Archetypal and Psychological Criticism in Poetry

Introduction

Historically, an archetypal approach to poetry is derived from Sir James George Frazer’s work in comparative anthropology, The Golden Bough (1890; 2 vols.), 1911-1915 (12 vols.), and from the depth psychology of Carl Jung. Frazer discovered certain repetitive cultural patterns that transcended time and place, appearing in widely different myths and literature. Jung posited the existence of a collective unconscious within each individual, a racial memory that held various archetypes. The archetypes or recurrent patterns and images concerned birth, death, rebirth, marriage, childhood, older men, magnanimous mothers, heroes and villains, male and female, love and revenge, and countless others. A type of person, a type of action, a type of relationship were so embedded within an individual’s history that any new appearance was imbued with the force and richness of every past occurrence. When literature possesses such archetypes, its potency is magnified.

An archetypal critic of poetry can employ Jungian psychology as an extraliterary body of knowledge, in contrast to the archetypal criticism represented by Northrop Frye, in which archetypes do not refer to anything outside literature but to a larger unifying category within literature itself. Even though the term “archetypal” is relevant to Jung and Frye, their critical intentions differ. A Jungian approach to poetry seeks to wrest meaning from the poem by referring specific images, persons, and patterns to broader, richer archetypes. A Frye approach assumes that there is a totality of structure to literature represented by various common literary archetypes. It is the critic’s job to connect individual works to the total structure of literature by way of the recognition of archetypes. Thus, one archetypal approach, Jungian, involves content and meaning, and the other, derived from Frye, involves systematic literary form.

Only the Jungian variety of archetypal criticism has relevance for a distinctively psychological approach to literature. A Jungian archetype is an inherited racial pattern or disposition residing in a layer of the unconscious that all persons share. It is brought to light by the poet’s imaginative transformation of the archetype into a symbol that appears in the poem. All depth psychologies, which postulate the existence of an unconscious, are predicated on the notion that a symbol emerging from an unconscious level may manifest itself in a poem. Freudians, however, do not interpret humanity’s psychological base as the collective unconscious; their symbols emerge from the personal unconscious and, therefore, have no connection with archetypes. Within the psychoanalytic group, there are several schools and, therefore, many psychological approaches to poetry. After discussing the Jungian approach (which is archetypal and psychological), Frye’s approach, and the varieties of psychoanalytic approaches, the discussion will focus on the phenomenological approach, which owes nothing to archetype or symbol.

A Jungian approach to poetry

Jung deals specifically with literature in the following essays: “The Type Problem in Poetry,” “The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales,” “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry,” and “Psychology and Literature.” What ties Jung’s discussion of literature to psychology is the symbol. The inexplicable part of the symbol is, according to Jung, a manifestation of certain “inherited” structural elements of the human psyche. These elements or archetypes are revealed in dreams, visions, or fantasies and are analogous to the figures one finds in mythology, sagas, and fairytales.

In “Psychology and Literature,” Jung mentions those “visionary artists” who seem to allow us “a glimpse into the unfathomed abyss of what has not yet become.” Beyond Jung’s specific focus on symbol as revealed in literature as a basis for certain hypotheses and finally for an entire depth psychology that may be applied, in turn, to literature itself, Jung’s study of the nature of symbol gives him an especially perceptive understanding of the nature of literature. Jung has no concern for the specific form, the presentation of symbols in literature. It is impossible to distinguish the symbolic processes of the poet from those of anyone else. The symbolic richness of a work as illuminated by the Jungian approach, therefore, does not itself make the work successful. A Jungian methodology, however, can be said to reinforce the notion of a symbolic unity of a work in the sense that it can make explicit certain image patterns that may be obscure.

The Freudian attacks on Jung’s view of art are strident and somewhat muddled. Frederick Crews believes that invoking the Jungian system is contradictory—a view presented at length in Edward Glover’s Freud or Jung? (1950). For Jung, art represents necessary contact with the personal unconscious, as in the case of psychological art, and with the collective unconscious, as in the case of visionary art. While Sigmund Freud’s artist is a person who turns from the real world to a fantasy life that permits them to express their erotic wishes, Jung’s artist is not driven to art because of such unfulfilled desires but achieves art through a natural encountering of energies existing on two levels of the unconscious and through a manifestation of archetypal energy by means of unique symbols.

