Psychoanalysis of Bulgarian Literature: A Historical Perspective

The article is devoted to the development of the psychoanalytic movement in Bulgaria between the 1920s and the 1940s, when it reached its apogee. After this period, the communist regime came to power in Bulgaria and it banned all philosophical currents other than Marxist-Leninist philosophy. Psychoanalysis was also banned and it was declared to be a “bourgeois and unscientific doctrine”. The meta-analysis of the work of the Bulgarian Freudians makes it possible to distinguish the following main problem areas in which they worked: philosophical and methodological issues of psychoanalysis; the topic of religion; the “reading” of socio-political and social phenomena; issues of education and training; psychopathology and abnormal personality development; and the application of psychoanalysis as a methodology of artistic creation. This text examines the application of psychoanalysis as a methodology of artistic creation and its possibilities for analyzing the personality of the author and the literary works. It presents the interpretations of Bulgarian psychoanalytically oriented authors of the literary works of the poets Hristo Botev and Peyo Yavorov, as well as their reflections on some problems of art and aesthetics.