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THE "PAST" OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN psychoanalysis and literature is now nearly a hundred years old. It has been rehearsed many times, at least twice by me (1976), (1978), (and 1990). I want to shorten this survey by putting it in terms of a three-by-three-by-three matrix.
We can think of psychoanalysis as having three phases (Holland 1976), (1978). In the first phase, Freud made his great original discoveries. I mean his discoveries of free association, unconscious processes, the oedipus complex, and infantile sexuality. I would define this first phase as one in which people explained things by the relationship between conscious and unconscious.
Then came a second phase. Freud rethought the model he built on his original discoveries, and he and his colleagues in Vienna in the 1920s and '30s developed the structural id—ego—superego model, the principle of multiple function, and what we think of as ego-psychology. I would define this second phase as one in which people explained things by the relationship between the ego and the nonego, the nonego being the id, the superego, and the external world.
The first phase dates from the beginning of psychoanalysis, let's say 1897, and goes on to 1923. The second phase goes on from 1923 to the present—we do, after all, still have a lot of ego-psychology around. The third phase begins, I would say, in the 1950s, and we are still in it.
All these phases, by the way, enlarge the scope of psychoanalysis without dropping much. They include rather than exclude. They