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In their study of the parallels between literary and clinical narratives focusing on how fictional characters and real people change, the authors Barbara Almond and Richard Almond ask two crucial questions: “[W]hile therapeutic themes may make literature interesting to the reading public, are literary conceptions of the therapeutic important or informative to the student of human psychology or the practicing therapist? Why not learn about psychological change from clinical situations alone?” (p. 18). The query goes to the very heart of what is called “psychoanalytic literary criticism,” with its assumptions that literature has something to tell us about the mind and the soul that cannot be got at through therapy, and that psychoanalysis can help us understand certain aspects of literary discourse to which we otherwise would be blind. Freud, of course, started it all off in 1897 when he interimplicated psychoanalysis and literature in the concept of the Oedipus complex, choosing a literary figure as the eponymous representative of a central insight into human psychology and creativity.
What, then, does literature—and, specifically, narrative (as opposed to lyric or drama)—have to offer the clinician? The authors, themselves practicing therapists, have chosen a particular area to study, namely “the human capacity to resolve internal conflict and enhance development through relationships” (pp. 18-19). They thus approach literature as if it were a special case of psychotherapy, a discursive field containing a “therapeutic ‘plot’” (p. 172). To explore this field, they have chosen nine novels—Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Margaret Drabble's The Needle's Eye, Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist, George Eliot's Silas Marner, Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, Johanna Spyri's Heidi, John Fowles's The Magus, and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth—that illustrate specific aspects