With Freud, no universal, inherited archetypes exist. Therefore, no continuum of comparable symbols can be traced in literature except those that refer to the personal unconscious and specifically to repressed energy therein. Symbols in Freud’s view represent instinctual needs and are always defined within a limited model of the human personality—one in which no real growth beyond childhood takes place. On the other hand, Jung’s consideration of archetype and symbol as emerging from a nonpathological relationship between consciousness and two levels of the unconscious goes beyond Freud’s notion that all art is the sublimation of repressed drives.

The Jungian approach has been criticized for reducing the artist to a mere instrument of the archetype. This criticism, however, is based on a confusion between the archetype and the symbol, the observable image representing the archetype; it is an image that cannot be fully grasped and that does not fully realize the archetype. The archetype may be considered autonomous, since it does not depend on the conscious mind. The symbol that the imagination grasps, however, is manifested in accord with the volitions of the conscious mind. Actual pictorial and verbal images owe their aesthetic aspects not to the uncontrollable forces of the archetype but to the forming disposition of the conscious mind. A Jungian approach to literature casts light on the symbolic aura of a literary work as well as on the creative process itself. Such revelation, in turn, from a psychological view, acquaints humans with unconscious levels that humans themselves cannot reach and encourages a continuation of human growth. As in Norman Holland’s reader-response approach, the Jungian critic-reader possesses a personality that develops through literature, although the literary text in the Jungian view is certainly a repository for symbols that transcend the personal.

A Jungian approach to “The Sick Rose”

O Rose, thou art sick!

The invisible worm

That flies in the night,

In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy,

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

The design accompanying this poem, “The Sick Rose” (1794) by William Blake, pictures the worm in human form. Two other human figures are pictured in lamenting postures. A Jungian interpretation of this poem brings in archetypes of Anima and Animus and Shadow. In Jung’s view, the human male must assimilate his contrasexual self, his female Anima, and the human female must assimilate her contrasexual self, her male Animus. The totally individuated person is androgynous on the psychic level and can utilize energies from male and female contrasexual portions of the psyche. In this poem, the worm is the rose’s Animus and she is his Anima. Both are clearly divided, obdurate in their own sexual identities. Divided so, there is no mutual sexual interaction, no sexual dynamic. Instead, the rose has a “bed of crimson joy” that obviously must have been hidden, since the worm has to journey to find it. The Shadow archetype is formed in the personal unconscious by repressed desires. In this poem, the rose has clearly repressed sexual desire since she hides from her male counterpart and thus allows him but one entrance—as a ravager. His love is dark and secret from the perspective of the rose. He is indeed a shadow figure emerging from the night, a shadow of the rose’s unconscious.

Frye’s archetypal criticism

Frye’s archetypes connect “one poem with another and thereby [help] to unify and integrate our literary experience” (Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, 1957). Literature, in Frye’s view, is an expression of a person’s imaginative transformation of his (or her) experiences. Ritual and myth were the first creative expressions, beginning as stories about a god and developing into what Frye calls “a structural principle of story-telling” (The Educated Imagination, 1963). Essential mythic patterns or archetypes manifested themselves in literature. Writers in various periods drew upon these archetypes, modifying them in accordance with the conventions of their own day and the force of their personalities.

The archetypal literary critic views the entire body of literature as a self-contained universe of these archetypes, an autonomous and self-perpetuating universe that is not effectively interpreted by extraliterary analogues. Frye believes that by confining criticism to an exploration of essential archetypes recurring throughout literature, he is developing a “science” of literary criticism, a science that recognizes that literature, like all art, is self-referential and that the function of criticism is to bring past imaginative transformations of human experiences into the present and explore the parameters of present transformations. According to Frye, the critic is scientific in his study of literature, although his mission is not to proclaim literature as science but to make man’s imaginative transformations of his experience, his literature, “a part of the emancipated and humane community of culture.”

Frye discerned four basic types of imaginative transformations of experience in literature. These types first developed as mythic patterns expressing humanity’s attempt to humanize the world. The imagination fuses the rhythms of human life with the cycle of nature and then invests the whole with variable emotional import. The fused natural-human cycle is one in which a youthful spring declines into winter and death. Frye then relates literature to the following mythic structure: Romance is synonymous with dawn, spring, and birth; comedy is synonymous with the zenith, summer, and marriage; tragedy is synonymous with sunset, autumn, and death; satire is synonymous with darkness, winter, and dissolution.

