a) They give central importance, in literary interpretation, to the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious mind. They associate the literary work's 'overt' content with the former, and the 'covert' content with the latter, previleging the latter as being what the work is 'really' about, and aiming to disentangle the two.
b) Hence they pay close attention to unconscious motives and feelings, whether there by 1) those of the author, or 2) those of the characters depicted in the work.
c) They demonstrate the presence in the literary work of classic psychoanalytic symptoms, conditions, or phrases, such as the oral, anala, and phallic stages of emotional and sexual development in infants.
d) They make large-scale applications of psychoanalytic concepts to literary history in general, for example, Harold Bloom's book. The Anxiety of Influence (1973) sees the struggle for identity by each generation of poets, under the 'threat' of the greatness of its predecessors, as an enactment of the Oedipus complex.
e) They identify a 'psychic' context for the literary work, at the expense of social of historical context, privileging the individual 'psycho-drama' above the 'social drama of class conflict. The conflict between generations or siblings, or between competing desires within the same individual looms much larger than conflict between social classes, for instance.
