In the contentious world of contemporary literary studies, the traditional methods of psychoanalytic criticism appear to be an embarrassment. Analysts attempt to understand people, so their contributions to literary studies have naturally focused on the people of literature—authors, readers, and fictional characters. To Peter Brooks and many other literary critics, such approaches involve an unacceptable “displacement of the object of analysis” (p. 22) from its proper locus, which is the text itself. Even more objectionable for them is any claim to “explain” works of literature by invoking psychoanalytic concepts. So intense and politicized are these objections that Brooks and his editors refer to traditional psychoanalytic writing with such terms as “the