Prufrock's Defenses and Our Response

In The Dynamics of Literary Response (Oxford, 1968), Norman Holland writes: “the literary work acts out a psychological process which we introject. That process is the transformation of a central fantasy toward a central meaning” (p. 101). The key term is “introject.” With it Holland shifts our attention from the mind of the author and the supposed minds of the characters to the mind of the reader or audience. This shift, similar to the one toward the appeals of literature in Simon O. Lesser's Fiction and the Unconscious , reminds us that in psychoanalytic criticism we very often read about the motives and actions in a literary work, but seldom about the psychological appeals of the work and our response to it. A good example is T. S. Eliot's “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” generally regarded as one of the most influential poems of the twentieth century, and essential to an understanding of modern poetry. It has been read and reread by a variety of critics, often with sensitivity and psychological concern,1 and at least once with psychoanalytic insight,2 but never in terms of response. In this paper, I want to show how our response is controlled by the defenses in the poem. But before doing that we must consider what it is we are responding to— in other words, what psychological problem the poem handles.

” Prufrock “is a dramatic monologue that presents an inner conflict between the need to be loved and the failure to satisfy that need. Or, to be more precise, a conflict between the need for love and two paralyzing fears of acting on that need. When Prufrock asks” Is it perfume from a dress / That makes me so digress?,” he reveals ironically that his love song does not have the seductive aim of Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress” (to which he alludes in the line, “To have squeezed the