Melville, Shame, and the Evil Eye: A Psychoanalytic Reading by Joseph Adamson New York:  State University of New York Press, 1997,  348 pp., $21.95

Unlike Jacques Lacan, who has dominated American psychoanalytic literary criticism for the past 20 years, Heinz Kohut remains relatively unknown to most depth critics. This is unfortunate, for while Kohut did not have Lacan's dazzling linguistic virtuosity or wide familiarity with philosophy and literature, his contributions to both the theory and practice of psychoanalysis should interest a great many literary scholars. Kohut's investigation of narcissistic personality disorders illuminates a wide cast of literary characters who struggle with grandiosity, shame, entitlement, idealization, and narcissistic rage. Although a small number of literary critics have applied Kohutian theory (which has come to be called self psychology) to fiction and poetry, Joseph Adamson is the first to demonstrate how Kohut's understanding of the dynamics of shame offers new insight into one of America's greatest novelists.

Melville, Shame, and the Evil Eye opens with a lucid and helpful discussion of Kohut's theory of the development of the self. At the heart of this theory lies the bipolar self consisting of the two poles of the “grandiose self” and the “idealized selfobject.” The grandiose self represents the child's ambitious and exhibitionistic attempts to control and master the environment. The idealizing selfobject is the child's internalization of his or her parents and other authority figures. Loving and attentive parents enable the child to develop a healthy sense of self in which grandiose and exhibitionistic strivings are tamed. These parents seem to realize almost instinctively the importance of empathizing with their children. Kohut, more than any other psychologist or psychoanalyst, affirms empathy both as a precondition for human development and as a mode of scientific inquiry. Unempathic parents produce feelings of betrayal, helplessness, and powerlessness in the