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The idea for a special issue of this Journal devoted to psychoanalytic perspectives on George Eliot originated with its editor, Douglas Ingram, who, amazingly, read through all of Eliot's fiction during a year in which he was President of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and assumed the deanship of the American Institute for Psychoanalysis, in addition to carrying out his editorial duties and engaging in a busy private practice. Once Doug discovered that I had written a book on George Eliot (Paris, ) and was writing on her again, we corresponded about each piece of fiction he was reading. His invitation to guest edit this issue flowed from that correspondence.

Doug was profoundly impressed, as I have been for many years, by the subtlety of Eliot's characterizations and the ways in which they anticipate the insights of psychoanalysis. It has been one of my main themes as a literary critic that the great realistic writers, of whom George Eliot is one, have intuitively grasped and artistically portrayed the same kinds of phenomena that psychoanalytic theory has tried to explain (see Paris, , , , , , and ). As Freud acknowledged, the great writers were there first.

Not only were they there first, but they will still be there when the theories of today seem outmoded. Every age and culture develops explanatory systems that satisfy the basic human need to make sense of ourselves and our fellows, and those systems invariably seem quaint to succeeding ages or members of other cultures. Literature participates in this process insofar as it embodies the author's conscious, culturally derived understanding of human experience. An author's interpretations of his or her characters become just as outmoded as the explanatory systems by which they have been influenced. But there are things in great literature that are universal and timeless, and one of those things, in realistic writers such as George Eliot, is mimetic characterization: the detailed, concrete, dramatized portray