest content and latent content. The manifest content is the literal, surface level message of the work. The latent content, by contrast, is the underlying meaning of the text, conveyed through symbolic language and the Freudian slips in the author’s diction. Some psychoanalytic critics also find evidence of the author’s repressed sexual desires in the text through the unintentional inclusion of phallic symbols. There may also be suggestions of Oedipus Complex in the story, situations which hint of a character’s sexual attraction to his or her parent of the opposite sex. This may be through the son’s desire for his mother, the father’s envy of the son and rivalry for the mother’s attention, the daughter’s desire for her father, the mother’s envy of the daughter and rivalry for the father’s attention. However, all of these situations usually occur in the latent content of the text. The reading of the latent content of the work, however, reveals only aspects of the author’s psyche. When Jung’s ideas of archetypes are brought into focus, psychoanalysis can disclose information about the universal human condition. Readers can relate to works of literature because the symbols and archetypes contained within the text are innately understood. A character in a work of fiction is not only the creation of the author and a product of the author’s experiences, but he or she is also a reflection of the reader as well. Each time a story is read, it must be recreated in the reader’s mind. Symbols and archetypes generally evoke the same thoughts and emotions, making the reading of the work a shared and common experience. Once these symbols and archetypes are identified and analyzed, a psychoanalytic critic can understand how different texts “work.”