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Although the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne is known for the acuity of its psychological insights, surprisingly few critical studies have addressed this topic beyond exploring the pervasive presence of the Puritan doctrine of original sin and its varied psychological sources and consequences. In The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes , Frederick Crews produced an influential study of Hawthorne's fiction premised on the theory that unresolved Oedipal aggressions and repressed sexual drives suffused the author's work—but the passage of time has revealed the reductive nature of many of Crews's findings, even as the author formally renounced his embrace of Freudian models and expressed dissatisfaction with his own work in the 1989 reissue of his study. On a related front, biographical studies of the author with a psychological focus have sought to shed potential light on examples of aberrant behavior in his fiction, with Gloria C. Erlich in Family Themes and Hawthorne's Fiction raising the idea of Hawthorne's possible physical abuse by his uncle, Robert Manning, and Philip Young in Hawthorne's Secret pointing to the colonial history of incest in Hawthorne's mother's family, the Mannings, and suggesting the possibility of such intimacy between Hawthorne and his reclusive older sister Elizabeth. More recently, David Greven in The Fragility of Manhood: Hawthorne, Freud and the Politics of Gender combined Freudian and Lacanian insights with queer theory to critique Hawthorne's representations of hegemonic manhood. Over the last few decades, Hawthorne's writings have also been subject to a variety of ideological interventions that have threatened to diminish his status as an author. Only rarely do we find literary studies that, immune to critical fashion, substantially illuminate whole new swathes of the writer's work.