ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytical criticism is even more thoroughly challenged – to begin with, by literary theorists who criticize it for all sorts of reasons. They claim that it ties the work too closely to an analysis of the author, even though many works of psychoanalytical criticism deal exclusively with the text and leave aside the always conjectural biographical approach. To be a psychoanalyst is to have a psychoanalytical view of any experience. The psychoanalytical process, even if it is based on the patient’s regression, always moves forward, even if the repetition compulsion seems to indicate stagnation. A psychoanalytical interpretation relies to a great degree on the hypothetical, because it deals with the patient’s internal psychic reality which is shaped by his fantasies. The extreme subjectivity of psychoanalytical criticism nevertheless aims at certain objectivity. Structuralist literary critics, even those who have the most reservations concerning psychoanalysis, admit that a text possesses formal unconscious structures.
