You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
There are four methods by which psychoanalysis can attempt to contribute to an enriched understanding of a work of art. In the first, a character in a novel or a play is treated as the subject of a case history. The investigator can then attempt to explain certain attributes of the fictional characters in the work as though they were real people interacting with one another. With sensitive use of this approach, certain limited insights can be reached, in analogy with clinical cases. However, the essence of what is literary is often lost when the "as if" quality of literary characters is not given adequate consideration. A second approach, labeled pathography, relates the text to its author in an attempt to learn something either about his psychology or about the process of creation. A third approach focuses only on the text. It attempts to discover various formal structures or organizers without attempting to relate findings to the author. The fourth approach reintroduces a live person by considering the effect of the text on the reader. It studies aesthetic or poetic problems in association with the reader's affective reactions.
The key problem of method in applied analysis is the absence of a live person. The success or failure of a researcher in the field rests on his ability to circumvent this obvious limitation. How well does Splitter, an Assistant Professor of English at the California Institute of Technology, overcome this obstacles? Which aspect of the application of psychoanalysis to literature does he rely on in his book on Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu?