Psychoanalytic criticism is a literary interpretation founded by Sigmund Freud with significant contributions being made by Carl Jung and Jacques Lacan. Freud places importance on the reality vs. pleasure principles, often resulting in repression and denial which then leads to the subconscious projecting our repressed pleasures (often sexual) in our dreams. Jung takes a more analytical approach asserting that our dreams include more than just sexual imagery, that mythological images (which he refers to as archetypes) are expressed as well. Lacan suggests that we have an innate need to feel “whole” yet the reality is that we are fractured beings. This fracture causes feelings of “lack” which then leads to “desire.” We then seek our desires in an attempt to somehow feel complete. Psychoanalytic criticism is a theory which argues that literary texts are much like our dreams in the sense that they express the undisclosed unconscious desires of the author and that a literary work is little more than a manifestation of the author's own neuroses. However, psychoanalytic criticism does not concern itself with what the author intended but rather what the author never intended.
By applying Lacan’s model of the human pysche to Nathaniel Hawethorne’s “Young Goodman Brown," we can see how Young Goodman Brown transitions through Lacan’s three orders. As Brown makes these transitions we ultimately realize that the “fellow-traveler” accompanying Brown is essentially a reflection of himself as the two come together to make a dynamic whole as opposed to two binary opposites.
We first meet Young Goodman Brown while he is in the “imaginary order;” joyful and united with his young wife, Faith. Up to this point it would appear that he has relied on his perceived images of concepts and his community as a way to interpret his world. He had a “sweet, pretty wife,” whom he advised that by