The I: Norman N. Holland. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985, 390 pp., $30.00.

If it ever came to a point that psychoanalysis had to be entrusted to anyone, my vote would go to a professor of English. By training and experience, such a person knows about metaphors and their meaning in the human experience. An English professor would never be found examining the ear of a person who heard God's voice. Similarly, an English professor, even one who was also an electrical engineer (Professor Holland), would not apply amperometrics to an organ or limb that had been “cathected,” or recommend vasoligation for preserving the psychic energies of schizophrenics. The literary person becomes puzzled when clinicians find specific chemicals to energize the ego or reinforce the superego. Psychoanalysis and the literary experience both start and end with words and abstractions, all fed by the symbolic process. It is, therefore, neither surprising nor accidental that a professor of English (and a psychoanalyst), Norman N. Holland, should bring us illumination in the direction of humanity in an age when the mechanistic theme has become so prevalent in psychology, psychiatry, and sadly, in psychoanalysis as well. Holland informs us of individuality, of uniqueness apart from the statistical heavy hand. Acknowledging his debt to Erikson and Lichtenstein, Holland uses the concept of identity to bring into coherence an individual's lifelong behavior. He views identity—as a literary person would—as a theme or style, albeit with variations, that characterizes an individual from inchoation to the very end. Obstructions and interferences with the identity theme constitute frustrations, which in turn lead to crises and to the bevy of aberrations observed in the consultation room, in life, and in literature. In other words, we track the exquisitely fragile “I” and its vicissitudes. Although we are constantly doing new things, our “style” never changes. For Holland then,