Psychoanalytic criticismLiterary criticism that uses psychoanalytic theory to analyze readers' responses to literature, to interpret literary works in terms of their authors' psychological conflicts, or to recreate authors' psychic lives from unconscious revelations in their work.
Psychoanalytic criticism originated with the theories of Sigmund Freud. Freud himself was the first to employ this approach in the analysis of literature; other Freudian critics included Ernest Jones, Otto Rank, and Marie Bonaparte. Developments in psychoanalytic theory were reflected in the different approaches to criticism that evolved. Carl Jung's concept of the collective unconscious, which assumes universally similar responses to archetypal human situations, influenced such works as Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934) by Maud Bodkin and A Jungian Approach to Literature (1984) by Bettina L. Knapp . “Ego-psychology,” as developed by Norman N. Holland in The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968) and 5 Readers Reading (1975), is an aspect of psychoanalytic criticism that studies how readers respond to texts. Freud was reinterpreted by Norman O. Brown in Life Against Death (1959) and Love's Body (1966) and by linguist Jacques Lacan, who, in turn, influenced many later critics, including feminist critics Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray.
-Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature®