Toward a Reorientation of Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism*

“It's a devastation!” Lionel Trilling, one of the first of the critics to use psychoanalysis, averred in his last years about psychoanalytic literary criticism.† Another, Leon Edel, so despaired over the misuse of psychoanalysis in literary criticism because of conflicting approaches to symbolic expression that he strongly urged psychoanalysis to be confined to biography only.9 Most recently, Frederick Crews ran up the red flag over intrinsic, reductionistic tendencies in psychoanalytic criticism, warning that only the utmost caution can “prevent the ubiquitous misuse of psychoanalysis”5 And yet we are paradoxically faced with a swelling movement by literary critics as well as psychoanalysts to use psychoanalysis in criticism.

Is psychoanalytic literary criticism, then, simply a currently popular cul-de-sac? Or, rather, is psychoanalysis a viewpoint pertinent to literary understanding, but one fraught with danger from hidden problems just beneath the surface of easy synthesis? If we are to speak of psychoanalytic literary criticism, rather than simply applied psychoanalysis—where one may romp freely without regard for the ecology of another discipline—then we must talk in the dialogue of a serious interdisciplinary effort. And such interdisciplinary explorations invariably lead into uncharted areas.

In particular, the psychoanalytic critic has a most difficult time in negotiating the straits between psychological reductionism and ignorance of the complexities of either psychoanalysis or aesthetics. The monster of psychological reductionism usually fells the critic