Frye defines commentary as “the translating of as much as possible of a poem’s meaning into discursive meaning” (“Literary Criticism”). Such allegorical commentary, however, is not the aim of criticism, which, in Frye’s view, is to identify the poem. Like a cultural anthropologist, the literary critic places the poem within its proper literary context. The first context is the total canon produced by the poet under consideration. The second context is historical. For example, John Keats’s poetry must be understood within the broader context of Romanticism. Beyond considering the poet’s historical context, the critic must consider the genre. Tragedy, Frye says, is a “kind of literary structure,” a genre exemplified throughout literary history. The critic must also pay attention to the allusions within the poem itself. John Milton’s Lycidas (1638) for example, reveals historical ties both in its form—pastoral elegy—and in its imagery. These ties are within literature itself. Allusions in a poem by Milton are to a poem by Vergil.

Poems in Frye’s Romantic mode possess a vision of the heroic, either religious or secular, with which the poet himself is identified. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Windhover” (wr. 1877, pb. 1918) presents a view of Jesus as hero, while Walt Whitman’s Passage to India (1871) presents the poet as hero. The poet of the romantic mode seeks the imaginative transformation of the natural world, as do Andrew Marvell in “The Garden” (wr. c. 1660) and William Butler Yeats in “Sailing to Byzantium” (1927). The poets in the comic mode, however, are satisfied with the world as it is, as in Keats’s major odes. The tragic mode involves loss and reconciliation through some effort to make sense out of loss, as in Milton’s Lycidas, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais (1821), and Hopkins’s “The Wreck of the Deutschland” (1918). The ironic poet does not achieve imaginative transformation of the world through supernatural help but rather achieves a vision of a shattered world. Emily Dickinson’s poetry, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), and Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (1923) are examples.

In Frye’s criticism, mythic images were the first and clearest expressions of a relationship between humans and their world. Literature is thus a “direct descendant of mythology,” and biblical and classical mythologies are central myths in Western literature. What the poetry critic of archetypal persuasion ultimately does is to explore archetypal connections, recurrent patterns, in literature. As criticism continues to explore the structure of literature rather than its content, it eventually encompasses literature as a whole as its content. Once this is achieved—when criticism has a hold on literature as a whole—questions regarding the purpose of literature, its relationship to society, and its connections with discursive literature can be tackled.

Frye has been criticized for ignoring the critic’s task of evaluation, for separating literature from life, for ignoring the individuality of a work by emphasizing its archetypal relations with other literature, and for creating, in Anatomy of Criticism, a literary work rather than a critical theory that has practical applications. Frye is criticized for assuming that literary discourse and poetic vision are unique and separable from all modes of extraliterary thought and discourse. Frye’s views here are traced to the German idealist tradition, in which the words of the poet are somehow autonomous, free of referential meaning. Frye’s view of literature is criticized because literature is seen as the ultimate goal of culture, as superior to the objective world because it transcends it by way of the imagination. The liberally educated person has replaced an unsatisfying world with its imaginative transformation—literature. What is celebrated in Frye, according to critic Frank Lentricchia,

is a fantastical, utopian alternative to the perception of a degraded social existence: a human discoursing free of all contingency, independent of all external forces, a discoursing empowered by unconditioned human desire.

A Frye approach to “The Sick Rose”

In “Blake’s Treatment of the Archetype” (1950), Frye comments on Blake’s powerfully integrated theory of art and of the unity of symbol and archetype in Blake’s work. Frye places Blake in the anagogic phase of symbolic meaning, in which the total ritual of humanity, the total dream of humanity, is represented. Blake’s “The Sick Rose” is interlocked with his entire canon; in itself it re-creates the “total form of verbal expression” of his work (“Levels of Meaning in Literature”). Blake’s symbols are anagogic symbols, symbols that turn outward toward the macrocosm of his entire myth and inward toward any individual work (in this case, “The Sick Rose”) that expresses the unity of desire and reality, of dream and ritual.

Only religious myths have achieved this combination of personal dream or desire and reality or ritual. Romance, a phase just below the anagogic phase, reflects a conflict rather than a unity of desire and reality. It also employs archetypes that do not have a limitless range of reference, as do the “monads” of the anagogic phase. If “The Sick Rose” is placed within a mythical rather than anagogic phase of symbolic meaning, the rose and the worm would have correspondences to other roses and worms in literature but would not be true representations of the visionary apocalyptic kind of poetry that Blake’s is. The location of the poem within Frye’s anatomy depends upon a proper location of Blake’s entire work within that anatomy. All the richness of the proper fit can be brought to bear on “The Sick Rose.” Thus, finding the proper niche for the poem rather than interpreting it as a unique, unconnected entity is the task of Frye’s critical anthropologist.

