In Support of Psychoanalyzing Literary Characters

Psychoanalysis came into being as a means of healing mental disorders, but psychoanalytic theory has a much broader range of application. As Richard Sterba (1940) observed, “the range of validity of psychoanalysis extends far beyond the field of dreams and neurosis …. our highest cultural activities and accomplishments also have their roots deeply implanted in the unconscious whence they draw their dynamic force.” The relevance of psychoanalytic theory to many realms of human experience has led scholars from many fields to incorporate its insights, with varying degrees of success. The more indiscriminate uses of psychoanalytic theory in the field of literature led Bonime and Eckardt (1977) to publish an article protesting the use of psychoanalysis as a means of understanding literary characters. This point of view, however, is unnecessarily extreme; art and life are not so separate that we need to use completely different approaches to each.

Bonime, who wrote the first half of the Bonime and Eckardt paper, begins the article by reminding us that art is not life, and that literary characters are not patients. Literary characters are created through language, and therein lie their limitations. They exist in an artificially delimited timespan in which the past exists only insofar as it is alluded to in the text and the future is wholly indeterminate. The events of the story are artificially focused around one or two conflicts, and all other irrelevant events are omitted from the action; literary techniques such as flashbacks help to fill in the gaps created because we cannot know all of a character's past and present psychological reality. Anyone who grows up in our culture learns to understand the function of such