Within approach literary researches seek indications of unsettled

Within the the psychological field the psychoanalytic theory has had a vital place since it was first introduced by renowned psychologist Sigmund Freud. In the field of psychology this theory is used as a means of treating patients with mental disorders as it is generally acknowledged that mental disorders or neuroses do not happen without reason. Employing this approach in order to expose unknown reasons causing the neurose by drawing out repressed feelings, memories, childhood traumas and the effect of these repressions on the patient’s mental faculties. This of course is not unlike literature as dreams like literary texts reflect the inner worlds, conflicts, repressed desires and unconscious desires of the author turning the literary work itself into an expression of the writer’s own neuroses. By analyzing literary works by means of the psychoanalytic approach literary researches seek indications of unsettled emotions, psychological discords, equivocations, guilts, and so forth in what can very well be considered a disunified literary work.

After all an author’s psyche (sexual strife, traumatic experiences, family life, fixations, etc.) is detectable in their character’s behavior; of course tracing these psychological paths will not be simple as the any psychological text will be conveyed  circumlocutory, disguised or encrypted through such tents as symbolism, condensation and displacement. In this respect psychoanalytic criticism is much like that of new criticism, concerning itself not with seeking what was intended by the author but by seeking what was never intended thus uncovering what the cognizant censoring mind has distorted. Sigmund Freud once claimed that “ the dream-thoughts which we first come across as we proceed with our analysis often strike us by the unusual form in which they are expressed; they are not clothed in the prosaic language usually employed by our thoughts, but are on the contrary represented symbolically by means of similes and metaphors, in images resembling those of poetic speech” (Freud, 26), perhaps the greatest example of such symbolic speech is that of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.