3 - Plath and psychoanalysis: Uncertain truths

Summary

Psychoanalysis is both a body of doctrine and a system of psychotherapy developed principally by Sigmund Freud. Concerned with the study and interpretation of mental states, the body of doctrine describes conflicts and processes originating in the unconscious. As a form of therapy, psychoanalysis seeks to alleviate neuroses and other mental disorders by the systematic technical analysis of unconscious factors as revealed, for example, in dreams and fantasies, slips of the tongue and free-association, neurotic symptoms or lapses in memory, and does so by revealing unconscious contents and motives in the patient's psyche and behaviour. Both as doctrine and therapy, psychoanalysis relies on the concept of the unconscious - mental processes, ideas and desires of which the conscious mind is unaware - and interpretively seeks to make what is unconscious, conscious. In the context of literary studies, psychoanalysis is particularly interested in the ways in which the language of the text may displace or conceal its subject. Psychoanalysis in this context should be understood not so much as a tool with which to diagnose the pathology of the individual author but as an interpretative and narrative practice which, as for example in the work of Jacqueline Rose, discussed below, is alert to the place of fantasy, desire and repression in our personal and collective lives.