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Kuhns examines skepticism, which he considers to have both a philosophical and psychoanalytic developmental aspect. Skepticism is what philosophers call the response to loss. Enduring the loss of childhood has been an important theme of American art. Using concepts developed by Winnicott, Kuhns examines Walt Whitman and Henry Thoreau. The American cultural tradition produced severe dilemmas
for artists: “In their writings, questions of skepticism take on an urgency that we may understand as a consequence of confrontations the poets experienced as they set their experience in the New World against the lost endowment from the Old.” For American writers of the nineteenth century, the “facilitating environment” was capacious and complex, demanding an act of synthesis to establish continuity between old-world tradition and new-world challenges. Artists deal with “parental loss, object loss, doubts about reality and the sustained existence of objects,” and “to remedy absence the arts of cultural life reconstitute the lost objects.” Kuhns declares “reconstituting a lost object of one’s own past establishes the first defense against skepticism.”