Psychoanalytic approaches: Freud

Freud’s views of the relationship between art and psychoanalysis were presented in his “Delusion and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva” (1907) and in “The Relationship of the Poet to Daydreaming” (1908). The forbidden wishes of dream, associated with the psychosexual stages (oral, anal, phallic, and genital), appear in the literary work but are disguised by distracting aspects of aesthetic form. The superegos of reader and author are circumvented, and art serves to release unconscious forces that might otherwise overwhelm the ego. The critic’s job is to delve below the surface of a distracting literary facade and point out the lurking fantasies. Freud himself began, in his book on Leonardo da Vinci, a stage of psychoanalytic criticism that has been termed “genetic reductionism,” or the discussion of a work in terms of the author’s neurosis.

Genetic reductionism has been and remains a primary focus of psychoanalytic criticism despite a general recognition that the danger for psychoanalysis is the lure of a simplistic and mechanistic interpretation. The dispute here is between those who hold that literature is autonomous, existing independently of a creator’s emotional disposition, and those who hold that a psychoanalytic critic can “show how a writer’s public intention was evidently deflected by a private obsession” (Frederick Crews). A psychoanalytic examination of the author’s wishes and anxieties, in the view of antipsychoanalytic criticism, ignores the variety and ontology of literature. Crews argues, nevertheless, that there does exist a certain range of problems that psychoanalytic assumptions illuminate.

Freud also initiated a psychoanalytic interpretation of particular characters in his work on Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva (1918) and in his discussion of oedipal complexes displayed by certain characters in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (c. 429 BCE; English translation, 1715) and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Prince of Denmark (pr. c. 1600-1601, pb. 1603). While most contemporary psychoanalytic critics deplore genetic reductionism, there is debate regarding the treatment of characters as real people. Critics on one side of the spectrum tend to put a character on the analyst’s couch, talk about the character’s childhood, and totally neglect other aspects of the literary work. Opposing critics contend that while readers do indeed experience characters as humans, the critic must use psychoanalysis so as to understand fully the character in relation to other aspects of the work.

In Freud’s view, literature was like dream—a symbolic expression of the unconscious whose original meaning could be interpreted. This interest in the relationship between the writer and their work, in the creative process itself and its importance in interpreting a work, remains an interest of contemporary psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic critics. Freud’s original view of creativity has been refashioned in various ways, and psychoanalytic critics now fall into various camps. Freud’s view of the work of literature as a product of the author’s sublimated desires has been challenged by an emphasis upon the literary work as “the potential space between the individual and the environment,” by an emphasis upon the reader whose “identity theme” fashions meaning from a work of art, and by an emphasis on preconscious and conscious involvement with literary creation (D. W. Winnicott). These views have been termed, respectively, “object-relations,” “reader-response” (based on the work of Norman Holland), and “ego psychology.” The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has also created a unique approach to literature.

A Freudian approach to “The Sick Rose”

The focus in this approach is immediately upon the poet. The question is, What “dark secret” repressed by the poet has found release in this poem? The poem is a mere symptom of the poet’s neurotic desires. The rose can be viewed as a female whose “bed of crimson joy” is “found out.” This is no healthy, natural sexual act, however, because the “worm” or phallus “flies in the night,” in a “howling storm,” and destroys his beloved with “his dark secret love.” At the root of the poem, therefore, is the incestuous desire of the poet. The secret love of the poet here is his mother.

Ego psychology

Freud’s view of literature-as-symptom emerging from the id is modified by ego psychologists who recognize creativity as a function of the ego. For the ego psychologists, literature in the service of the ego reflects the ego’s mission of mediating between self and others, between id and superego. Symbols from the id are, therefore, shaped in literature to communicate beyond the intrapsychic level. The movement in ego psychology is away from literature as raw wish fulfillment of the author and toward the literary text as a manifestation of id instinct and ego-monitoring. Literary critics utilizing ego psychology seek in the text not the disguised wish or wishes of the author but their transformation by the ego in the direction of something beyond the personality of the author, something of thematic import, communicable and succeeding or not succeeding depending upon the author’s gifts or skills.

