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My purpose here is to consider some implications of recent developments in psychoanalytic theory for literary criticism. In particular, I intend to delineate some striking structural similarities between the dyadic relationship which constitutes the clinical psychoanalytic situation and the literary relationship in which a text links the author and the reader. By so doing, I hope to illuminate the essential hermeneutic function (Gadamer, 1975) of the analyst and critic. For each, interpretation is the fundamental task which becomes possible only through a symbolic exchange within a field of illusion.
Perhaps the most ambitious and comprehensive effort thus far to develop a psychoanalytic approach to literary criticism can be found in the evolving work of Norman Holland. In Holland's first major effort at systematization, The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968), he elaborated an ego-psychological model in which the created text was viewed as an adaptive product of ego strategies in the service of defense.