Third Force Psychology and the Study of Literature, edited by Bernard J. Paris. Madison, NJ:  Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986,  338 pp.

This book should serve as a guide and a reference source for a generation of mental health workers, literary critics, and for that segment of the general public for whom an understanding of culture in general represents a deeply felt need. This is a deserved endorsement since the book opens perspectives that should promote a new understanding of literature and its relationship to psychology, psychoanalysis, and culture. The title of the book obscures its real scope. The words “third force,” after Abraham Maslow, refer to the fact that the psychoanalytic theories on which the book is based comprise the third stage in succession of comprehensive theories of human nature, following the Freudian and the experimental-behavioristic groups.

The fact, however, is that the theories discussed in this book represent more than a succession. They introduce a way of looking at human nature that is of a higher order of conceptualization than what preceded them. The real significance of the holistic theories (theories of the self being another name they are known by) has been well brought out by Heinz Kohut. In his last book, How Does Analysis Cure? , Kohut proposed that it is not the parts which determine the meaning and significance of the whole, but the whole that determines the meaning and significance of the parts. Thus, the holistic theories, the only body of thought that can explain the real place in personality of such parts of it as the vicissitudes of instincts, or of behavioristic schema, must be of a higher order of conceptualization compared to the theories explaining those segments of human nature, just as the whole is versus its parts. The value of this observation becomes obvious when we observe the wealth and the quality of ideas presented in the book.

Paris points out that the literary critic has long been handicapped by the prevalence of a point of view which considers the human being as a tension-reducing or a conditioned animal. The advent of theories which assum