Thus ended my flirtation with feminist film theory.

That said, given the cultural impact, it does make sense to take Freudian ideas into account in literary criticism (although I think that the validity is not there in works written before Freud’s influence had grown). The model to use would be to take into consideration, Christian doctrine in writing criticism of Milton or Graham Greene.

Although writing this, I can see a case made for Freudian analysis of, say Shakespeare, not because it’s a valid model for Shakespeare, but because it provides some insight into how Shakespeare may have helped shape Freud’s ideas.

When I got my BA in English, there were no Freudians that I was aware of in the English faculty. Mostly we were dominated by New Critics, and to a lesser extent deconstructionist theory. Me, I tended more towards a hermeneutic analysis with a touch of Marxism. Until I had my intellectual crisis: I could see why I would want to write literature, and I could see why I would want to write critical theory, but criticism itself seemed to be devoid of a purpose (and simultaneously was the bulk of what I was doing). Needless to say, this was disastrous to my continuation as a literary scholar.