The ego psychoanalyst analyzing poetry emphasizes ego functions rather than id impulses. In what ways, this critic asks, does the poem display the ego’s assertion of control by allowing repressed instincts an outlet? A discovery of what instincts are latent does not lead the critic into the entire poem, but a study of the poem as a manifestation of an ego directing the release of repressed instincts does.

An ego psychologist’s approach to “The Sick Rose”

For the critic applying the theories of ego psychology, incest may remain the repressed desire of the poem, but the way in which the conscious ego expresses that hidden desire in the form of the poem itself is the proper subject matter of the critic. The poet distances himself (or herself) from the poem by adopting a censorious tone. The directness and clarity of poetic style also reveal the wise perceptiveness of the poet with regard to the sexual plight of rose and worm. Thus, tone and style point to the ego’s mastery over a repressed desire of the id, and a search for such ego mastery results in an analysis of the poem. The poet’s perceptiveness does not lie in the core fantasy of incest but in his view of love that must be invisible, which must emerge only at night. The poet’s perceptiveness lies in his understanding that a covert sexuality injures and ultimately destroys both sexual partners. His censoriousness lies in his view that such clandestine sexuality is “unethical,” that it works against humanity and the individual human life. The instinctual base remains incest but it has been controlled by the ego’s fashioning of the poem, making the poem something other than the wish that inspired it.

Reader-response criticism

Norman Holland, in The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968), emphasizes the instinctual drives of the id rather than the monitoring, controlling powers of the ego, although, unlike early Freudian interpreters of literature, he posits an ego that mediates between the id and the superego and whose mediation is the form of the work itself. The form of a literary work is indeed comparable to the ego defenses against the assault of the id, but it is this assault that is the hidden, determining root of the work. A core fantasy is the base of every literary work, and the writer, through form, defends against it, tries to shape it in the direction of redeemable social, moral, and intellectual value. The eye of the critic, in Holland’s view, is on the core fantasy, on the id, while the eye of the ego psychologist-critic is on the ego’s manipulation of the id through literary form. The core fantasy critic seeks out the core fantasy and demonstrates the author’s artistry in shaping and disguising it. The reader accepts both the core fantasy, which they may share, and the devices employed to contain the fantasy. Thus, the reader achieves pleasure by possession of the fantasy as well as by having it controlled. The reader, in the view of the ego psychologist-critic, attains pleasure primarily through the pattern of ego control expressed in the literary work.

In Holland’s later work (Poems in Persons: An Introduction to the Psychoanalysis of Literature, 1973, and Five Readers Reading, 1975), he places the pertinent core fantasy in the mind of the reader rather than in the text. Readers extract meaning from the text in accordance with their “identity themes.” Readers may be directed by their desires to seek such themes in the texts they read. Finding them, readers may deal with them as they do in their lives. They may also attend the author in transforming a core fantasy into something socially acceptable or intellectually significant. Holland believes that through the literary text the readers confront themselves, engaging in acts of self-discovery by analyzing what they as readers have said about a text. Throughout the three faces of psychoanalysis that Holland identifies—psychology of the unconscious (id), of the ego, and of the self—readers have always been structuring the text by means of their intentions. A realization of this fact enables readers to make use of literature as an opportunity to gain self-knowledge.

A critical approach to poetry based on Holland’s later work would begin with a description of the critic-reader’s responses to the poem. These responses, determined by the critic-reader’s identity theme, direct an analysis of the poem. A dialectic then takes place between the objective reality of the poem, a common store of shareable realities, and the critic.

A reader-response critic’s approach to “The Sick Rose”

The reader-response critic approaches the poem by focusing on those personal connections made in the poem. Such an interpretation is not necessarily the same thing as a literal interpretation, for example, that the poem is about the perils of gardening. From the reader-response view, this poem would be seen as a poem only about gardening by a gardener. It is quite possible in the first line of the poem, “O Rose, thou art sick,” for a reader to think of someone named Rose, perhaps a mother or a sister or a lover, who was or is or may be sick. The “invisible worm” becomes a disease, such as cancer, that has struck the reader-critic’s beloved suddenly, perhaps in the full bloom of life, in bed of “crimson joy.” Now, this cancer slowly destroys the beloved.

