Psychoanalytic Criticism

I enjoyed the psychoanalytic criticism chapter.  I've had the thought before, "I wonder what kind of baggage you're carrying," when someone reacts to something small in a huge way.  But this approach really makes a lot of sense to me, not only in literary criticism, but in life.  I think that a huge amount can be told about a person by the way that they react to something, whether it be a book, a movie, or something that happens to them.

Tyson outlines the core issues of people:

1) Fear of intimacy
2) Fear of abandonment
3) Fear of betrayal
4) Low self-esteem
5) Insecure of unstable sense of self
6) Oedipal fixation (complex)

The core issue of a person can be carried with them throughout life, and they shape our behavior.  If we don't identify them and change them, then they stay with us, causing a destructive cycle.

Tyson highlights trauma, death-drive, and tons of ways that a person can be sexually screwed up, but then points out that we need to know all of these things in order to do an effective psychoanalytic reading of a work.  We should be looking for repression, family dynamics, and fears to understand the characters with a work when reading this way.

Tyson's reading of Gatsby points out that it isn't a great love story, but an example of dysfunctional love.  I'm not sure how anyone who reads Gatsby has the idea that it is about great love, but I am not sold on the idea that it is just about dysfunctional love.  However, after the Marxist reading, I am not sure that I can buy into any other reading. Ever.