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The relationship between psychoanalysis and literature dates from Sigmund Freud's remark, in Studies on Hysteria (1893/1955, pp. 160–161), that he still found it strange that his case histories “should read like short stories … and that they lack the serious stamp of science” but that they nonetheless had the advantage over psychiatric ones of relating the story of the patient's sufferings to the symptoms of his illness. A few years later, in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900/1953, pp. 261-264), his analysis of one mythical story, that of Oedipus, was to provide him with the most important theme in the psychoanalytic theory of emotional and sexual development. Freud's knowledge of literature, both classical and contemporary, was extensive and profound, but in writing about it he attempted for the most part to apply psychoanalytic insights to individual works and their authors, thereby stimulating an enormous amount of literary criticism ever after. Only in Some Character-Types Met with in Psychoanalytic Work (1916/1957) did he draw on illustrative literary examples to substitute for case histories, with detailed discussions of Shakespeare's Richard III and Lady Macbeth, and Ibsen's Rebecca West.
Sandra Buechler's most recent book seems to continue this latter tradition, in that her title foregrounds psychoanalytic work over literature. She draws on short stories to illustrate, not so much character types, as maladaptive styles of relating to others and coping with common “human dilemmas,” having found in her teaching at the William Alanson White
Institute that stories by “accomplished writers” can demonstrate the vagaries of character style in far more vivid and compelling ways than do pedestrian case histories (pp. 1–2). She devotes separate chapters to what she sees as the major personality styles: schizoid relating, paranoid processing, humiliated suffering, grandiose posturing, hysterical bargaining, and obsessive controlling, ending with chapters on t