Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic interpretation

Freud argues that art and literature are a reservoir of repressed desires that are unmet by reality and society.^[1] Each person has a set of forbidden desires—primarily sexual—along with an awareness of a society’s morals and values. This "censor" suppresses the unacceptable desires in the artist’s mind. These new, unconscious desires manifest in their art and literature and take three forms.^[1] The first is called “condensation,” whereby many things from the unconscious dimension merge into one thing in the literature.^[2] The second is called “displacement,” whereby the artist replaces something that is longed for but unacceptable, and thus within the unconscious, with something acceptable.^[2] The third is called “symbolism,” whereby suppressed, mostly sexual, entities of desire represent nonsexual entities with some qualities of the origin.^[2] The main goal of the psychoanalytic literary critic is to decode and interpret all of the real, repressed desires, fixations, and anxieties of the text’s author.^[1] The manifest content of a literary work includes its characters, its events, and its language. These often represent the author’s upsetting experiences as a child, his or her relationships and sexual desires, as well as any complexes (like an Oedipus complex) they may have.