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When John Fowles dismisses his second novel, The Magus, as a failure, partially because of its adolescent longing for “an experience beyond the literary” (Magus 6),1 he is being too modest. I wish to argue instead that the novel's immense popularity (5), rather than deriving from a weakness, has to do with its narrative purity: that it is the richest narrative in his canon in part because it does less than his other novels to explain itself. In allowing the story to speak for itself, Fowles creates a major character who defies understanding from a single psychological perspective. The character's complexity thus makes multiple interpretations possible and generates new readings. It also challenges the flexibility of individual psychological theories. What I propose to do—without attempting to exhaust the meanings of the novel—is to bring a variety of psychological approaches to bear upon that character, Nicholas Urfe.
In doing so, I will blend theories of Freud, whom the novel indicates Fowles knew a good deal about, Jung, among whose admirers Fowles counted himself at the time (6), and Kohut, the Freudian revisionist, whose contributions Fowles almost certainly could not have known in the early 60s.2 Only through multiple approaches like these can we begin to understand the problem that wrecks all of Nicholas's relationships with women, explore the causes that underlie his malaise, and determine the effectiveness of the mythic masque, or psychodrama, that Maurice Conchis (the magus) stages to lead him out of his confusion.
No sentence in the novel better describes the nature of Nicholas's basic problem than his own early comment: “In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love” (34). He is thinking of his own affair with Alison, specifically of the