| Theorist |
What One Needs to Know |
What to look for in literature |
Outcome |
| Freud |
Freud's "normal" process of infant development (and associated revisions): oral stage, Oedipus complex, identification with father and law.
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Look for representation of successful socialization or neurosis, places that "abnormal"adjustment appears as hidden, transferred, or displaced desires; as problematic identifications; as violent or otherwise "deviant" impulses. |
Literature reveals psyches in distress; social processes or institutions out of alignment with human psychological needs; "happy endings" as successful resolutions of neuroses, or repressive disregard of them; tragic outcomes indicate the stakes involved in unaddressed inner conflicts.
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| Lacan |
Lacan's processes of infant development, and his psychic "orders" |
Look for language exposing "mirror stage" issues, or a rupture from an unconscious, pre-Oedipal experience of complete unity; look for images, symbols, myths that reveal an idealized "imaginary" order and that simultaneously mark its absence. |
Show literature to be part of the symbolic order, a structure of language and other signs that, when orderly, demonstrates the Law of the Father; reveal the process through which we fashion selves in absence of a unified consciousness and identify places we conform to and occasionally evade limiting forces.
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Skura (for example) |
Nothing exceptional; a good grasp of literary context and some knowledge of surrounding culture. |
Look for contrary or otherwise problematic human impulses or actions: in this case, the tendency of families to desire both endogamy and exogamy. |
Show how characters work to resolve social and psychic pressures; how institutions make visible and focus unconscious conflict; how conflicts within institutions might admit solutions worked out by subjects (characters, for example) internally.
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Questions