Importance of psychology in

field of literature
 Psychology And Literature

 Literature is defined as books and other written works, especially

those considered to have creative or artistic merit or lasting value.
Books written by Charles Dickens are an example of literature.
 Psychology is best defined as the "scientific study of behavior in
humans and animals." Behavior is what people and animals do:
 e.g. what a person says about last night's dream, and how long it
takes a rat to run a maze.
Cont..

 Literature is written about human experiences, and often

depicts the private and public lives of individuals and
groups.
 The human experiences explored in literature, and the
aspects of lives described, are often very similar to those
that are of central concern for psychologists.
 Relationship between Psychology and Literature

 Psychology and literature have a reciprocal relation, the psychology of the

unconscious can be called literature, and is a dune mining approach to its foreign
opinion, very familiar to literature and literary critics.
 In Psychological Review in depth stories, and techniques for induction made ploy
it is.
 This function works the same dream in the literature, And function of the dream
and its elements is in the form Which is related to the literature.
 Psychology of Literature

Psychological study of the author:

 The psychological study of the writer, as type and as individual.
 The study of creative processes.
 Psychology of the Characters:
 The study of psychological types and laws present within works of literature.
 Psychology of the Readers:
 The study of the effects of literature upon its readers.
 Psychology of Characters

 Characters in play and novels are judged by us to be psychologically true.

 Situations are praised and plots are accepted because of the characters portrayed
by the author.
 In art, psychological truth is an artistic value.
 Character would be matter or content like any other types of information to be
found in literature. For example, facts from the navigation, astronomy or history.
 Psychological Study of the Author

 The poet the “possessed”, he is unlike other men, at once less and more;and the
unconscious out of which he speaks he is felt to be at once sub- rational and
super-rational.
 According to Freud, author is originally a man who turns from reality because he
cannot come to terms with the demands for the renunciation of instinctual
satisfaction as it is first made,and who then in fantasy-life allows full play to this
erotica and ambitious wishes.
 The poet or author is a day dreamer who is socially validated. Instead of altering
his characters, he perpetuates and publishes his fantasies.
 Psychology of Creative processes

 The creative processes should cover the entire sequence from the sub conscious
origins of a literary work to those last revisions which, with some writers are the
most genuinely creative part of the whole.
 The author is a maker of poems; but the matter of his poems is the whole of his
percipient life. With the artist, in any medium, every impression is shaped by his
art; he accumulates no inchoate experience.
 Psychology of Readers

 Art not only reproduces life but alose shapes it.

 People may model their lives upon the patterns of fictional heroes
and heroines.
 The young are more directly and powerfully influenced by their
reading than the old.
Cont.

 The reader is an active marker of meaning. It means that the reader

interprets the author’s work to get the messages.
 The inexperienced readers may take literature more natively as
transcripts rather than the interpretation of life.
 Those whose books are few take them in more utter seriousnes than
do wide and professional readers.
 Literature and Psychoanalysis

 For Freud, the unresolved conflicts that give rise to any neurosis is
the stuff of literature.
 A work of literature, he believes is the external expression of the
author’s unconscious mind.
 The literary work can be treated like a dream, applying
psycholoanalytic techniques to the text to uncover the author’s
hidden motivations and repressed desires.
Cont.

This is a very useful tool for understanding literary works in which the characters
have obvious psychological issues.
Having insight into a writers psychological state can give readers a greater
understanding of their work.
 Psychological literary criticism is easily applied to works that are highly
symbolic.
 The author’s own childhood traumas, family life, sexual conflicts, fixations, and
such will be traceable within the behavior of the characters in the literary work.
All such characters are projections of the author’s psyche.