Conductas observables en el niño/a

44 There are a lot of critical theories used to analyse literary works. But this research study adopts the psychoanalytic theory propounded by Sigmund Freud in his quest for

“understanding the ways we should look at ourselves”. Psychoanalytic theory is a personality theory used to treat the neurotic (mentally illed). It gives insight into the unseen forces that are behind the behaviour of the mentally illed. Freud argued that dreams, humour, forgetting, and slips of the tongue (Freudian slips) all serve to relieve psychological tension by gratifying forbidden impulses or unfulfilled wishes.

Psychology can illuminate the creative process. Lowes (1984:89) records that “at the zenith of its power the creative energy is both conscious and unconscious; controlling consciously the throng of images which in the reservoir (the “well” of the unconscious) have undergone unconscious metamorphosis. Lowes is trying to say that the psychology of authors can be a driving force in their creative process. So playwrights could be influenced by their own psychology in the process of creation.

Freud was a neurologist practicing in Vienna in the late nineteenth century. He was troubled that he could not account for the complaints of many of his patients by citing any physical cause. Diagnosing his patients as hysterias, he entered upon analyses of them and (himself) that led him to infer that their distress was caused by factors of which perhaps even they themselves were unable to admit.

Shaka and Ihemtuge (2008:178) explain psychoanalysis as a theory of personality and human developments; a method of investigating the unconscious and conscious forces governing human behaviour and a technique for treating neurotic disorders. It is concerned with emotional disturbances and therapy and not with the traditional areas of psychology. They continue that Freud’s earlier and more valuable work was primarily concerned with the sexual instinct in man, its development and modifications under the influence of cultural, ethical and religious restrictions. According to Eagleton (2008:132),

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“what has dominated human history to date is the need to labour, and for Freud, that harsh necessity means that we must repress some of our tendencies to pleasure and gratification”. The pleasure principle according to Freud means the act of repression which forces man to work for survival and forfeit the reality principle of sleeping or lying down. In the course of doing this, repression becomes too much which may lead to sickness called neurosis. Man is admittedly known as a neurotic. This is because his survival is mostly based on repressing some desires which in turn causes unhappiness to the person. Some of these desires are relegated to the unconscious state because man is unable to fulfill them.

According to Freud, the Oedipus complex is the beginning of morality, conscience, law and all forms of social and religious authority. Freud discovered the various functions of the three instinct in man which are the id, the ego and the superego.

He believed that human behaviour are irrationally rooted in basic biological drives such as sex and aggression and governed by unconscious motives. He is of the view that many childhood impulses are repressed but remain in the unconscious only to resurface in dreams, neurotic symptoms, slips of the tongue and nervous manifest

According to him, this tripartite psyche (id, ego, and super ego) made up the human personality. The id is the most primitive and the least accessible part. It is entirely unconscious and includes sexual urges and repressed motives seeking immediate satisfaction (tension reduction) regardless of prevailing circumstances. Dreams and other impulses and instincts that seem strange to the individual stem from the id. (Shaka and Ihemtuge 2008:179). The superego according to Freud represents conscience and encompasses moral and ethical principles that the individual acquires in life. It is referred to as the higher side of human life. Eagleton (2008:136) refers to it as “the awesome, punitive voice of conscience within an individual”. When the child passes through the

46 Oedipal complex, he postpones his desires, accepts the authority of the family and society and in so doing, represses somewhat felt desires in order to belong. Then the ego is the individual identity. It is the reasoning and consciousness faculty of the individual that settles the dispute or rivalry between the id and the superego. Dobie (2012:57) explains that the ego’s function is “to make the id’s energies nondestructive by postponing them or diverting them into socially acceptable actions. Therefore, the ego is the reality psyche of every human being.

All of Freud’s work depends upon the notion of the unconscious, which is the part of the mind beyond consciousness which nevertheless has a strong influence upon our actions. Psychoanalysis aims to uncover the hidden causes of the neurosis in order to relieve the patient of his/her conflicts, so dissolving the distressing symptoms. It is also not only a theory of the human mind but a practice for curing those who are considered mentally ill or disturbed. It does not achieve this cure by merely telling or explaining to the patient what is wrong with him or revealing his conscious motivations, rather; the cure is obtained through terms like “transference”. It is a situation by which the analysee begins unconsciously to transfer on the figure of the analyst the psychical conflicts from which he or she suffers. Repeating sometimes compulsively what we cannot properly remember and we cannot remember it because it is unpleasant. Psychoanalysis was applied to the study of literature with the notion that literary artists are somewhat neurotic.

There are key terms (ideas) associated with psychic processes. That is Freud used these terms to express how the unconscious plays its decisive role in our lives. Such terms include Repression – Resolving the desire you are unable to fulfill or achieve. These desires are repressed to the unconscious mind. The dark zone tabularises and come up again in dream and sublimated. That is the act of forgetting or ignoring unresolved

47 conflicts, unadmitted desires or traumatic events, in the sense that they are consciously eroded to the realm of unconscious. Sublimation: This is a way by which the repressed desire is taken over by something more noble, accepted for instance, avoiding sexual urge by intense religiousity. Projection: Is the act of ascribing especially our negative feelings and wishes to others; refusing to recognize them as part of ourselves. Through such means we develop defence mechanism to avoid painful admissions.

Freud was not alone in this postulation. Jacques Lancan, a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst advancing the Freudian style comments that the unconscious is structured like a language. He had a new emphasis on the unconscious workings. He said “the unconscious is the nulceus of our being because the psychiatrist must find out the truth through the use of language so he insisted that the unconscious is not a chaotic or tumultuous region inside us but an orderly network as complex as the structure of language. He argues that the two (the signified and the signifier) tally with the dreamwork mechanisms identified by Freud (condensation and displacement) corresponds to the basic poles of language identified by the linguist, Roman Jacobson. That is, metaphor and metonymy respectively. These are the two primary operations of human language metaphor, (condensing meaning together) and metonymy (displacing one meaning on to another).

The psychoanalytic critics give central importance to the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious. They pay close attention to unconscious motives and feelings of the author or the character depicted in the work and they also identify a psychic context for the literary work at the expense of social or historical context, privileging the individual psycho drama above the social drama of class conflict.

Nevertheless, Freudian work or psychoanalytic theory has some limitations. These limitations arise from its non-testability to individualistic thinking. In the first place it is

48 not testable because there could be counter transference shaped by the analyst unconscious desires and distinctively his conscious ideological beliefs. It is also a medical practice that has a form of oppressive social control; labeling individuals and forcing them to conform to arbitrary definitions of normality. The theory records a common sensical impatience like asking “how can a little girl could desire her father’s baby”?

Everything about the Freudian work is brought down to sex. Freud regarded sexuality as central enough to human life to provide a component of all our activities. The theory is also seen as an individualistic thinking; that is to say, that social and historical explanations are substituted with private psychological causes (Eagleton 2008:140-141).

The dream-work analysis is the aim of this study for using the psychological theory. Barry, (1995:97) records that dream work is a process by which real events or desires are transferred into dream images. These include displacement, that is symbolic substitution and condensation which means representing a number of people or events by a single image in the dream.