Text As Dream: Instinctual Life In Literature

A dream according to Freud as the ‘royal road to consciousness’, is the product of three agents: a sleeping ego, a repressed id in the unconscious and a censoring superego in the preconscious. A work of art also consists of three elements with the artist as the 'smith' of the unconscious, a definition of three components: the artist; the predicative smith; i.e., the process of construction and the unconscious.

Drew analyses Coleridge’s Kublah Kahn, Bronte’s Cathy in Wuthering Heights and a feminist reconstruction of Hamlet using Freud’s psychoanalysis of dream and compares his breakdown of dream with the process of creating art. Investigating psychological links between the protagonists in literature Drew reveals an instinctual life weaving in and around the characters, offering a startling perspective into their behaviour and development, such as the interplay between Heathcliffe and Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights.

Much as Freud’s biologically deterministic theory outrages feminists, it has pushed them to give thought as to what brings about gender differences. Freud is the first thinker in Western philosophy who has grappled with the question why sex differences are reflected in social inequalities. Theories of art and dream abound among art critics and the agents of the occult. Consequently, the meanings, sources and the process of creation in both fields have not found an agreement among the experts. Inspiration is put down as the origin of both. Drew suggests an ‘instinctual life’ as the dream in the text.