Freud highly praised an Oracle in the temple of Apollo at Delphi as his motto. The psychoanalytic psychology he founded is a kind of psychology that goes deep into "knowing yourself" and digs the subconscious mind, a new continent of human psychology. Freud believed that human growth and socialization is a process of gradually taming human animal instinct. He said that these instincts include self-protection, diet and other self-instincts to maintain individual survival, as well as sexual instincts to get pleasure. In the later period, Freud called these two instincts "the instinct of life" and put forward the opposite "the instinct of death" on this basis.
I understand "death instinct" as a natural desire for destruction, which is also the tradition of western civilization, that is, the theory of evil nature, which holds that human beings are born guilty and human nature is evil and needs to be controlled. The so-called good and evil were established only after the ethics of human civilization gradually took shape. Like eat small fish, animals that eat big fish eat each other, and there will be no moral problems. At the beginning of mankind, natural conditions were harsh, wild animals were rampant and the production level was low. It is not easy to live longer. Slowly, human beings find that division of labor and cooperation can make them survive for a long time and increase the probability of reproduction and development.
However, cooperation is a very troublesome thing. It stipulates when people do what, which will lead to the stratification of management and managed. Since then, people can't do whatever they want like animals, which is a great challenge to "people are born free". But after calculation, only cooperation can maximize its own interests. For a long-term plan, the cooperative relationship that may be established for maximum survival is fixed, and on this basis, human society is derived and developed.
Freud believed that in society, for the sake of long-term cooperative relationship and the standardization and stability of the whole society, the most primitive part of human consciousness, namely sex and destruction, must be suppressed. It is precisely because of the suppression of civilization that Freud divided people's spiritual activities into three levels: peripheral consciousness, pre-consciousness and subconscious, and from this he derived his division of people's personality-id, ego and superego. The ID is the most primitive part of people's innate subconscious, that is, the "instinct of life" and "instinct of death" mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph; Ego is a part of reason, which can be understood from two aspects: one is to control the impulse of id according to the principle of reality, that is, to suppress instinct and destroy instinct with reason, and the other is to suppress superego by oneself; Superego is an idealized self with high ethical principles. Regarding the relationship between the three, for example, when you see the old man fall, as an ethical superego, you want to help him, but at this time, the ego begins to calculate the cost of the income. What should I do if I help him? What is the economic condition of my family? Should I take the risk? So your ego and superego are fighting there. In the final analysis, it is the id at work, and the instinct of life appears here in the form of "the influence of this matter on the individual's living state"
Then talk about the relationship between psychoanalysis and literary psychology. Freud believes that human civilization will inevitably produce the oppression of the id, and this oppression will gradually accumulate in people like energy. Freud called it libido. Freud believed that if the accumulation of libido could not be effectively released, it would break out sooner or later, causing people to suffer from mental depression or more serious mental illness. According to Freud, there are two ways to release libido. One is a dream. In Interpretation of Dreams, Freud believed that dreams are the satisfaction of wishes, and they are the compression, disguise and deformation of Libido to escape the monitoring of consciousness. The other is literary and artistic creation. Through the analysis of dreams, Freud found that dreams are highly consistent with artists' creative consciousness. Artists usually break away from reality, enter an illusory state and sneak into the creative subject when creating. Freud believed that all artists are dreamers in daydreaming, and the difference between them and mental patients is that they can escape from fantasy and return to reality, and keep a certain psychological distance from the objects described and depicted when expressing. This is the "empathy theory" and "distance theory" in literary and artistic creation, that is, Wang Guowei said in "Words on Earth" that artists can be "inside ..." outside the universe and life.
Therefore, dreaming is actually a kind of psychotherapy, and we can understand our hidden wishes through the channel of dreams. For works of art, Freud thinks that it is a special form of psychological meaning, in which everyone can enter and get alternative satisfaction, so as to compensate for the unrealized desire in reality. Appreciation of works of art is often very subjective. We understand that a work has mobilized our knowledge accumulation and life experience, which is inevitable, and what comes out is an interpretation based on our knowledge structure and life experience. When a work is released by Freud's Libido, then the appreciator of artistic works will also find a similar experience of mental depression from his own experience here. The process of appreciating a work is to replace yourself with a narrative object or a narrative subject. This is what we often say, "A thousand readers have a thousand Hamlets".
Freud paid special attention to his childhood experiences. He believes that "writers and children who play are doing the same thing-creating a fantasy world with great enthusiasm and strictly distinguishing it from the real world". Apart from the similarity in spiritual experience, if we carefully examine an artist's works, we can find that childhood scenes and events often appear in the first few works created by this artist. Freud believed that "every fantasy is the realization of a wish", and the only wish in childhood is "growing up", so children always play the game of "growing up", in which they imitate the adult lifestyle he knows, and the inevitable important point is snooping. As these real-world characters came to him as an adult, he realized that he should play his role in the real world instead of playing games. The gap between the game and reality makes him feel ashamed of those childish fantasies, so the fantasy will be suppressed to a certain extent, but this does not mean the end of the fantasy, and the fantasy will sneak into the depths of consciousness, that is, the subconscious, under the suppression of the ID. With the change of understanding of life, fantasy began to refer not only to sexual desire, but also to selfish and ambitious desire.
We often have this experience. When someone talks about his fantasies, his wishes or his past sufferings, he often feels disgusted and sometimes even deeply disappointed. When a writer shows us his plays, when a singer sings his sadness to us, we will experience great happiness and considerable resonance. There is no doubt that there is a gap between people. As a song goes, "We were born alone". In Freud's view, "the essence of poetry art lies in the skill of overcoming the effect of disgust in our hearts", which makes us willing to listen to other people's stories. This is why people should create literary and artistic works and master artistic skills. The atmosphere created by works of art and the specific situation of appreciating works of art can make people consciously substitute works and complete their understanding of works, stories and authors.
As mentioned above, in Freud's view, art comes from self-repression, which is one of the costs of civilization and the driving force for its development. Art is to pour the inner self into the moral container, a flower on the wound, for people to accumulate their own fantasies and promote reconciliation between people and between people and society.