Every theory has its pet names. What does Psychoanalysis think of literature, authors, and readers?
What is literature?
Lit's a lot.
In psychoanalytic theory, literature is the complex of crazy images that make up the "work" of any dream. It's also more than meets the eye; like a good dream, it's rich with meaning and insight about how people work.
Literature, go ahead and be pleased with yourself: you're kind of a big deal. And let's be honest: you're kind of saucy, too.
You know how psychoanalysts are all into their ideas about the repression of our deep-seated desires and whatnot. So, novels are the place where all kinds of cultural fantasies and otherwise censored wishes get airtime. Truths that don't normally get to see the light of day in polite society will come out in unconscious bursts, say psychoanalysts, in the literary text.
A reader's work in engaging with a text is therefore more than an exercise in diagnosing some characters' or authors' weaknesses. Psychoanalytic critics tap into the reserves of insight stored up in books about what makes our societies tick.
And, ideally, these analytic revelations are not merely static knowledge about what this or that author thought or felt at this or that time. They serve up some dynamic truth bombs that help us to live better, whenever and wherever we happen to be.
What is an author?
First and foremost, the author is never, ever master of her literary house. Just as a patient who sits on a therapist's couch will often inadvertently reveal her deepest secrets, texts are always packed with symbols that have slipped out of the author's unconscious mind.
An author is also never just "an author." According to psychoanalytic lit critics, when an author writes, he gives voice to dreams and fears that are collective. They're not only reflected of individual desires.
An author is therefore like many people at once. When she puts pen to paper, the author inevitably says more than she means to say—not only about herself, but about history, art, culture, and oppressive nature of societal norms. And that's where the reader steps in.
What is a reader?
Readers always bring their own hosts of experiences to a text. Their own panoply of memories, wishes, fears, fantasies, resistances, loves and hates, and desires. So a reader is a whole new set of psychic material that engages with what's been written in order to create a new understanding of the text, and of people at large.
We might even call the reader, as psychoanalysis imagines him, a desire machine. Of course, she sees herself in the text, and she sees a whole lot of other things too.
And just like an analyst can never offer you one "objective" interpretation of your dreams, no reader can hope to offer a final and "official" interpretation of a text. Any interpretation is a dynamic and unpredictable "meeting of minds": a grudge match between the reader's psychic life and the traces of the author's psychic life that are in the text.
Yowza. That's not what your sweet old high school English prepared you for when you read Hamlet, was it?