Psychoanalysis

•analysis of authorial motivation and motives

•analysis of readers’ motivations and motives and how they affect interpretation

•analysis of characters’ motivations and motives

•connecting authorial motivation to biographical details (particularly those of a developmental or traumatic nature, such as during childhood)

•understanding how the creative process functions at a conscious and unconscious level

•examination of how language reveals the unconscious of author, narrator and characters

•analysis of textual elements and aspects in accordance to psychoanalytic theory (especially symbols and linguistic intricacies)

-analysis of the stereotypes of gender roles and the relationships between characters that are determined by gender conventions

•What impulses drive Lennie’s behavior? What impulses drive George’s? What about Curley’s and his wife’s?

•To what extent would you say that the characters are conscious of this ‘otherness’ within themselves? What about in each other? Do they attempt to explain the mind of other characters?

•What does the ‘dream of the farm’ represent in accordance to a psychoanalytic framework? To what extent is it a conscious or an unconscious dream?

•What do the female figures of Curley’s wife and Aunt Clara represent within George’s and Lennie’s respective unconscious?

•What do the other elements (namely the rabbits and the act of stroking/petting) represent in Lennie’s unconscious?

•To what extent is George responsible for Lennie’s violent behavior?

•Psyche: the totality of the human mind (that is, the conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious).

•Conscious: the thoughts, feelings and emotions that the subject is aware of in an active manner.

•Preconscious: the sort of available memory that has not been accessed by the conscious. Yet because they are thoughts that, although seemingly unconscious, are not exactly repressed either, a way may be found through which to access them through the conscious, precisely because they are latent.

•Unconscious: the combination of repressed feelings, urges, thoughts, desires, impulses and instincts that are regarded as painful and/or shameful.

Substructure of the psyche:

•The id: it is the passionate, irrational, unknown and unconscious part of the psyche, where the libido and the principle of pleasure inhabit.

•The ego: it is the predominantly rational, orderly and logical part, mostly occupied by the conscious, where the principle of reality inhabits.

•The superego: it is the projected combination of the ego and the assimilation of cultural/parental impositions and taboos. It is therefore where conscience resides, a force that is socially-driven and moralizing, particularly when it comes to sexuality and aggression. 

•Pleasure principle (Id): force that demands immediate or instant gratification.

•Reality principle (Ego): force that demands assessment and checking of external reality.

•Libido (Id): sexual instinct/drive and impulse.

•Eros (Id): life force and willingness to live.

•Death drive / Thanatos (Id): impulse towards self-obliteration, self-destruction and death.

•Coping mechanisms: the strategic, conscious endeavors through which to deal with anxieties and negative impulses.

-Defense mechanisms (Ego): they are the unconscious strategies that pacify the anxiety caused by impulses, causing distortion and manipulation of reality.
•Oedipus Complex: the seeking of the child’s first love-object (that is, the mother), unconsciously regarded as one and the same with the child’s body. Consequently, the child develops sexual impulses towards the mother and aggressive ones towards the father, who he attempts to replace. (Freud focused much more overtly on boys than he did on girls, about whom his research changed throughout his career).

•Free association method: psychoanalytic procedure whereupon the patient abandons himself to a process of free association between thoughts, images, symbols, etc. Thus the course of the treatment is led by the patient, not the doctor, who notes everything that the patient verbalizes. Because the repressed feelings will never be consciously expressed, they are made manifest through allusions, metaphors and substitutive associations. The analyst (and in this case the psychoanalytic literary critic) must interpret and arrange the symbols in order to try to make sense of the unconscious and how it operates through associations.  

-Conversion: a symptom arises from the damming-up of emotional impulses.

Dream-work: the process whereupon latent thoughts are transformed into the manifest content of the dream. It includes the following sequences:

•Condensation: the concentration of the preconscious material of the dream.

•Displacement of the psychical forces of the dream.

-Dramatization: the dream is recoded into visual images.