Given this personal reading, what can the poem do to assert its own existence? The reader-critic must first be willing to entertain the notion that perhaps the poem is not about Rose’s bout with cancer. The poet has used the word “love.” The poem asserts itself, if given a chance, by its words, and the word here is “love.” This love “flies in the night” “in the howling storm”—it emerges from Nature. Thus, despite the apparent ludicrousness of such a subjective beginning, the reader-critic is led toward an acceptance of this love as natural. It is in the nature of things to die, or to love sexually. Neither death nor sexuality can be repressed wisely. In this instance, the path of subjectivity is modified by the poem itself. As this dialectic continues, the original subjectivity of the reader-critic is modified, and the interpretation becomes more “objective” though determined by the identity theme of the reader-critic. What the poem is connects with what the reader is, and the result is a thoroughly human form of comprehension.

Object-relations theory

Object-relations theory does not hold, as do traditional psychological and ego psychological theories, that a literary work is the product of psychic conflict. It argues, rather, that a literary work is the place where the writer’s wishes and the culture around them meet. Rather than emphasizing the literary work as narcissistic wish fulfillment, object-relations critics emphasize those aspects of a literary work that are not the author’s self, which lead toward a world outside the writer. This outside world of convention and tradition is transformed by the writer, who has accepted what is outside their own self. The literary work as an object is an extension of the writer, somewhat as a teddy bear, for example, is an extension of a child. Both teddy bear and literary work are invested with illusions; yet they are objects in the world. In the case of the child, the teddy bear is something like the mother’s breast, although significantly it is another object. Similarly, the literary work is wish fulfillment and yet an object that is not pure wish fulfillment but a place where wishes and world meet, an object representing a “collective love affair with the world.”

A critical approach to poetry based on an object-relations theory would not focus on the poem as an expression of intrapsychic conflict but as the ground in which the poet’s wishes and the outside world meet. In what ways does the poem signify the internal desires of the poet? In what ways does it stand as a transformation of those desires into what is outside the poet? The meeting of internal and external is the poem.

An object-relations critic’s approach to “The Sick Rose”

The object-relations critic views the poem as a meeting ground of the poet’s fantasies and the surrounding environment—in this case, late eighteenth-century England. If incest is on the unconscious mind of the poet—Blake—he has presented it as nothing more specific than “dark secret love,” a phrase that has meaning in the context of an England in which hypocrisy with regard to sexuality was increasing. If the poet were really expressing a desire to unite sexually with his mother, then the poem would serve as an illusionary connection between himself and his mother. The poem as object, however, is clearly a transitional object rather than a complete illusion of the poet. The poem is a transition between the poet’s desire for uncensored sexuality and the moral prohibitions against sexuality that were prevalent in the poet’s day.

Jacques Lacan

Lacanian psychoanalysis once again resurrects the sole supremacy of the id in the creative process. Indeed, the unconscious itself is structured as a language, and, therefore, the conscious and the unconscious are identically rooted. Literary discourse, like ordinary discourse, is symbolical and subjective. Rather than the id being a source of instinctual drives that appear disguised in literature, specifically in the language of literature, the Lacanian id is a reservoir of words that determine perceptions.

Lacanian literary interpretation depends upon tracing literary language to a constitutive language of the unconscious. It depends upon relating significant words in the literary text to words signified in the unconscious. The unconscious is structured not according to innate laws but originally according to the image of another, someone whom the child is dependent upon (usually the mother). This desire to remain secure is fulfilled when the child constructs their unconscious in accordance with the significant other. The “discourse” of the other becomes the discourse of the child’s unconscious, which is fictional insofar as it is not the child’s but another’s.

In Lacan’s view, the ego is composed of a moi, which is unconscious, overriding the other but determined by it; and the je, which is identified with spoken language and culture. The discourse of the moi permeates the discourse of the je. The symbolic, subjective moi permeates the apparent logical discourse of the je. The Lacanian literary critic seeks to go from the discourse of the je to the discourse of the moi, from a symbolical consciousness to a symbolical unconsciousness. The discourse of the moi, of the unconscious, is weakly and elusively manifest in the surface of the literary text. Both signifiers and signifieds are available in the surface of the text, and the act of literary interpretation attempts to reconstruct, wherever possible, the connection between signifiers and signifieds. It is an act that seeks to uncover what unconscious desires determine the details of the literary text.

