Despite its undisputed merits in making biographies more searching and casting light on literary figures and reception processes, the psychoanalytic approach to literature has been repeatedly exposed to the criticism of being “reductionist,” and especially of neglecting the aesthetic form of the works it examines. Kuchenkoff's psychoanalytic interpretation of Melville's Moby Dick centers on the question of the relationship between self-care/self-destruction and processes of identity formation. He demonstrates the relevance of the latter in dimensions extending to the actual formal structure of the novel, thus permitting us to draw conclusions about identity formation processes in modern society.