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I concluded A Psychological Approach to Fiction: Studies in Thackeray, Stendhal, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, and Conrad (1974) by observing that if the potential of Horney's theory is to be actualized, it needs “what Freud and Jung found; co-workers in other disciplines who will apply [it] to a variety of phenomena, showing how wonderfully well [it works], and testing, refining, and extending [it] in the process” (p. 290). I have endeavored to be such a co-worker. Since 1974, 1 have published a book on Jane Austen (1978c) and essays on Hardy (1976a), Bellow (1976b), Shakespeare (1977, 1981b, 1982b, 1983, 1984a, b, 1987, 1989), Dostoevsky (1978a), Ibsen (1978b), Flaubert (1981a), and Emily Brontë (1982a, 1986); I have edited Third Force in Psychology and the Study of Literature (1986), which includes Horneyan essays by others on Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Browning, D.H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, Faulkner, and Styron (see also, 1982;, 1982; Lewis, 1985); and I have written two books on Shakespeare. I have tried, in the process, to show how Horney's theory can be a powerful tool for the analysis of realistic characterization, of the relation between rhetoric and mimesis, of unreliable narration, and of conflicting authorial attitudes. It enables us to infer the psyche of the “implied author” from the individual text and that of the “authorial personality” from the writer's entire corpus, and it helps us to relate the psychology of the author to the literary work and the psychology of the reader to critical response.
While Horney has served me well in my work as a critic, I like to think that my work has made a contribution to her theory. That, at least, has been my hope. I welcomed the invitation to guest-edit this issue in part because it provided an additional opportunity to demonstrate the “potency” of the theory and “the promise which it holds for other tasks, both in literary criticism and in related disciplines” (Paris, 1974, p. 290). The literary essays I have inclu