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Sheldon Brivic aims at analysing Joyce's mental progress through his major works. He suggests that the Freudian system clarifies best the early Joyce, the Jungian system late Joyce. He also quotes extensively from Fenichel's The Psychoanalytic Theory of the Neuroses. The result is historically accurate and initially interesting. The fact that Joyce possessed at least four psychoanalytic books before 1915 indicates Joyce's own orientation. Early on, Professor Brivic labels Joyce a compulsive, which is probably accurate but becomes restrictive, and the quotations from Fenichel do not necessarily prove it.
Because the book is based on a close verbal analysis of Joyce's works, a large part of it is in the detective style of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life which Joyce possessed, only now the artist Joyce replaces the unconscious, and the unmentioned Director of Public Prosecutions hovering in the wings replaces the censor mechanism. Professor Brivic is most acute when revealing certain clusters of words in many passages. He shows beyond doubt that Joyce purposefully enriched the overt content of a sentence by deepening it with ambiguous key words to serve his concept of Epiphanies, especially words connected with fetishism, sadism, anality and phallicism.
Central to all Joyce are the castrated son, the virgin/whore mother who betrayed him, and the cuckolded father. The underlying fear of impotence in such a schema accounts partly for the cyclical nature of Joyce's work. Even the chapters of the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man have now been shown to follow a cycle. But there does develop in Joyce a concept of love which offers a progress from the rejection of cynicism of Dubliners through the relatedness of Exiles to the containment and universality of Finnegan's Wake. It is a move from the love of possessiveness and desire to that of wishing well to the loved one. It becomes the love that allows the other to be. Professor Brivic shows Joyce's version of the unio