psychoanalytic criticism
psychoanalytic criticismis the application of Sigmund Freud's theories of the unconscious to the interpretation of literature. It was initiated by Freud himself in an analysis of Shakespeare's Hamlet as a manifestation of Oedipal conflict. Freud's ideas were subsequently developed by his disciple Ernest Jones in the classic Hamlet and Oedipus (1949), and by numerous other amateur and professional critics. Psychoanalytic criticism has a long 20th-century history marked by competing developments of Freud's theory. In Shakespeare studies Norman Holland combined American ego psychoanalysis and formalism when psychoanalysis was in disfavour in an academic world dominated by New Criticism and historicism. After the demise of New Criticism around 1970, psychoanalytic approaches became more prominent in Shakespeare criticism, through the work of critics like C. L. Barber, Richard Wheeler, and Coppélia Kahn. The theories of object-relations...
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