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For more than half a century, psychoanalytic literary criticism has flourished in American books and journals. Its specific modes have varied, reflecting the diversity of available clinical procedures: Freudian, Jungian, Adlerian, Lacanian, and so on. Recent interest in Lacan has focused critical attention on textual operations of language more than on presentation of character, but Jeffrey Berman's allegiance to character as the most direct manifestation of the psyche is by no means unique even today. His tendency to investigate fictional characters as though they had experience and histories outside the text, on the other hand, allies him with an antiquated and dubious set of critical habits.
Berman's ambitious study begins by recalling Ovid's myth of Narcissus, in which a beautiful youth, born from the rape of a water-nymph, rejects all his would-be lovers, including Echo. Already deprived of normal speech as punishment for deceiving a goddess, Echo loses existence as a physical body after Narcissus rejects her. Narcissus continues his solitary course until, falling in love with his image in a pool, he validates an early warning by Tiresias that he will live to old age only if he never knows himself. Although Echo—now only a voice—tries in vain to help him, he pines away and dies.
The complexities of psychoanalytic theories of narcissism correspond to the intricacies of this story. Freud proved only the first of many psychoanalysts to find in the image of Narcissus a figure for a crucial aspect of selfhood. Berman summarizes and criticizes Freud's theories of narcissism, then dwells more extensively on the work of Kernberg and Kohut. Although he attempts an even-handed account, his Kohutian sympathies soon become apparent. 'Kernberg writes like an omniscient parent', Berman observes, 'Kohut like an all-forgiving one' (p. 35). His own bias towards 'forgiveness' emerges clearly in the reflections on nineteenth- and twentieth-century English novels that co