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Psychoanalytic Criticism Definition http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sigmund_Freud_1926.jpg

The concept was first brought up by the famous psychologist, Sigmund Freud. He stated that unconscious thoughts determine conscious actions and internal conflict causes a struggle in the characters.  Here are a few key terms that are necesarry to know while exploring psychoanalysis:  1) **Repression**-hiding thoughts in the unconscious  2) **Isolation**-disconnecting one's emotions from a traumatic event  3) **Sublimation**-redirecting an unacceptable desire into a creative act  4) **Displacemen**t-replacing an unacceptable object of one's emotion with a safe place  5) **Denia**l-refusing to accept one's unacceptable desires or fears of a traumatic event  6) **Projection**-placing one's unacceptable or unworthy desires or fears onto another  7) **Intellectualization**-avoiding one's desires and fears by analyzing them and rationalizing them, instead of feeling them  8) **Reaction formation**-believing the opposite is true to avoid facing the truth from Critical Theory Today

 Two famous psychological literary critics are Carl Jung, who looked at fairytales and myths to answer human motivations, and Norman Holland, who focused on how the reader responded to the text. Some archetypes that developed from the scope of psychoanalytic criticism are various images and patterns of a character in the unconscious, images that show a progression to identity, something representing shared experiences.

 To develop a criticism through the psychological scope you need to ask these key questions:  1) What are the unconscious motivations of the author?  2) Why did the character act in such a way? <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;"> 3) How would the reader's unconscious motivations have elicited a response to a certain section? <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">[]

<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">*Conrad, like many great writers, elicits a response from the audience, based on the words of Marlow. A psychoanalyst could argue that Conrad wanted the reader to feel a little animosity towards Marlow, which is why he presented him in such a fashion and made his words demeaning toward humans. He was portraying the racism of the time, but in a psychological view he was trying to make the reader get into a certain mindset towards the characters.

<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Concepts such as sibling rivalry, inferiority complexes, and defense mechanisms are used daily. There is a common belief that psychoanalysis is both impossible to understand and meaningless, but it allows a person to better understand human behavior. Looking through the psychoanalytic lens, each persons history begins with childhood experiences, and their adult behavior directly links to those experiences. Our unconscious is the storehouse for all painful experiences and events we don’t want to remember because they will make us overwhelmed. Repression removes things from conscious, but doesn’t eliminate painful emotions. It then causes us to behave in ways that will play out based on those experiences even though we don’t realize it <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Ex: if you had an alcoholic father that died a while ago, and you realize you long for love from him, then it isn’t uncommon for you to find an alcoholic mate so you can reenact your relationship with him and make him “love you” this time. You want something in which you don’t know what it is and also can't have. from Critical Theory Today

<span style="color: #ff0000; font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">Notes from Heart of Darkness

<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">1) Marlow dives deeper into the forest and down the river, further losing himself <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">2) Kurtz's illness took over his body while the river, and the jungle consumed him. This is relative to isolation, and how Kurtz's illness may represent his separation of his emotion, or soul even, which became the illness that overtook him. <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">3) Marlow experienced how the europeans were aimless and they all worshipped Kurtz. The relationship between the people at the outpost was dictatorial towards Kurtz. The power they gave him and Kurtz's rising power in raping Africa of its goods resulted in Kurtz's fear of Marlow for he was afraid they would send someone like him there. As Marlow came to closer to Kurtz, Kurtz came closer to realizing his wrong, until his final pronouncing of "the horror, the horror". <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">4) When Marlow learns what Kurtz is doing in the jungle, he is intrigued by his intentions. The manager, and most of the staff concerned with the imperialism show signs of intellectualism. They try to rationalize the meaning for the tragedy. Kurtz rationalizes taking the ivory from the other tribes through force by his need and requirement to have the most ivory out of all the areas combined. <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">5) Marlow didn't tell kurtz's woman what his real last words, which is evidence of his displacement after he traveled down the congo, because he was replacing "the horror" with a much more acceptable response, a "safer" response. He wanted to avoid projection, which is projecting one's own thoughts and fears on someone else, in order to protect his self image. <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">6) Marlow was talking about sacrificing his shoes to the “devil-god” he said, “Why do you sigh in this beastly way, somebody?Absurd?.......Now that I think of it, it is amazing I did not shed tears.” Marlow’s ability to find absurdities in others is quite impressive and makes him seem smart and witty. Another example following along the same lines is when he saw the two women at the Trading Society’s office. They were described as having, “knitted black wool feverishly” while at work but outside of work they did nothing at all. Marlow thought that these women were guards for the “Door of Darkness.” Both of these encounters exhibit a persons ability to unknowingly judge situations based on past experiences. Marlow encountered many things while traveling down the Congo and they attribute to his views on situations when they occur.

