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To my mind most of the articles compiled by Maurice Charney and Joseph
Reppen in Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature and Film are highly enjoyable and rewarding. First, however, I would like to cite a few minor objections.
The editors' criteria for selecting and organizing their material sometimes seem questionable. For example: An intense interest in film theory now obtains among psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically oriented academics, yet the reader is only given two film essays—this in a book that mentions cinema prominently in its title.
A preponderance of the papers justifiably reflect contemporary post-Freudian work in the field, including Kleinian and Lacanian strategies. Some heed is paid to the psychology of audience response, but the “themes, imagery, and symbolic structure of the work itself are chiefly privileged. Pathobiography of artist or character is mostly dismissed as the detritus of a presumably outmoded “older psychoanalytic orientation.”
The editors thus seem to have overlooked the fact that psychoanalytic scholarship has evolved far beyond the naive reductionism of Marie Bonaparte's (1949) monograph on Poe, to the sophisticated methodology deployed in more recent pathobiographical research, such as Crews' (1966) searching analysis of Hawthorne's themes, or Feder's (1978) poignant study of the dying Mahler. Several essays in this collection would have achieved greater depth had their authors been more attentive to the articulation between the work and author's personal concerns.
For instance, Sammy McLean describes Brecht's preoccupation with powerful mothers who are incestuously tied to their sons. In his earlier plays, these women appear as profoundly ambivalent figures, melding creativity and destructiveness. In Brecht's final dramas, the mothers' “dark” side is suppressed. Incestuous desire is sublimated into a communal bond; the communal ethic draws revolutionary ardor from the idealized figure of the nurturing, sacrificing hero-mother.