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Literary critics have for some time successfully brought psychoanalytic insights to the discussion of characters in fiction and drama. But psychoanalysts were there first, raiding literature for insights into human behavior, using characters in fiction and drama to exemplify psychological processes.
Sometimes, they may also have used literary characters to pursue more personal goals.
I am intrigued by a passing observation in Susan Quinn's biography of Karen Horney, A Mind of Her Own. Quinn reports that after the break-up of her intimate personal and professional relationship with Erich Fromm, Horney characterized him to her secretary, Marie Levy, as “a Peer Gynt type” (p. 366). Quinn cites the remark as evidence of the bitterness that had developed between Horney and the brilliant associate, friend, lover, and, finally, rival with whom she had been associated for nearly a decade and from whom she had split definitively in 1943, when she drove him from the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis even as she herself had been driven from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute two years earlier. The Peer Gynt reference seems especially significant to Quinn since “[Horney] herself possessed many of the attributes of the Peer Gynt type” (p. 367).
What interests me here is not the details of the split—a very common phenomenon in the history of relationships and organizations, psychoanalytic and otherwise—but with Horney's use of a fictional character to describe the person about whom she had developed such strong negative feelings.
One reason characters in books have seemed attractive to psychoanalysts as subjects for analysis, I have been told, is that they are so cooperative—open, articulate, and never late for their appointments! But also, they are the common property of our culture, as familiar to the lay reader as to the analyst. As Freud well knew, an allusion to a character in Greek myth or Shakespeare can vividly conjure up a rich and detailed picture of a