The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock Psychoanalysis Essay

Vasile Elena-Cristina Twentieth-Century English Literature
2nd Year Seminar tutor: Andreea Paris
Group: II
Languages: English-German
Psychoanalytical perspective of T.S. Eliot’s
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Psychoanalytic criticism originated in the work of Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who pioneered the technique of psychoanalysis. Freud developed a language that described, a model that explained, and a theory that encompassed human psychology. His theories are directly and indirectly concerned with the nature of the unconscious mind.( http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/virtualit/poetry/critical_define/crit_psycho.html)

In a Freudian perspective, literary works are compared to dreams, because they represent a displacement of unconscious desires, drives from the author’s psyche into imagery which may not bear any resemblance to what the artist tried to hide. According to Freud, the human mind is divided into super-ego, based on society’s rules that we impose to ourselves and make us feel guilty if we don’t behave accordingly, the id which is in opposition with the super-ego, because the id consists of our instincts and forbidden desires, and the ego, or the conscious self, caught between id and super-ego. (Tyson 25).Through concepts such as defenses, embodied by the process of denial-believing that the painful event did not happen, selective memory-remembering only what one’s conscious thinks it can handle , avoidance- avoiding things that may trigger painful memories, regression-returning to a former psychological state a.s.o., freudian slips-the so-called “slips of the tongue”, oedipal complex-competing with the parent of the same gender for the affection of the parent of the opposite gender, symbols etc., a psychoanalytic critic may start