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This anthology, the latest volume in the admirable series called Essential Papers in Psychoanalysis, offers a collection of 20 interdisciplinary studies, most of them distinctive works by distinguished figures. Given the vast amount of significant material he had to choose from, the editor has done a creditable job of making a diversified selection of representative papers. Emanuel Berman, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Haifa and a training and supervising analyst at the Israel Psychoanalytic Institute, explains that in structuring the collection he has tried to have it reflect both the history of the relationship of literature and psychoanalysis and the methodological difficulties that have plagued interdisciplinary work in these fields.
Berman's introduction to the volume provides an excellent overview of the issues to come. He blames much of the reductionism bedeviling the early period of applied psychoanalysis on exaggerated claims, by supposedly detached analysts, to a kind of scientific objectivity—and hence to authority. A related problem was the tendency to conceptualize authors as patients and the analysis of their work as “pathography.” Berman mentions Paul Schilder's infamous characterization of Lewis Carroll as a “destructive writer” as an extreme instance of such attitudes. Then he quotes Frederick Crews's condemnation of doctrinaire analysis of literary texts: It must be admitted that Freudian criticism too easily degenerates into a grotesque Easter-egg hunt: find the devouring mother, detect the inevitable castration anxiety, listen, between the syllables of verse, for the squeaking bedsprings of the primal scene” (p. 6). Among the remedies that have served to decrease reductionism, Berman mentions the advent of the concept of multiple function, the development of ego psychology, the