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Kaplan and Kloss have written a text for undergraduates with the ambitious aim of establishing an alliance 'between depth psychology and literary criticism'. They are enthusiastic warriors in the cause of Freudian analysis, 'in partibus infidelium' as Freud liked to say—in this case the vast lands of Academie of the English Departments. Enlisted in so good a cause, this reviewer regrets that he cannot recommend the book without reservations.
The authors assume that their readers have no previous knowledge of psychoanalysis. Kaplan, therefore, introduces the topic with a dictionary of elementary concepts, such as the primary process, the dual instinct theory, the ego, and even the Oedipus complex. If this scanty preparation seems sufficient it is because the examples cited do not rise above what is self-evident. Faithfully following Freud's 1908 essay, Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming, Kaplan demonstrates with six examples that every work of fiction embodies a basic fantasy. These fantasies are so poorly disguised that psychoanalysis can be presented to students as a kind of master key unlocking every door with the aid of a few basic tenets.
A section, The Development of Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism, by Kloss, is addressed to a better informed audience and will be of greater interest to the reader of this journal. Beginning with Freud and moving on to Rank, Jones, Sachs, Reik, Bonaparte, Kris, and Kanzer, the contributions of each of these authors to the psychoanalytic understanding of works of literature are summarized, each in a short chapter. In keeping with the idea of an alliance between depth psychology and literary criticism, there are also short chapters summarizing the work of literary critics who wrote under the influence of psychoanalysis. These cover a wide range from the now all but forgotten Albert Mordell, whose The Erotic Motive in Literature appeared in 1919, and received Freud's praise, to contemporary critics like F. C. Crews and N. N.