A Psychoanalytic Reading of Hedda Gabler :: Hedda Gabler Essays

A Psychoanalytic Reading of Hedda Gabler   Attempting a psychoanalytic reading of a assumption text is a bit like attempting to understand a city by examining its sewer system helpful, yet limited. There be some(a)(prenominal) reasons for using psychoanalysis as a critical literary possibility the critic might be interested in gleaning some crystalise of subconscious authorial intent, approaching the text as a aperient documentation (my own term) of the authors psyche the method might be effective in judging whether characters be well-rendered, whether they are truly three-dimensional and, therefore, worth our while as readers (thus satisfying the pleasure principle) finally, in a larger sense, the psychoanalytic approach can be employed to actually enounce us something about our own humanity, by examining the relative continuity (or deprivation thereof) of basic Freudian theories exemplified in written works over the product line of centuries. If we are inde ed scouring the text for what I call evacuant documentation, we must, at the outset, look at the period in which the work was written. Pre-Freudian works, that is to differentiate those poems, courses, short stories, and novels written before the late 19th century, are the study candidates for success with this approach. However, 20th century works, initiation with the modernist authors, pose a problem. How are we to be sure that the writer is not consciously playing with Freuds theories, perchance even deliberately expanding and distorting them for additional effect? Herein lies the problem with Hedda Gabler The play was written at roughly the same time that Freud was just beginning to publish his theories. The question is who influenced whom? Obviously Freud was taken with Ibsens realizations of certain fundamental ideas which were to be the foundation of his (Freuds) work repression, neurosis, paranoia, Oedipal complex, phallic symbols, and so on all of these factors are pr esent in Hedda Gabler. The question remains, however, whether Ibsen had caught wind of Freuds work and decided to practice it in the play. Perhaps I am wrong, but having read A Dolls House and An Enemy of the People, both earlier works by some ten years, Hedda Gabler awaits to embody Freudian concepts to so much farther an issue that the possibility of a conscious effort to create Freudian neurotic types and set them loose on one another does not seem altogether outside the realm of possibility. Whether consciously or unconsciously, however, Ibsen has created extremely well-developed characters.