A PSYCHOANALYTIC APPROACH TO THE READING OF

Reading is a cognitive exercise. At recent times, classroom reading has become a vanishing activity. Factors like, lack of interest among the learners towards reading, teachers failing to initiate interesting discussions during reading sessions and, deficient approach towards reading a story or a literary text in a classroom have made reading anachronistic. This paper proposes to examine how a story reading session in classrooms at tertiary level can be converted into an interesting and useful session for the learners. The approach suggested here is Psychoanalytic reading, where the reader reacts to the story bringing in psychological responses in his daily life. Norman Holland, a psychoanalytic critic claimed that readers' motives strongly influence how they read. Holland calls this method Transactive analysis because reading involves a transaction between the reader and a real text. Holland focused on how readers' interpretations reveal about themselves, not about the text. He calls the pattern of our psychological conflicts and coping strategies our identity theme. He observed that in our daily lives we project the identity theme onto every situation we encounter and perceive the world through the lens of our psychological experience. Analogously, when we read literature, we project our identity theme, or variations of it, onto the text. That is, various ways we unconsciously re-create in the text the world that exists in our mind. Our interpretations, then, are products of fears, defences, needs, and desires we bring to the reading of the text. Interpretation is thus primarily a psychological process rather than an intellectual one. A literary interpretation may or may not reveal the meaning of the text, but to a discerning eye it always reveals the psychology of the reader. Hollands theory may be explained by a study of a short story by the Jewish-American writer Saul Bellow: "What Kind of Day Did You Have?" The focus of interpretation in this story lies on the two main characters, that is Victor Wulpy and Katrina Goliger. Kartrina is a middle-aged woman who lives in a Chicago suburb; she is going throug