Volume 6, Number 11 · June 23, 1966
Literature on the Couch
By Frederick C. Crews
The Quest for Love
by David Holbrook
University of Alabama, 376 pp., $5.95
Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare
by Norman N. Holland
McGraw-Hill, 412 pp., $9.95
It is a little-noted curiosity that lay intellectuals are on the whole more interested in psychoanalytic theory than the psychoanalysts themselves. The latter are understandably concerned with pragmatic medical results instead of with nuances of metapsychology, and the wearing clinical routine does not make for long perspectives. There is also a certain feeling that the higher concepts of psychoanalysis are superfluous or askew. For the theorist of history or culture, however, these concepts have an almost magical appeal, and in recent years we have seen the most scientifically vulnerable aspects of Freudianism—Eros and Death, quantified and differentiated libido, the 'Nirvana' model of the nervous system—appropriated for the proof of special moralities and apocalyptic fears. Much excitement and much silliness have been generated behind the psychoanalysts' backs. But we can hardly blame the intellectuals for trying; it has become increasingly clear that Freudian theory has something significant and perhaps revolutionary to tell every branch of the humanities and social sciences. Both books under review are efforts, vastly different in their scope and degree of success, to deal with the implications of psychoanalysis for literary criticism.
Review, 2379 words
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