A Lacanian approach to “The Sick Rose”

A Lacanian interpretation attempts to break through the language of the je and reach the symbolical unconscious of the moi. The literal language of the je in this poem has to do with gardening, with the destruction of a rose by a worm that is invisible to the naked eye. When readers probe more deeply, they discover that the poem is really “talking” about human sexuality. The poet, Blake, clearly reveals his symbolic intent in his depiction of human figures in the design accompanying the poem. A Lacanian analysis probes below the level of the language of the je in poems apparently not symbolical and not intended to be symbolical by the poet, whose surface language seems to mean no more than it says. The “invisible worm” as a phallus signifies a flaccid phallus. The erect, firm phallus lies not flies in the night. The “dark secret love” cannot be consummated with the flaccid phallus, and thus the moi, formed by a desire to please the mother, describes in this poem the fulfillment in words of a desire the reality of which the words themselves belie.

Psychoanalytic approaches: Critical overview

Alan Roland and Frederick Crews, among others, have provided criticism of various psychoanalytic approaches to literature. Roland objects to the correlation of literary work and daydream. The literary work, in his view, goes far beyond the author’s fantasies and the imagery of dream. Poetic metaphor and the structure of paradox are essential components of the literary work but not of dream. According to Roland, literary form must be freed from the notion that it is synonymous with the ego’s defenses. Defense is viewed as only part of form. Object-relations critics do not limit the author’s fantasies to those of a psychosexual stage, but they fail, in Roland’s view, to integrate their exploration of fantasies with what the work may mean on its highest level. In opposition to Holland’s view of the reader, Roland feels that, besides a core fantasy, a literary work possesses an abstract meaning, a total vision formally created. The relationship between these two levels should be described by the critic. In Roland’s view, the core fantasy within the reader’s mind is apparently affected by the critic’s efforts.

Crews sees as reductionist the views that Holland expresses in The Dynamics of Literary Response, although he admits that Holland is sensitive to literary form and very cautious about making an “armchair diagnosis of authors.” Holland’s reductionism lies in his view of literature as subterfuge for forbidden thoughts. Crews also maintains that no one goes to criticism to discover the “identity theme” of the critic but rather to learn more about literature as a meaning-creating enterprise.

In the final analysis, according to Crews, Holland’s focus on the reader is yet another example of academic objectivity being attacked by subjectivists, by those who argue that the interpretation of literature is a private affair. Crews finds no real remedy for contemporary psychoanalytic criticism, not even ego psychology. Eventually, all psychoanalytic critics realize that their interpretations say more about themselves than about the text, that “they have reduced literature to the rigid and narrow outlines of their own personalities.” A psychoanalytic critic, according to Crews, must bear in mind that their method is reductive and that there are many aspects of a work excluded from their approach.

In his essay “Anaesthetic Criticism” (1970), Crews goes beyond a discussion of the dangers of reductionism in psychoanalytic criticism and defends it against antideterministic critics. He considers the “informal taboo” placed on extraliterary theories by many academic critics. Frye, the most influential antideterministic critic, in Crews’s view, advocates an inductive survey of literary works, in which no external conceptual framework is considered. Literature, in Frye’s archetypal view, is its own progenitor; although Crews terms such a belief “a common fantasy among writers, a wish that art could be self-fathered, self-nurturing, self-referential, purified of its actual origins in discontent.” Such a “fantasy,” of course, is no less common among critics than among writers. In essence, critics who deplore the search for causes and effects are anti-intellectual, preferring a literary approach in which references to extraliterary analogues are at once disclaimed. Finally, in Crews’s view, criticism that ignores the affective element of literature and accentuates the role of form over chaos, of genre conventions and the like, is anaesthetic criticism. Crews concludes that regardless of the dangers of reductionism in the application of psychoanalysis to literature, the approach is more efficacious than that of such antideterministic critics as Frye.

Phenomenological psychology

In the case of a phenomenological psychology, a delineation of a Lebenswelt, or human life-world of a character, a speaker in a poem, or an author, is in each case a delineation of consciousness. The phenomenologist’s desire is to return to lived experiences and bracket, or set aside, presuppositions. Such experiences are not understood by an examination of external behavior but by an examination of psychic reality, or consciousness. Because consciousness is always consciousness of something, intentionality with regard to external reality being always implicit, a focus on a person in literature or on the author him- or herself, on various self-revelations, reveals the Lebenswelt.

To the phenomenological psychologist, literary accounts—poetry, drama, or fiction—are personal records, descriptions of psychic reality that aid in achieving a psychological understanding of behavior and phenomenal experience. Through a phenomenological approach to poetry, which emphasizes various portrayals of self by poetic speakers and the poet (portrayals of others, of objects and time), it is possible to define and reveal meaning in the poem as a whole.

