A Psychoanalytic Reading of Hedda Gabler Attempting a psychoanalytic reading of a given text is a bit like trying to understand a city by examining its sewer system: useful, but limited. There are several reasons for using psychoanalysis as a critical literary theory; the critic may be interested in gleaning some sort of subconscious authorial intent, approaching the text as a "cathartic documentation" (my term) of the author's psyche; the method could be useful for judging whether the characters are well rendered, whether they are truly three-dimensional and, therefore, worth our reading (thus satisfying the pleasure principle); finally, in a broader sense, the psychoanalytic approach can be employed to actually tell us something about our own humanity by examining the relative continuity (or lack thereof) of basic Freudian theories exemplified in works written over the centuries. in fact, looking in the text for what I call "cathartic documentation", we must, first of all, look at the period in which the work was written. Pre-Freudian works, that is, those poems, plays, short stories, and novels written before the end of the 19th century, are prime candidates for success with this approach. However, the works of the 20th century, starting with the modernist authors, pose a problem. How can we be sure that the writer is not knowingly playing with Freud's theories, perhaps even deliberately expanding and distorting them for additional effect? Herein lies the problem with Hedda Gabler: the work was written around the same time that Freud was just starting to publish his theories. The question is “who influenced whom?” Obviously Freud was impressed by Ibsen's realization of some fundamental ideas that would be the foundation of his (Freud's) work: repression, neurosis, paranoia, the Oedipus complex, phallic symbols and so on; all these factors are present in Hedda Gabler. However, the question remains whether Ibsen had heard of Freud's work and decided to use it in the play. Maybe I'm wrong, but after reading A Doll's House and An Enemy of the People, both earlier works by about ten years, Hedda Gabler seems to embody Freudian concepts to such a high degree that the possibility of a conscious effort to create neurotic Freudian types and leaving them free from each other does not seem entirely out of the realm of possibility. Consciously or unconsciously, however, Ibsen created extremely well-developed characters.