Literary psychology

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Literary psychology is a generic or collective term for the numerous, often very different, literary (out) directions that examine the literary work as well as its creation and reception process with the help of different psychological theoretical approaches, methods or concepts.

Roughly speaking, two main directions can be distinguished: on the one hand, psychoanalytic literary studies , which, with recourse to Freud and Lacan, understands literary production and reception as an expression of the unconscious , and on the other hand, empirical literary psychology , which has been developed since the 1960s , the psychological statements about literature or its own The emergence and effect of empirical studies are examined, for example aspects of creativity or the creative process in analogy to dreaming, the relationship between text content, text form and emotional reader reactions as well as literary development or the change in style and changes in individual literary genres that result from the decline of the try to counteract aesthetic stimuli through alienation .

Accordingly, literary psychology is pursued both from psychology and from literary studies and thus stands in the field of tension between hermeneutic humanities and cultural studies and (empirical) social and natural science .

The longest tradition in literary psychology research has author psychology, which focuses on the study of the psychological aspects of the production process and the producer of literature. At the end of the 19th century, the substitute hypothesis (“the blind seer ”), which has been represented since antiquity, was psychologically and psychiatrically accentuated and discussed as a connection between genius and madness ( Lombroso : Genie und Irrsinn , 1887). In connection with the psychoanalytic equation of creative and neurotic regression processes by Freud, a multitude of pathographies emerged from this at the beginning of the 20th century ( cf.e.g. Lange-Eeichbaum : Genie - Irrsinn und Ruhm , 1928, new edition 11 volumes, 1986ff.) .

The “neurosis thesis” of creativity was, however, revised in the second half of the 20th century by the further development of ego-psychological psychoanalysis (for example in Kris : non-neurotic regression in the “service of the self”). At the same time, empirical creativity psychology has shown that creative people are shaped by quasi- paradoxical , but by no means particularly psychotic or neurotic personality traits (Barron: Creative Person and creative process , 1967). Therefore, both psychoanalytical and empirical-experimental creativity research are currently geared more towards researching the constructive-creative process and person characteristics in literary-creative writing (see, for example, Scheidt : Creative Writing - HyperWriting , 2006).

In work psychology by means of hermeneutic literary interpretation, since Freud's school-building application of psychoanalysis to literature and the fine arts (see, for example, W. Jensen : Gradiva ), primarily depth psychological works and approaches have emerged that, in addition to psychoanalytic aspects (e.g. Rank , Sachs ) but also contain mythological interpretations and interpretations of literary works in the succession of CG Jung . This development broke off in Germany as a result of National Socialism and was only resumed from the 1970s (for example by Cremerius , Dettmering, von Matt and others). At the moment, depth psychological approaches to interpretation are not infrequently linked with other (interpretive) traditions or methods (e.g. BP Kutter: Psychoanalyse interdisciplinary , 1997)

As far as possible separately, the empirical work and text analyzes range from a primarily statistical description of the literary form to the elaboration of psychological content and aspects of literary texts; The method of content analysis used in this context was, however, developed (from 1930 in the USA) mainly on non-literary information texts, for which there is also a wealth of studies with regard to their ( political-ideological ) effect as a result of changing attitudes (see Drinkmann and N. Groeben : Metanaalyses for text effects research , 1989)

The investigation of the effect of literary texts already includes the aspect of reader psychology, which deals with the general reception and processing of texts on the reader's side. With regard to literary texts, the focus is on the reception of the text and the role of the reader for the received text meaning. In parallel to the hermeneutical work-immanent reception aesthetics, empirical reception research on real readers was carried out at the same time (cf. N. Groeben: reception research , 1977).

Such approaches to empirical reception research can also be viewed as part of a more comprehensive empirical literary study ( cognitive poetics ), which is geared towards the description and explanation of the production, reception, communication, etc. of literary works or texts ( cf.SJ Schmidt : Empirische Literaturwissenschaft , 1981).

