An American Dreamer: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Fiction of Norman Mailer. Andrew Gordon. Rutherford, NJ:  Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980.  234 pp.

A literary critic with a psychoanalytic perspective can approach fiction from various angles. He can use psychoanalytic insights to understand a novel's characters and themes; he can show how aspects of the novel relate to the author's psychological concerns, thus creating a “psychobiography”, or, he can explore the psychology of the reader of the novels in what is now known as “reader-response” criticism. Andrew Gordon in his study of Norman Mailer's fiction concentrates on analyzing the characters and the themes but he cannot help straying into hypotheses about Mailer and the American cultural environment:

This study will interpret Mailer's fiction in rnueh the same way as Freud analyzed the content of dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams—bearing in mind, of course, that the dream, which is a wholly uneonseious, involuntary, private, and obscure systein of symbology, differs from fiction, which is a consciously willed product intended to have meaning to a wide public …. [Psychic] conflicts [discovered in the novels] belong solely to the author or to his characters, but are intended to have meaning for all of us, to comment on the situation of contemporary Americans, (pp. 18-19)