Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Psychoanalytic Perspective
Homework Questions: 263:
Explain: "What Freud did was develop a language that described,
a model that explained, a theory that encompassed human psychology" (Murfin
263).
Explain the concepts of the id, ego, and superego.
264:
Answer Murfin's Question: "Why are oedipal wishes and fears repressed
by the conscious side of the mind?" (264).
265:
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" (265).
266:
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" (266).
269:
What is object relations theory?
Explain: "Interpretations are made of language--itself a transitional
object--and are themselves the mediating terms or transitional objects
of the relationship" (269).
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" (269).
270:
What is the mirror stage?
271:
What is the "Law of the Father" (271)?
What is the Symbolic order? What is the Imaginary order?
272:
Explain: "The united self, or ego, is a fiction, according to
Lacan" (272).
Explain: "The monster represents not a mother a substitute but
the body of the mother lost on entrance into the Symbolic order" (272).
273:
Explain Collings's suggestion that the creature is "doubly impossible,
representing two taboos at once" (Qtd. in Murfin 273).
Other Discussion Questions: 263:
Explain: "The powers motivating men and women are mainly
and normally unconscious" (263).
Explain the theory of repression.
266:
Explain: "Psychoanalytic criticism written before 1950 tended
to psychoanalyze the author" (266).
267:
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" (267-68).
