What impact did Freud’s psychoanalytic theory have on literary criticism?

Influence on literary criticism:

Freud believed that literature and dreams are also inextricably linked. The writer's creative imagination is the equivalent of daydreaming. The realm of imagination is a refuge that exists because people have to give up certain instinctive needs in real life and have to painfully retreat from hedonistic principles to realist principles.

This shelter was built during this painful process. Therefore, the artist, like a mentally ill person, retreats from a reality with which he is dissatisfied and dives into a world created by his own imagination. His works are like dreams, an illusory fulfillment of subconscious wishes. And it is essentially a compromise like dreams. Sublimation means that we get rid of the sexual color of instinctive desires and turn these energies into a form that is acceptable to society and vent them out. Literary creation is actually a process of sublimation.

Freud’s theory:

Freud’s early theory divided people’s spiritual life into two main parts: consciousness and subconsciousness, and believed that the conscious part excludes people. Those primitive, animalistic instinctive desires are not important; the subconscious part is the deep foundation of human spiritual life, which contains various never-ending instinctive impulses and unsatisfied desires, which have a profound impact on human beings as a whole. Mental activities and even all human behaviors play a decisive role.

His later theory was slightly revised. He divided the human psychological structure into three parts: "id", "ego" and "superego". "Id" includes all primitive inherited instincts and desires, the most fundamental of which is sexual impulse, which provides power for various instinctive impulses and desires and is the basis and source of human's entire spiritual activities.