had become trivia. He concerned no more with it. He had desire to be an artist by doing writing. He enlarged his chance to follow his dream more and more.
Finally, he decided to leave England and became free to do what he loved in his life.
B. Approach of the Study
In Bressler’s Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice, psychoanalytic criticism is one of the schools used to make a criticism on a
literary work. Psychoanalytic criticism was first developed by Sigmund Freud and as the time went by, it has been becoming more complex as it has diverse form of
development. Psychoanalytic was firstly introduced as the therapy for people with psychological disturbance. As it is developed into a literary criticism, it is still
related to the concept of clinical psychoanalytic. It mainly talks about the unconsciousness which drives human being’s action.
According to Bressler 1999: 161, psychoanalytic criticism is an approach to literary analysis that holds that we humans as the complex yet
somewhat understandable creatures often fail to note the influence of the unconscious on our motivations and our everyday actions. This idea is the starting
point of the analysis of this research since related to the practice of education, specifically in school, people who had joined that process for a very long time are
usually not aware of that ‘unconsciousness’. The repression occurred at school
runs on this method. Those who are included in the process of education in school unconsciously conduct and nourish this phenomenon.
In this kind of criticism, the critic has to read the text of the unconscious. It might be meant to seek what the text does not say or to read the hidden
meaning of the text. Psychoanalysis does not only do that, but also does the steps of uncovering the processes, the dream-work, by which that text was produced.
To do this, the critic uses the method of symptomatic reading. What to seek are “distortions, ambiguities, absence and elisions which may provide a specially
valuable mode of access to the ‘latent content’, or unconscious drives, which have gone into its making” Eagleton, 1996: 158.
The analysis in this study is done in the textual level using Lacanian psychoanalysis. This criticism is chosen to analyze the work because it deals with
the unconscious repression toward the student characters done by school in the story. For those reasons, psychoanalytic criticism is the most suitable approach to
work this research with.
C. Method of the Study
This research was done over a library research. Some previous studies on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are the references in collecting some
point of view on this work. To reach the goal of this research, there are some theories used to be the means of the analysis.
In doing the analysis, representative and significant data from the work were collected to be the basis of this research. Afterwards, the characters and their
characterization in the novel were found out. The next step used the result of characters analysis to figure out the repression that happened to students through
some aspects of the school system. By using the theory of the psychoanalytic criticism, such actions explained in the previous step are proven whether they are
the actions of repression or not by considering the criteria and the impacts of a repression.
