Write a detail note on Literature and Psychology What is psychological approach to literature?

Write a detail note on Literature and Psychology

What is psychological approach to literature?

How is the psychology related with literature? In what way? Elucidated.

Is the artist neurotic? Discuss Freudian approach to literature.

Discuss Jung’s Psychological typology of artists.

Can inspiration be induced? Discuss the effect of creative habits, stimulants and rituals with Creative artists?

          There psychology of literature means – (1) the psychological study of the writer as type and as individual or (2) the study of the creative process, or (3) the study of the psychological types and law present within the works of literature, or finally, (4) the effect of literature upon its readers. The first two are sub-divisions of the psychology of art and the third belongs to literary study.

The Nature of Literary Genius: -

          The nature of literary genius has always attracted guessing. The Greeks related it to ‘madness’. The poet is possessed, he is unlike other men. Another conception is that of poet’s ‘gift’ as compensatory. The Muse took away the sight of Demodocos’s eyes, but gave him the gift song in the ‘Odyssey’; the blinded Tiresias was given prophetic vision. Handicap and endowment are not always correlate and the malady or deformity may be psychogical or social instead of physical. Pope was a hunchback and dwarf; Boyon had club fool; Proust was an asthmatic neurotic, Keats was shorter than other men. Thomas Wolfe much taller. They turn their maladies into their thematic material.

Neurotic Attitude:-

          There are two questions regarding the neurotic attitude. The first is if the writer is neurotic, does the neurosis give the themes of his work or only its motivation? The other question is if the writer is neurotic in his theme, then why his work is intelligible to his readers?

          Freud’s view of the writer is not quite steady. He says that the writer is a man who turns from reality. Because he can not stand with it. He finds a way in fantasy that life may allow. Thus by a certain path he actually he actually becomes hero, king, creator, favorite, he desired to be.

          The poet is a day – dreamer who is socially validated. Instead of changing his character, he continues and publishes his fantasies.

          Most writers have denied their psychoanalytic treatment. Most of them have not wanted to be ‘cured’ or ‘adjusted’. They thought that they would stop writing if they were adjusted. Thus Auden says that artists should be as neurotic as they can endure.

Imagination in Relation to Belief: -

          The theory of art as neurosis raises that question of imagination in relation to belief. The poet is not a romantic child who tells stories till it confirms to his pleasure and credit. He is also the man who suffers from hallucinations, confounding the world of reality with fantasy world. Some novelists have spoken of seeing and hearing their character. They say that sometimes the characters take over the control of the story, and shape it to a different end. Not a single example, given by psychologists seems to confirm the charge of hallucination. Some novelists have the capacity of imagery which is perpetual and sensory in character.

          Another trait given to the literary man is synaesthesia. It is the linking together two or more senses, most commonly hearing and sight. However synaesthesia is a literary technique. It is the stylized expression of metaphysical aesthetic attitude towards life.

          T.S. Eliot says about the artist that he is more primitive as well as more civilized than his contemporaries.

Writer as a ‘maker’ and ‘a possessor’:-

          Jung has given an elaborate psychological typology. He said any writer can be ‘extravert’ or ‘introvert’. He subdivides the four types based on dominance of thinking, feeling, intuition and sensation. He remarks that the writers reveal their type in their creative work.

          There is certainly a typological pair of the ‘possessed’ (i.e. the automatic or obsessive prophetic) and the ‘maker’ (i.e. the writer who is primarily a trained, skilful, responsible craftsman) This distinction is partly historical.. ‘Possessed’ means there is some natural gift which a writer may have. ‘The Possessed’ is the primitive poet. The Romantic, the expressinalist, and the surrealist are such poets. The ‘makers’ means the writer is trained and skillful. The professional poets, trained in the school of Ireland and Iceland, the poets of Renaissance, classicism are ‘maker’. But we have to think of the writers as both ‘maker’ and ‘possessed’ because both of these are necessary. Milton, Poe, James and Eliot are such poets who have both the qualities.