The poetic consciousness involves the poet’s intentions, which are tied to their human life-world and their particular arrangement of phenomena. Although such an arrangement is unique to each poet, a patterning presided over by their poetic consciousness, such consciousness, by virtue of its intentionality, is directed to and tied to objects comprising the reader’s natural universe. The very process of poetic construction and patterning reveals the experiential foundation of the reader’s world and illuminates rather than mirrors disparate objects and impressions. The critic of poetry has little interest in poetry as a source of phenomenal experience, as an exploration of psychic-subjective reality. Rather, they utilize the phenomenological perspective to define the relationship between intentionality and aesthetic patterning or form.

The relationship between intentionality and form cannot be defined until the Lebenswelt of each speaker or persona in the poem is defined, leaving the poet’s own Lebenswelt discernible. Thus, the phenomenological perspective enables the critic to analyze speakers and personae by means of their perceptions of the world and eventually to distinguish aspects of the poem that are derived from intentions not of any speaker or persona but of the poet. Nothing less than the entire poem is revealed.

A phenomenological psychological approach to “The Sick Rose”

In “The Sick Rose” it is possible to discern two “characters” almost immediately—worm and rose. It is also possible to discern a speaker, who may or may not be the poet, and, somewhere behind it all, the poet. Neither worm nor rose is a true character since they do not reveal their perceptions. Focus must be placed on the speaker of the poem, who reveals himself in his revelation regarding the worm and the rose. Despite the conventional perception that a rose is beautiful, the speaker finds, in the very first line, that this rose is sick. “She” is sick because “her” life is being destroyed by the dark secret love of an invisible worm. In the mind of the speaker of the poem, the worm is “the” and not “a” worm; in the mind of the speaker of the poem, the worm is obviously someone or some specific thing. If “someone” is first considered, it is someone up to no good, someone evil. That evil has been created not through hate but through love, although a dark secret love. A bright, open love is a love that can be displayed in society without fear of censure. A dark, secret love is that sexual love that must go on behind closed doors, which cannot be lawfully witnessed. The worm in this speaker’s mind is a diabolical figure bringing death through sexuality to the rose. When one begins to separate poet from speaker, it is clear that the speaker himself is “sick.”

The poet’s Lebenswelt is not restricted to this one poem. In the case of Blake, it is revealed in the totality of the work he has titled Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794). “The Sick Rose” is a song of experience. Most often, the speakers in poems of experience are themselves victims of what Blake considered the “evils” of experience. In the phenomenological approach, critics employ what is known of the poet as revealed in their other work as a gloss on the poem under consideration. Biographical information becomes important so that the Lebenswelt of the poet can be defined. The reader-critic intends to know enough about the poet’s mode of perception to distinguish the poet from speakers or personae in their poems. The poem's richness is revealed as a rhetorical juxtaposition of the victimized speaker and critical poet.

In another experience poem, “The Garden of Love,” a speaker returns to the garden of love, which previously bore so many sweet flowers, and discovers that it is filled with graves, that priests have bound with briars the speaker’s joys and desires. This bound speaker is the speaker of “The Sick Rose.” In the poet’s view, “the” worm may be a priest, or he may be conventional religion’s notion of god. The rose of perfect beauty, in its bed of crimson joy, is destroyed by a priest’s or a conventionally perceived god’s repressive dark secret love—a love that binds the speaker’s joys and desires, a love that is fatal. A dark secret love makes love dark and secret. Only a human victimized as this speaker is victimized can construct a god for him- or herself who binds and shackles and is then considered loving because of those acts. The love of an institutionalized religion’s god, a god outside humanity itself, is, in this poet’s view, not love but death.

New applications

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, these criticisms were not widely used, but some critics continued using psychological and archetypal theories in specialized genres. Archetypal criticism has been found especially helpful in studies of the ritual poetry of groups such as Native Americans, the First Nations peoples, and the Māori. It has also been applied to other religious traditions, especially those that emphasize the mystical and the transformational.

Archetypal criticism is also basic to gender studies. Feminists explicitly identify women as sacred figures, earth-mothers, or divine goddesses, and point out how poets implicitly use archetypes to define or to elevate the status of women. Other writers identify traditional male archetypes, such as gods and heroes. Both archetypal and psychological theories can be applied to poems about the search for the self and the related theme of metamorphosis. Thus, twenty-first-century critics continue to utilize and develop new variations on these theoretical approaches to literature.

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