Trauma and Creative Writing in the Light of Psychoanalytical Criticism
Main Article Content
Abstract
With the rise of psychoanalytic criticism, the relationship between the
author and his work has become one of the major fields of research. This
article demonstrates the interplay between the author’s trauma and his
artistic sensibility. Far from being an autotelic artifact, the literary text
provides a kind of therapy, which brings solace to a writer, who is
psychically wretched. The traumatic times and the shattering and
baffling experiences in the author’s life sometimes have an impact on his
psychological equilibrium. Hence, the author vents his pent-up feelings
to experience a sense of catharsis. The paper relies on the recent
psychoanalytical trends to evince the relationship between the author’s
trauma and his literary work.
Article Details
References
A.S. Hornby, Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current
English, Ed. Sally Wehmeier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000):1440.
Mark Crinson, Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the
Modern City (Loudon: Routledge Taylor, and Francis Group, 2005):5.
Ethhels S. Person, and Arnold. M. Cooper, et al, Eds. Textbook of
Psychoanalysis (New York: American Psychiatric Publishing, INC, 2005):
Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002):91.
René Welleck, and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York:
Penguin Books, 1978): 81.
Peter Widdowson, Literature (London: Routledge, 1999):28.
SimtenGurac, Qtd in Creativity, Writing and Civilization, Ed.
Richard Pine (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007):4.
Jeffrey Meyers, Qtd in Richard Pine, Creativity, Writing and
Civilization (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007): 5.
Albert Einstein, Qtd in Constructions and the Analytic Field:
History, Scenes and Destiny, Ed. Dana Birksted-Breen (London: Routledge,
: 1.
Thomas Mann, Qtd in Dana Birksted-Breen, Constructions and
the Analytic Field: History, Scenes and Destiny (London: Routledge,
:110.
David Daiches, Critical Approaches to Literature (New York:
Longman Group Ltd, 1981):332.
W.H.Auden, ‘Memorable Speech’, Literature in the Modern World
:Critical Essays and Documents, Ed. Dennis Walder (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990): 179.
Eva Martin Sartori, et al. Eds. The Feminist Encyclopedia of French
Literature. (London: Greenwood Press, 1999): 442.
Lionel Trilling, “Freud and Literature”, Literature in the Modern
World: Critical Essays and Documents , Ed. Dennis Walder (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990):47.
Sigmund Freud, Qtd in Allen Thiker, Levels in Madness: Insanity
in Medicine and Literature (Ann Arbor: The University of Chicago Press,
: 247.
Trauma and Creative Writing in... Journal of Milev Research and Studies
Second Issue 15
----------------, “Creative Writers and Day Dreaming”, 20th Century
Literary Criticism, Ed. David Lodge (London: Longman Group Ltd, 1972):
M.A.R. Habib, A History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to the
Present (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2005): 584.
M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms( Boston: Harcourt
Brace, 1999): 248.
ÖzlemÖzen, “Poetry: A Therapy for Unsatisfied Wishes”, Journal
of Arts and Sciences 1:4/ Aralik, 2005): 111-12.
C.G Jung, “Psychology and Literature”, 20th Century Literary
Criticism, Ed. David Lodge (London: Longman Group Ltd, 1972):186.
Terence Dawson, The effective protagonist in The Nineteenth
Century British Novel: Scott, Bronté, Eliot, Wild (Burlington: Ashgate
Publishing, 2004):17.
JaquesLacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in
Psychoanalysis”, Ecrits, Trans Alan Sheridan (London: Taylor & Francis e-
Library, 2005):35.
-----, “On a God who does not deceive and One Who Does”, The
Psychoses: The Seminar of JaquesLacan, Ed. Jaques –Allen Miller. Book III
-1956. Translated with notes by Russell Grigg ( London: Routledge,
: 60.
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and
History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996):3.