The Psychoanalytic Approach to Literature

Abstract

In matters of literary criticism. Tzvetan Todorov distinguishes between two fundamental approaches. "The first", he writes, "regards the literary work as an ultimate goal; according to the second, each particular work is taken to be the manifestation of something else."

Let us add that these various types of discourse are not mutually exclusive - on the contrary, they tend to complement one another. A literary text, even if its ultimate nature is made up of the network of formal relations which unites its various components into a structure, does not appear out of the blue, without any context. It has its roots in a twofold context, historical as well as individual. A work, literary or otherwise, is necessarily the creation of a workman, and evidence of his workmanship. So that even though the essential object of literary criticism is the work rather than its author, it is helpful to elucidate the conditions, both external and internal, which presided at the creation of the work. These conditions concern the author's personality as well as his historical, social and cultural environment. Every text is thus doubly determined, and one should bear in mind the respective importance of those two determinants so as to make clear, as Roland Barthes put it, what belongs with style, "this autarcic language which has its roots only in the author's personal and secret mythology" and what belongs with writing ("l'criture"), "this literary language transformed by its social purpose."²