Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Psychoanalytic Perspective
Homework Questions: 301:
Explain: "What Freud did was develop a language
that
described,
a model that explained, a theory that encompassed human
psychology"
(Murfin 301).
Explain the concepts of the id, ego, and superego.
302:
Answer Murfin's Question: "Why are oedipal wishes and
fears
repressed
by the conscious side of the mind?" (302).
303:
Explain: "Such writers regularly cloak or mystify
ideas in
figures
that make sense only when interpreted, much as the unconscious
mind of
a neurotic disguises secret thoughts in dream stories or
bizarre
actions
that need to be interpreted by an analyst" (303).
What is the collective unconscious?
Explain Jung's suggestion that a great work of literature
"is a
manifestation
of desires once held by the whole human race but now repressed
because
of the advent of civilization" (303).
306:
What is object relations theory?
307:
Explain: "Interpretations are made of
language--itself a
transitional
object--and are themselves the mediating terms or transitional
objects
of the relationship" (307).
Explain: "[Lacan] treated the unconscious as
a
language
and, consequently, viewed the dream not as Freud did (that is,
as a
form
and symptom of repression) but rather as a form of discourse"
(307).
308:
What is the mirror stage?
What is the "Law of the Father" (308)?
What is the Symbolic order? What is the Imaginary order?
309:
Explain: "The united self, or ego, is a fiction,
according
to
Lacan" (309).
310:
Explain: "The monster represents not a mother
substitute
but
the body of the mother lost on entrance into the Symbolic
order" (310).
311:
Explain Collings's suggestion that the creature is
"doubly
impossible,
representing two taboos at once" (qtd. in Murfin 311).
Other Discussion Questions: 301:
Explain: "The powers motivating men and women are mainly
and normally unconscious" (301).
Explain the theory of repression.
304:
Explain: "Psychoanalytic criticism written before
1950
tended
to psychoanalyze the author" (304).
305:
Explain what "manifest content" and "latent content" are.
Explain: "Figurative literary language in general
is
treated as
something that evolves as the writer's conscious mind resists
what the
unconscious tells it to picture or describe" (305).
