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By Norman N. Holland. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973, 183 pp., $6.95.
Professor Holland, best known in our field for Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare, here examines the relationships among literary works, readers, and writers. Specifically, he focuses on lyric poetry and one particular fantasy: the unconscious wish to undo one's separateness from a nurturing other.
Holland studied the writer H. D. as revealed in her book Tribute to Freud and in selected portions of her poetry. He extracts something unitary and characteristic about the writer, which, after Yeats, he calls a "myth." He relates the myth to style and to character in the psychoanalytic sense. Like the "identity theme" conceptualized by Lichtenstein, the myth reveals the organic unity of the psyche. On the basis of his empathic response to H. D.'s poetry, Holland defines her myth: "to close up the gap between inner and outer, spiritual and physical, male and female, by perfect, timeless signs which she can be and be in." Both psychopathology and creative writing may act out the same underlying myth; both will "close the gap with signs."
Holland next describes the reactions of students to literary works. Based on anamnestic data and the results of projective tests on these subjects, he concludes that each reader re-creates the work of art in his own individual style. He then tries to explore, "How do different readers build a bridge from one reading to another so as to form a community of shared experiences which keep, even so, their very private status?" Holland began with his own reaction to the poem: an account of his feelings, a formal approach from the