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Parallels between literature and therapy are useful for the study of psychological change. The literary text, unlike the psychoanalytic one, is definable, accessible, and static. The reader is not a party to its creation, as is the patient in the clinical situation, and thus is not subject to the biases consequent to being a participant in the events being described, although any particular reading of a text will have its share of “reader's transference.” We can examine fictional characters and relationships with a view to improving our understanding of mutative processes, allowing authors to be our observers of human psychology and interaction (B. Almond, 1990a, 1990b; R. Almond, 1989, 1991). This examination allows for new perspectives on processes of change in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, as well as fresh understanding of the literary works themselves.
In Silas Marner a man in mid-life recovers from chronic depression and social withdrawal. My goal is to show that elements of the novelist's depiction of psychological healing parallel psychoananlytic or psychotherapeutic processes and that Silas Marner can be read as a commentary on current controversies in the conceptualization of psychological change. I believe Silas Marner-along with many other novels of the 19th and 20th centuries-can be viewed as a novel about cure. George