ABSTRACT
The history of psychoanalytic literary criticism is as old as psychoanalysis, but it has undergone considerable change since Freud’s famous readings of Hamlet ( 1900 ), the novels of Dostoevsky (1928), and the story of Moses (1939). The methodology of psychoanalytic literary criticism introduced by Freud and adopted by most psychoanalysts and non-analysts through the greater part of the twentieth century is founded on the idea that writers create stories and characters that refl ect their own unconscious psychology. A text is a mirror of the unconscious mind of the writer, much as dreams are creations of the unconscious mind that are disguised in order to escape repression (“censorship”), thus gaining access to preconscious and conscious awareness (our remembered dreams). Through readings of this sort, psychoanalytic literary criticism brought established analytic formulations to bear on the text, for instance, constellations of feeling understandable in terms of the Oedipus complex, castration anxiety, the incest taboo, oral, anal, and phallic stages of psychosexual development, and the like.
