What Is Critical Psychology?

Psychological criticism in the broad sense refers to the critical method of studying literary phenomena based on the basic theories and principles of psychology. Psychological criticism in the narrow sense refers to the integration of Freud's critical theory into literature to draw psychological results, based on art as a spiritual activity The particularity of criticism is a method of analyzing the psychological phenomenon in the artist's creative process, the psychological phenomenon contained in the artistic work, and the receiver's appreciation psychology.

Psychological criticism

Psychological criticism is the earliest new method of literary criticism in the new period. Since the early 1980s,

The further development of psychological criticism in the new era is

In the mid-to-late 1980s, Freud's psychoanalytic theory was introduced into our country, which brought psychological criticism to a new stage.

As the great founder of human psychoanalysis from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, a major breakthrough and contribution of Freud was the discovery of human irrationality, that is, unconsciousness, outside the human rational world. Although this unconscious is hiding in the abyss of consciousness, as a powerful internal driving force, it often breaks the bounds of reason unconsciously, rushes to the foreground of consciousness, and ruthlessly controls people's behavior. According to Freud's experiments and investigations, the dominance of this unconscious force on people occupies a large proportion of the entire human motivation. The reason that the unconscious is blocked and suppressed by consciousness or reason is mostly because it has a huge collision with social ethics and family ethics, impregnated with strong guilt desires and requirements. Freud believes that this guilt desire is mainly sexual desire. In his opinion, human sexuality has powerful energy, also known as libido. It was backlogged and demanded release. Many human behaviors deformly reflect the realization of this desire. Freud applied this theory to literary criticism, and specifically explained the actions of King Oedipus, Hamlet, and Dostoyevsky's creation, and they believed that they all had an oedipal complex or an uncle complex. Freud's specific views may not be generally accepted by the world, but his research methods have opened up a new way for literary criticism, that is, how to reveal the unconscious content hidden in the depths of literary texts. This criticism became the obvious science of western literary criticism in the twentieth century.

In drawing on the methods of western traditional psychoanalytic criticism, the critics in China's new era obviously made a few sublations. On the one hand, they are more interested in the theory of unconsciousness than in using the theory of sexual instinct. This is because the unconscious field does show the complexity and hierarchy of human psychology. It guides people to understand the motivation behind consciousness and to explore the impact of unconscious psychology on human behavior. On the other hand, they also abandoned other questionable hypotheses in the unconscious theory, and fully explored the role of consciousness and reason, thereby expanding the scope of cognition of the psychological world of literature. We can illustrate this with several successful unconscious psychological criticism articles.

Myth-prototype criticism is a more in-depth development of psychological criticism. It started with Jung and was completed by Canadian scholar Fry. Jung did not fully agree with his teacher Freud's view of general sexual desire, thinking that there is a more important content in the unconscious field, that is, the collective unconsciousness of the nation. This collective unconsciousness is a mental schema formed by the ancestors and later passed on to the children and grandchildren. It is also called prototype consciousness or prototype. For example, the statement about the sun, heroes, and people's expectations of the sun and heroes in social life are all manifestations of prototype consciousness. The prototype consciousness is concentrated in the ancient myths and legends of the nation.

Fry absorbed and developed Jung's point of view, and believed that literature is essentially myth. This myth not only means telling stories and legends, but also means of thinking and constructing the prototype mental schema of literature. For example, the consciousness pattern about spring makes people construct a joyful comedy, the consciousness pattern about summer makes people a passionate legend, the consciousness pattern about autumn makes people a sentimental tragedy, and the consciousness about winter makes people construct Into a satirical style. Also, mythical thinking must be imaginary, intuitive, and fictional.

Myth: Archetype criticism came to China in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The publication of Ye Shuxian's "Mythology-Prototype Criticism" has promoted China's experiments, and Fry's publication of related anthologies and works has further strengthened this research trend. Among the more successful critical texts are Fang Keqiang's "Myths and the Myth Forms of Novels in the New Era", Yu Jixin's "Hero Complex" in Military Literature in the New Era, and Feng Liming's "Naive Man: An Image of Mang as a Prototype" "," The Dam and the Stele in Language Flood "by Huang Ziping, and so on.

Fang Keqiang's research on the myth of the new period novels, on the one hand, analyzes the reflection of the spirit of Chinese myths in the novels of the new period, on the other hand, it emphasizes that, because writers use the mythical spirit to enrich their works, the Chinese nation s The cultural revival complex actually constitutes collective unconsciousness. It can be proved that when applied to literary research, the myth-archetype criticism is closely related to the cultural collective unconsciousness.