<span style="color: #ff0000; font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">Criticism

<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">1) Heart of Darkness has aspects of both repression and reticence. Marlow is stuck between whether or not what the Europeans were doing was good or bad and doesn’t particularly want to deal with the reality of that. Here is an excerpt displaying his unsure mindset: <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">“I’ve seen it. I’ve read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing he had found time for! But this must have been before his—let us say—nerves went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites, which—as far as I reluctantly gathered from what I heard at various times—were offered up to him—do you understand?—to Mr. Kurtz himself. But it was a beautiful piece of writing. The opening paragraph, however, in the light of later information, strikes me now as ominous. He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them (savages) in the nature of supernatural beings—we approach them with the might as of a deity,’ and so on and so on.” (pg. 66) <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;"> Marlow goes back and forth with his opinion of Kurtz writing. He begins with saying that is eloquent, but soon goes onto say that after reading the first paragraph it struck him as ominous. Those two words are very contrasting and show Marlow confused mindset, even when simply reading a paper. During the book Marlow meets his identity presented in the form of Kurtz during his journey down the Congo, but also finds another part of himself in a superego, that of European ideology. Marlow uses these two paths to create a great story, but it hides the fact that there is a numerous amount of racism occurring throughout the story. <span style="color: #0000ff; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">http://davidbrown7891.blogspot.com/2008/09/heart-of-darknesspsychoanalytic.html

<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">2) Marlow attempted to rescue Kurtz from the Congo river but he ended up dying before Marlow could get to him. Throughout Marlow’s mission to find Kurtz he is searching for his true self as well. His journey can also be looked at as a decent into the unconcious. His journey down the Congo is characterized as the “human’s hidden mind”, and all of the pain that he endured through the journey was considered a “discovery of self-hood.” Once he returned to Europe he found peoples behavior offensive and disapproved of it. <span style="color: #0000ff; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">http://epubl.ltu.se/1402-1552/2006/090/LTU-DUPP-06090-SE.pdf

<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;"> 3) Harold Bloom in his criticism of Heart of Darkness comments on how "darkness engulf Marlow's tale from his first words to his last." He suggests that Marlow tells of the absurdities of colonialism, but somehow adds a sense of humor. For example, his voyage to Africa is due to a childhood dream to explore the congo and to sail all over the world. Then, he got there and all of his words lead to one; darkness. He even knew he was taking the place of a man who was killed by the natives, and still went without questioning the integrity of his journey. Marlow's blind ambition reflects on that of Europe, and the mindset to take and push forward without considering the consequences. Bloom also points out that the interactions with the doctor were highly unordinary. The suggestion that the brain may undergo psychological changes in the congo is important, especially in the psychoanalyst viewpoint. The doctor took measurements of Marlow's brain/head and wanted to see if they changed when he returned. Marlow knew the research was faulty, but it is a little foreshadow as to the mental stability of Kurtz and of Marlow when he returns. <span style="color: #0000ff; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=BRa-psD7HpIC&oi=fnd&pg=PA67&dq=heart+of+darkness+&ots=5UrevTX81J&sig=8MdtgQKDf-RpZMQs3v8-tOvjb4c#v=onepage&q=heart%20of%20darkness&f=false

<span style="color: #ff0000; font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; font-size: 120%; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Additional Information

<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Here are two websites that have great information dealing with psychoanalysis. <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">1) I’d like to begin our discussion of this evening’s film by asking, “What do we know about Lars?”, and then we’ll move on to “Why is he like this?” and <span style="background-color: #000000; color: #ffffff; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">﻿ <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;"> “What made it possible for him to get better?” I’ll propose some answers to these questions with a little help from psychoanalysis, and the British analyst Donald Winnicott, in particular. <span style="color: #0000ff; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">http://www.cgjungpage.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=917&Itemid=1

<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">2) Wilson says that Sophocles used the character of Philoctetes to symbolize both madness and nobility. Thus, Wilson might claim that this character was "overdetermined." This term was used by Freud in his work on dream analysis and refers to the process by which one image takes on more than one meaning. A Freudian literary critic might say that this process was also involved when Joseph Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness. The critic Frederick Karl notes that Conrad utilizes the jungle as a symbol not only of what we fear, but also of what we destroy (130-2). Through this symbol, Conrad voices his concerns on both political policy and the irrationality of human behavior. <span style="color: #0000ff; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">http://www.lawrence.edu/dept/english/courses/60a/psycho.html

In conclusion: As Marlow travels down the Congo, he finds himself and his true understanding of human nature as he experiences the natives and Kurtz's insanity. His realization of everyone's trust in such a mentally unstable man opened his eyes to the true meaning of European imperialism. His conquest was from blind ambition and desire to sail through the world, and all he found was horror.

<span style="color: #ff0000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">By Scott Heydrick and Erin Geoghan