Psychoanalytic Criticism and the Impact of Parents

The Psychoanalytic Criticism, more specifically the Oedipus Complex, studies the impact of parents in a child's life. "Essentially, the Oedipus complex involves children's need for their parent" (Brizee).  
Three interesting points are:

Freud believed that our unconscious was influenced by childhood events

Freud organized these events into developmental stages involving relationships with parents and drives of desire

Freud argued that we develop defenses: selective perception, selective memory, denial, displacement, projection, regression, fear of intimacy, and fear of death, among others.


"Apparently Mr. Rochester has lost his mother young, a frequent 
feature in the lives of victims of depersonalization, and the hy- 
pothesis that he is trying to reconstitute a family of sorts at Thorn- 
field Hall gets some support from the fact that his housekeeper 
there and its titular head in his absence is Mrs. Fairfax. If we ex- 
cept the connections made by his disastrous marriage, she seems 
to be his only surviving relative; she is distantly related (by mar- 
riage) on his mother's side, presumably bears his mother's family 
name (it is his own given name), and is about the same age his 

mother would be if his mother were alive."

Jane Eyre: The Apocalypse of the Body

Paul Pickrel

ELH , Vol. 53, No. 1 (Spring, 1986) , pp. 165-182