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Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.
As has been pointed out elsewhere about existentialism, psychoanalysis has passed with some rapidity through what William James called “the classic stages of a theory's career.” First the theory is “attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.”1 Much of psychoanalysis seems still to be considered in the second stage of its career—“obvious and insignificant”; or more accurately, not significant enough to warrant the attention it receives.
Among the friendlier adversaries of psychoanalysis have been the literary critics, though in literary criticism the classic stages have been passed through seemingly in reverse order. To begin with, some twenty-five years ago, psychoanalysis was novel enough for a few unfastidious critics to champion it out of snobbery; that is, to regard it a fashionable perspective from which to view and evaluate literary products, perhaps with some notion of a “new” or even “scientific” criticism in mind. This early “acceptance” gave way almost immediately to its opposite: the use of psychoanalysis in literary criticism came to be regarded as “obvious and insignificant.” And finally, today, although the theory of psychoanalysis is gaining increasing respectability in academic quarters (though hardly anywhere else), in the domain of literature it is still occasionally “attacked as absurd”—meaning in that context, it might be supposed, that it is so irrelevant to the concern with art as to be meaningless in its application to it.