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Psychoanalytic literary criticism has gone through several phases. The earliest studies were analyses of literary characters along psychoanalytic lines, exemplified by Freud's interpretation of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Jones's study of Hamlet. Freud's Michaelangelo exemplifies a psychoanalytic analysis of the “author” of a work of art. Psychoanalytic theory provided critics with rich content for deeper psychological understanding of
creator and creation. (The psychoanalytic literary criticism discussed here is reviewed well in Eagleton, 1983 and Skura, 1981.) As they became more sophisticated in the use of psychoanalytic ideas they widened the range of application. Norman Holland argued that the reader's unconscious plays an important part in the experience of literature. Fiction touches forbidden themes, enabling momentary loss of repression and vicarious satisfaction. Harold Bloom suggested that every author struggles with an oedipal relationship with past authors; the creative work is a compromise between the old and the new.
Because of his deep interest in language as well as in Freud's ideas seen from a new perspective, Jacques Lacan's work has become a major source of critical perspective in recent years. Strongly influenced by Lacan, Julia Kristeva has developed a feminist critical approach that sees a feminine, preoedipal force in the semiotic, or expressive aspects of writing. Pamela Boker's The Grief Taboo in American Literature is informed by several aspects of this legacy of criticism. She is interested in the psychology of authors and characters alike but is aiming for a wider understanding that grows from a feminist perspective on society. Boker's thesis is that a major theme in (male) American culture involves the repression of the loss and grief that are a normal part of development, the denial of feminine identifications, and psychological arrest in adolescence. She traces this theme to America's origins as a “new” land, where the individual was