Freud's "symptomatic Reading" And Narrative Theory

The psychoanalysis of Freud has deeply effected the culture and thought of the West in the 20^th century. It can not avoid Freud theory to study western literature, aesthetic theory and psychology. The significance meaning of Freud's psychoanalysis in modern criticism has been agreement among theoretician. However, there still are two problems in the study on Freud: The first is that there are more attention is paid to the result than the method, which is neglected, of Freud's psychoanalysis; The second is that the mutual explication among theorys is frequently neglected whill the impact of psychoanalysis on literature work in the 20^th centure is emphasized on. "Symptom reading" is not only one of the most important methods of psychoanalysis but also the hermeneutics of Freud. The literature theory in the 20th century had been affected to a large extent by "symptom reading", in which narratology is one. However, the study in this field is rare now.The author has made some meaningful work in this field. This article mainly discusses two questions: First, the concept of "symptom reading" is explained; Second, the "symptom reading" is compared with narratology.The "symptom reading" of Freud is explained. There mainly are 2 aspects in this section: The first is the concept of "symptom reading". Freud supposes that the depressed unconscious is the source of causing of symptom, the symptom will disappear once unconscious comes into conscious. The purpose of "symptom reading" is to try to transfer unconscious to conscious. The author believe that the "symptom reading" has 3 important features: Great attention to the reading of blank in texts; Much stress on the deep meaning of texts; Emphasis on the reader's reading. The second is that the "symptom reading" is the most important method of Freud. Freud adopted it on both clinical observation and text reading.The development of "symptom reading" is described. First, Lacan developed the meaning of "symptom". Affected by Freud's "symptom reading", Lacan tried to find the meaning that was not appeared in the surface text through psychoanalysis of language meaning. Second, Althusser gave his "symptom reading". Althusser emphasized that it is important to see the empty and the missing among the visible texts and thus to understand the author's deep-structure theory in writing the text. Third, Levi-Strauss adopted "symptom reading" into mythology study to uncover the deep meaning of text.