Feng Liming's "Naive Man" focuses on the interpretation of "prototype". The success of Manhood is that it classifies images in the history of Chinese literature, such as Zhang Fei, Li Yan, Cheng Yijin, Niu Xi, Lu Zhishen, Shi Donggen, Liu Xuncang, Lu Han, etc .: King Kong's angry appearance plus naivety Childish words and deeds. Feng Liming called this type of image a "reckless man" prototype. "The reason why they are called a prototype is that this kind of character image entrusts a unique Chinese way of understanding the value of life. As an aesthetic form with positive value, they show that the Chinese A tradition of setting a certain personality form. At the same time, since the creation of two extremely representative images of Zhang Fei and Li Yan, Chinese literary creation has continuously created various' Zhang Fei ',' "Li Li '" shows that these two artistic images provide successive personality patterns or conventions for future generations of Chinese literature, and provide the basic principles and' mythological elements' for constructing literary images of the "manghan" type. " Since the "history accumulation" affected later cultural psychology, after the Song and Yuan Dynasties, the "reckless man" image has acquired a fixed feature and composition model. Its internal aesthetic mechanism lies in the fact that the "reckless man" image is rich in the sublime form of "force" in appearance, but is naive and simple in spiritual connotation. This makes the "reckless man" image a comical meaning and comedic in the aesthetic sense. At the same time, most "reckless people" are loyal and unrestrained, reflecting the traditional Chinese culture's conception and ethical requirements of human social organization. Here, Feng Liming closely follows the "prototype", and strives to tap the aesthetic meaning and cultural aesthetic connotation of the "reckless man" image as a "prototype", which is instructive in literary creation and appreciation.

Yu Jixin's research on "hero complex" is also very instructive. In the "Hero Complex" of military literature in the new period, Yu Jixin pointed out very deeply that it is because of the existence of the hero complex that the hero is in some way in history, reality and human life, so it can live for a long time. In art, consciousness and even language. Military literature regards the creation of heroes and publicity of heroes as important aesthetic content, and actually reflects people's "hero complex". As far as the heroic image of military literature in the new period is concerned, although it surpasses classical military literature, such as The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Water Margin, its spiritual origins are still derived from classical military literature-that is, heroes serve as role models for the times. , Always represents the will of the people. The difference is that the heroic image in military literature in the new period has been removed from the divinity, and it is also richer in personality and tragic noble character. Like Liu Maomei, Jin Kailai, Liang Sanxi, Tong Chuan, etc., they are emotional, fighting spirit, righteous, and more tragic. This shows that although the people in each age have a hero complex, the wishes of the people in different eras also determine the molding of different hero images. Yu Jixin explained very clearly why the heroic image in the new period military literature is so shaped and where our aesthetic focus should be.

Different from Feng Liming and Yu Jixin, Huang Ziping mainly penetrated into the contemporary study of quasi-mythology of Confucian culture. In "The Dam and the Stele in Language Flood", Huang Ziping found through re-interpretation of "Xiao Baozhuang", even though the concept of "contemporary myth"-hero killing the enemy, hatred, liberation-hit Xiao Baozhuang, But Xiao Baozhuang people are always subject to the "benevolent" symbol. The mythical character of the "benevolent" symbol has formed a collective unconsciousness, deeply rooted in the spiritual blood of the Xiaobaozhuang people. Whether it s the death of Lao Zha or the attitude of Xiaobaozhuang people to outsiders (Shi Lai, Xiao Cuizi, Wu lunatics), or their views on revolution and heroes, they are all related to the culture of "benefits" and are governed by "benefits" Of course, the Zhuangli people are not completely conscious of this. Therefore, it is more obvious that the collective unconscious analysis of cultural collectives is the only way to interpret the ideological actions of Xiaobaozhuang people.

From Feng Liming s reckless man prototype research to Yu Jixin s hero complex excavation, to Huang Ziping s pseudo-mythical narrative interpretation, we can clearly see that myth prototype criticism has evolved into cultural prototype criticism. This criticism paradigm aims at the analysis of cultural collective unconsciousness, and explores the "prototype" and "complexity" as the train of thought, focusing on finding out the spiritual origin of literary creation and the psychological laws of literary aesthetics. From this, we can conclude that cultural archetype criticism is of immeasurable significance to literary research. It is a pity that this method of criticism has not been fully developed for literary studies in the new period. To this day, it is still in an experimental state. Perhaps this is related to the crisis of literary research today, but I think that the depth of a literary research method depends more on the enthusiasm of critics.