          French Psychologist Ribot divides the writers between two types’ imagination, ‘visual’ and ‘auditory and symbolic’.

          But the ‘creative process’ includes the subconscious origins of a work to the last revision of the work.

Impression and Expression:-

          There is distinction between the mental structure of the poet and composition of a poem. There is also a distinction between impression and expression. Both are responsible in the construction of a work. The painter sees as a painter; the painting is the clarification and completion of his seeing. The poet is a maker of poems but the matter of his poems it his understanding life. With the artists in any medium, every impression is shaped by his art. He thus transforms his experience.

Inspiration:-

          Inspiration is classically associated with Muses, the daughters of memory. In Christian thought it is associated with ‘Holy Spirit’. In the ‘inspired state’, the poet differs from his ‘ordinary state’. In past it was believed that the poet’s personality is lost suddenly his work is written by he Muse.

          There is a question: May not inspiration be induced! Sometime some poets try to be unconscious by having Alcohol, opium or the other drugs Coleridge and De’ Quincy were among them. But such drugs can not be helpful every time. Modern reports say that the inspiration is derived form their neurotic psyches and not from the specific effects of any drug.

Some Capricious Rituals:-

          Some writers think that some objects, state, circumstances are helpful to create work. Schiller kept rotten apples is his work desk. Many writers write in bed, e.g. Mark Twain. Some require solitude, some require company. Many can write in the midst of the family. There are writers who prefer day or night for their creation. Wordsworth used to write early in the morning. Milton preferred certain seasons. But Dr. Johnson believed that all such theories are distasteful. He believed that a man may write at any time if he wishes. He himself wrote under economic ‘compulsion’. Some modern minds think about the creative process that it will concern unconscious and conscious mind.

The Literary Man – a specialist:-

          The literary man is specialist in association, dissociation and recombination. These means,  he uses ‘wit’, makes ‘judgement’ and makes a new whole out of elements separately experienced. He used words as his medium. The word is not primarily as ‘sign’, but a ‘symbol’. The novelists may use words as ‘signs’. But poets normally use words ‘symbolically’. The traditional phrase, the ‘association of idea’ is inaccurate. Beyond the associative linkage of word with word there is the association of objects to which our ‘ideas’ refer.

Creation of Characters:-

          The creation of characters may be blend of inherited literary types, persons observed, and the self. Some writers observe bahaviour or ‘emphasize’ while some writers (e.g. Romantic) ‘project’. Mere observation can not be sufficient for life-like characterization. One psychologist says that character of Faust and Mephistophilis are the projection into fiction of Goethe’s own nature. “One man’s mood is another man’s character’. Dostoyevsky’s four brothers Karamazov are all aspects of Dostoyevsky. But these characters’s relation to the writer is a serious topic. Personality of a writer may disappear, e.g. Shakespeare disappears into his plays. So characters can not be self or writer’s identity.

How Psychology helps to evaluate the work:-

          The theories we discussed belong to the psychology of the writer. The processes of his creation are the object of the psychologist’s investigation. The evidences of the psychologists may come from the literary works of unliterary documents.

          But important question is ‘Can Psychology be used to interpret and evaluate literary works?’ Psychology obviously can illuminative creative process. It can say us about the methods of composition, habits of authors in revising and rewriting. Such studies give information author’s workshop.

          There remains the question of ‘Psychology in the works themselves. Characters can be judged ‘psychologically’ situations and plots can be interpreted. Freudian psychoanalysis is used by many. If one examines ‘stream of Consciousness’ novels, one soon realizes that there is no ‘real’ reproduction of the actual mental process. The subject – stream of Consciousness is rather a device drawing the mind.

          We can assume that an author succeeds in making his characters behave with ‘psychological truth’. But whether such ‘truth’ is an artistic value. Much great art violates standard of psychology. Psychological truth is a natural standard without universal validity. In some cases psychological insight enhances artistic value.

          In the sense of a conscious and systematic theory of mind and its working, psychology is unnecessary to art. In the work its, Psychological truth is an artistic value only if it enhances coherence and complexity – if, in short, it is art.