The Big Names in Psychoanalysis
You can already tell that Freud looms large in psychoanalysis. He is larger-than-life, in fact. This "Father" of psychoanalysis wrote with a breadth, depth, clarity, and brilliance that made any later practitioner of psychoanalysis shake in his boots.
That said, Father Freud invented the Oedipus complex. He thought that the fantasy of killing your father was a universal one. That everyone wanted to do away with Dad.
He also wrote in texts like Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism about "the murder of the primal father." And like a paranoid patient, he kept imagining that he would be overthrown by the band of sons whom he had gathered around him.
By the way, he appointed his daughter, Anna Freud, head of the movement. Dr. Freud even called her "his Antigone." But that's another story.
Just as he feared, Freud's heirs have qualified his ideas—even if they haven't killed him off once and for all. Post-Freudian psychoanalysis has seen the emergence of schools and approaches too numerous to list here. But its heaviest hitters and their greatest hits include:
Don't Kiss, Make Up: Melanie Klein
Like Anna Freud, Melanie Klein had an interest in child psychoanalysis. And with Sigmund, Klein shared a determination to learn as much as possible about adult life from the experiences of the youngest and most helpless humans.
It wasn't all (theoretical) roses and sunshine between her and the Freuds, though. She broke with them in several key respects, and definitely made her own mark in the theoretical canon.
Klein thought that infants weren't just perverse—teehee—but also aggressive. According to her, the little kiddies are filled with violent and even "murderous" urges for which they later strive to atone. Or, "repair."
For Klein, the movement back and forth between destructive and reparative impulses is universal. The aim of psychoanalysis, then, was to provide a space in which violent tendencies would be accommodated. So, she wanted it to be safe to lash out at your analyst, or even throw tantrums. (At least your therapist won't make you apologize in the morning.)
Mizz Klein thought that getting all of this angst out would help us repair ourselves. So, basically: love could be made more viable and lasting, if hate was acknowledged openly.
In this sense, Klein was a key theorist of ambivalence. So she really loved her dear old (School of Thought) Daddy after all. Thanks for the legacy, Freud.
Klein had a pretty big impact in lit crit, too. Her texts have been widely cited by theorists like Spivak, Judith Butler, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
Hold On: D.W. Winnicott
Another child psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott, thought hate was central to human experience as well. He believed that to deny hate was dangerous and "sentimental." Like a good romantic comedy, we guess.
Winnicott is best known for his ideas about play, which have also been among his key contributions to psychoanalytic literary criticism. For Winnicott, the ability to play is by no means given or automatic. Play is risky, since it involves trusting enough in one's environment to leave that environment behind.
Children—and adults, for that matter—whose immediate worlds are not "good-enough," not safe, protecting, or "holding" enough, lack the capacity really to play. Like: why would you hop onto a swing if your Mommy never held you when you fell down?
Winnicott's brand of psychoanalysis aimed to strengthen the capacity for play in his patients, whatever their age. Without this ability, life becomes unbearable. (We have to agree.)
Play is why Winnicott thought literary culture and other arts were so central to human experience. These super fun things provided room for play and other human trickery.
Watch Out: Jacques Lacan
All the way across the English Channel, our buddy Jacques Lacan was busy developing much less sunny theories. Indeed, Lacan is often numbered among the most difficult of all difficult theorists. The Frenchman's early work with psychotic patients gave way, after his encounter with structural linguistics, to a brand of psychoanalytic theory that looked more philosophical than clinical.
Why was he as into complexity like pigs are into mud? We're not entirely sure. But it may have been because, in a series of heady and highly fashionable Parisian seminars, Lacan engaged with the most dauntingly difficult philosophies/philosophers of his day.
Lacan thought psychoanalysis should put patients in touch with their deepest desires. But don't go getting any wild ideas; he didn't want you to fulfill all of those desires. Instead, Lacanian psychoanalysis encouraged (or, um forced) patients to face the impossibility of getting everything they ever wanted.
If all this sounds kind of cruel, well. It is. Lacan was always making the students in his seminars feel stupid; he was something of a sadist that way, as well as a diva.
And when it came to his patients, there are all kinds of stories about what a weirdo he was. He would show up half an hour late to a session, then leave after five minutes, declaring that his day's work was done.
There was nothing patients could do to protest, since, like Freud before him, this Father always knew best. It's okay if you don't wish you could have been there, with Dr. L. We don't either.
Say What, Mom: Jean Laplanche
Another French psychoanalyst, the kinder and gentler Jean Laplanche, has been important for all kinds of thinkers. Butler, for example, has dug into his work.
Anyways, Laplanche is best known for having riffed on Freud's "seduction theory." This sexy-sounding theory tries to unpack how infants make sense of what their mothers are consciously (and unconsciously) conveying to them. We totally get it; our moms can be pretty hard to read, too.
Since literary texts can also be understood to give off "enigmatic signs"—signs whose significance us readers will never fully understand—Laplanche's theories can be helpful for thinking about the relationship between readers and texts as well. Huzzah.
Laplanche was also into transference. By that, he meant how patients project onto the analyst all kinds of prior experiences. When you're sittin' on that therapist's couch, you might turn the analyst into a parent, sibling, lover, or friend.
Using psychoanalytic models to understand how readers interact with literary texts allows us to ask whether similar, "transferential" dynamics operate there as well. Hm. This psychoanalysis business really is a pretty saucy theory.
You might consider how much of what you think you understand of a text is actually just you reading a lot of stuff into that text. You know, through unconscious projection. This does not mean that we can only ever see ourselves reflected in great books.
But it does mean that good readers must recognize their roles as sassy partners-in-crime in the creating the literary canon.