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‘This case-book’, we are told, ‘advocates a true critical pluralism’, the perspectives it presents being unorthodox by both literary and psychological criteria. It contains essays by twelve American academics, including the editor himself, the majority from Departments of English, and all claiming a degree of independence from Freudian thinking. Each author sets out to elucidate a particular psychological approach in straightforward terms and in almost every case to apply it to one or more specific literary texts. The courage involved in such an experiment is to be applauded, but the result is inevitably an odd mixture, at times hard to digest.
Jungian theory, for example, is simply and clearly expounded in the opening paper and with a series of glancing references we are shown effectively enough how an understanding of archetypal symbols can illuminate a moment, a scene or a character in literature; but a more detailed discussion of the individuation process in relation to Carson McCuller's novel, The Member of the Wedding, left me with a slight sense of disappointment, as if too large a tool had been brought to bear ponderously on a small, though valuable, object. Adlerian concepts, on the other hand, emerge very strikingly when applied to Holden Caulfield, the over-sensitive and grandiose hero of Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. Lacan, whose theory perhaps inevitably invites a display of virtuosity, is dealt with ingeniously via Jean Genet's play, The Maids, in which two sisters, trusted servants for years in a household of mother and daughter, murder them both, then go to bed together and ultimately become psychotic. This process is seen as part of an attempt to gain a sense of individual self-hood and as motivated by ‘the lack of Phallic separation … the non-symbolism of the Father's name’.
Such sophisticated juggling acts should prove fascinating, but at times they make for difficult, even baffling expositions, more so perhaps for the unsophisticated English reade