The reader's psychological research perspective is, even when non-literary factual texts are included, in this respect logically in the context of the analysis of the reading and comprehension process, identical to the so-called psychology of word processing, in which, since the cognitive turn in psychology (around 1970), the cognitive constructiveness of text reception has been thoroughly investigated. In this research focus, personal characteristics (such as prior knowledge, working memory capacity and reading motivation ) play a major role.

The development and promotion of such a reader psychological study of the processing of (literary) texts also touches upon central issues of educational research , so that against this background there are currently large areas of overlap between reader psychology and empirical teaching research as well as reading and literary didactics.

In the current reader psychological research approaches, in addition to basic cognitive psychological research on word processing, the focus is also on investigating the emotional- motivational dimension and the practical relevance that can hardly be dispensed with in the long term.

literature

  • Heike Gfrereis (Ed.): Literary Psychology . In: Heike Gfrereis (ed.): Basic concepts of literary studies . Metzler Verlag , Stuttgart and Weimar 1999, ISBN 978-3-476-10320-8 , p. 113f.
  • Norbert Groeben: literary psychology . In Gerhard Lauer and Christine Ruhrberg (eds.): Lexicon literary studies · Hundred basic concepts . Philipp Reclam jun. Verlag , Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-15-010810-9 , pp. 194-197.
  • Ralph Lagner (ed.): Psychology of literature: theories, methods, results . Psychologie-Verlags-Union, Weinheim and Munich 1986, ISBN 3-621-54702-9 .
  • Rolf Günter Renner: literary studies, psychoanalytic . In: Horst Brunner and Rainer Moritz (eds.): Literary Studies Lexicon · Basic concepts of German studies . Schmidt Verlag , 2nd edition Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-503-07982-3 , pp. 234–245.
  • Walter Schönau / Joachim Pfeiffer: Introduction to psychoanalytic literary studies . Metzler Verlag , 2., act. u. exp. Stuttgart 2003 edition, ISBN 3-476-12259-X .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Heike Gfrereis (Ed.): Literary Psychology . In: Heike Gfrereis (ed.): Basic concepts of literary studies . Metzler Verlag , Stuttgart and Weimar 1999, ISBN 978-3-476-10320-8 , p. 113f.
  2. ↑ Norbert Groeben: literary psychology . In Gerhard Lauer and Christine Ruhrberg (eds.): Lexicon literary studies · Hundred basic concepts . Philipp Reclam jun. Verlag , Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-15-010810-9 , p. 194.
  3. ↑ Norbert Groeben: literary psychology . In Gerhard Lauer and Christine Ruhrberg (eds.): Lexicon literary studies · Hundred basic concepts . Philipp Reclam jun. Verlag , Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-15-010810-9 , pp. 194f.
  4. ↑ Norbert Groeben: literary psychology . In Gerhard Lauer and Christine Ruhrberg (eds.): Lexicon literary studies · Hundred basic concepts . Philipp Reclam jun. Verlag , Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-15-010810-9 , p. 195.
  5. ↑ Norbert Groeben : literary psychology . In Gerhard Lauer and Christine Ruhrberg (eds.): Lexicon literary studies · Hundred basic concepts . Philipp Reclam jun. Verlag , Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-15-010810-9 , p. 195.
  6. ↑ Norbert Groeben: literary psychology . In Gerhard Lauer and Christine Ruhrberg (eds.): Lexicon literary studies · Hundred basic concepts . Philipp Reclam jun. Verlag , Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-15-010810-9 , pp. 195f.
  7. ↑ Norbert Groeben: literary psychology . In Gerhard Lauer and Christine Ruhrberg (eds.): Lexicon literary studies · Hundred basic concepts . Philipp Reclam jun. Verlag , Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-15-010810-9 , p. 196.
  8. ↑ Norbert Groeben: literary psychology . In Gerhard Lauer and Christine Ruhrberg (eds.): Lexicon literary studies · Hundred basic concepts . Philipp Reclam jun. Verlag , Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-15-010810-9 , p. 196.