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In Imagined Human Beings, Bernard J. Paris utilizes the perspectives of Karen Horney to explore the personality dimensions of several “imagined human beings.” As examples, Paris, a literary critic, plumbs the books of Dickens and Flaubert, the plays of Shakespeare and Ibsen, and the tales of Chaucer and the early Greeks. Horney associated belief systems with strategies of defense, observing that when defenses changes, so does one's worldview, or “life philosophy.” According to Paris, Horney's psychoanalytic theory serves as an appropriate lens to study these “imagined human beings,” because it recognizes that great literature provides insights about people's experiences that cannot be obtained by speculation or case histories alone. Because literature provides this unique approach to knowledge, Paris asserts that its effect is as important to the clinician as it is to the humanist. In both literary criticism and psychotherapy, there is a tension between overt language and covert activity that needs to be detected if an in-depth understanding of living events is to be attained.
Paris observes that Western literature long ago moved from a “mythic” approach in which the protagonists are superhuman, to a “mimetic” approach in which description reflects human capacities, frailties and concerns. However, Paris adds, even the most realistic novel or play uses the same structural principles that are found in myths. Therefore, the built-in conflict between myth and mimesis often challenges the logic of motivation, probability, and cause-and-effect. Further, a tension can be detected between the psychological portrait of a character and the rhetoric surrounding that character, that is, the devices an author uses to influence readers’ moral and intellectual responses to a character, as well as readers’ emotional closeness or distance to that “imagined human being.” These devices are nicely illustrated by Paris in his discussion of Ibsen's A Doll's House when Nora, “a well drawn