As psychoanalysis becomes more and more important to literary studies and the accompanying literature bulks larger and larger, students often feel overwhelmed, not knowing where to turn for readings that will open up the subject. Holland's Guide to Psychoanalytic Psychology and Literature-and-Psychology offers an ingenious solution to this problem. It provides concise outlines of all types of psychoanalytic theory and shows how they apply to literary criticism. The outlines point in turn to further, more specific readings--articles, essays, and books--which can (...) then be located by two extensive bibliographies that follow the discussion. These offer materials that range from the earliest Freud to the latest cognitive science and include dozens of bibliographic aids. Holland integrates these suggested readings with lively, detailed comments on various psychologies as they relate to literature. He is thus able to guide students easily to the precise subject they wish to study, be it Jungian criticism, ego psychology, feminist psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic film theory, or interpretation of some specific text. Holland also offers a bracing discussion of reader-response criticism and a lucid guide to the work of Jacques Lacan. A trenchant epilogue defends the psychological approach, suggesting which points in psychoanalytic theory will work for literary critics, and which will not. The only such guidebook for students of psychoanalytic literary theory and literary criticism, Holland's Guide will also prove an invaluable aid for those studying psychoanalysis and psychology. (shrink)

Holistic reasoning brings out the sustained and sustaining integrity of a system, be it a person, a poem, a neighborhood, a corporation, a culture, a crime to be solved by Sherlock Holmes, or an act of dreaming. Identity theory thus extends Freud's method of dream interpretation, explicating free associations, to the whole life of a person. We can talk rigorously about unique individuals. Yet that very talking is a human act, part of someone's identity, Freud's or mine. One has to (...) distinguish between "primary identity," the hypothesis of a persistent sameness established "in" a person in infancy, and "identity theme," a second person's hypothesis for searching out a persistent style in what the first has done. In a strict sense, I can never know your "primary identity," for it is deeply and unconsciously inside you. Formed before speech, it can never be put into words. It is entirely possible, however, for me to formulate a constancy in your personal style—from outside you but through empathy. Any such formulation of an "identity theme" will, of course, be a function both of the you I see and of my way of seeing—my identity as well as yours. Another reason one can never know a "primary identity" is, then, that it is inextricable from one's own primary identity—if there is such a thing. But there are definitely identity themes because I can formulate them. Norman N. Holland is professor of English and director of the Center for the Psychological Study of the Arts at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Two of his books, Poems in Persons and Five Readers Reading , apply the concept of identity here developed to literary response. His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Literary Interpretation and Three Phases of Psychoanalysis" and "Why Ellen Laughed". (shrink)

Film theorists talk enthusiastically these days in terms of semiotics, sutures, and systems of meaning. I think we can usefully frame these theories by some evidence as to how some actual readers make actual theories from an actual film. To that end, I would like to explore here what three people, Agnes, Norm, and Ted, said about The Story of O. It seems to me that if any film should demonstrate the fixity of semiotic and other codes, surely a pornographic (...) film should.You might call this essay, then, the story of this I storying three other I’s storying The Story of O.1 “Storying” is Audrey Grant’s verb, and by it she intends the representing of an event in your own mind and telling somebody about it.2In this essay, then, I propose to tell you how I represent in my mind how these three individuals represented in their minds The Story of O.Sometimes we felt or thought about the film more or less alike, and sometimes we squarely contradicted one another. I want to ask two questions of these responses. First, how can we relate their variety to the singleness of the film? Second, how can we relate their variety to the generality of any codes that govern the seeing of films? Norman N. Holland is Milbauer Eminent Scholar at the University of Florida. His most recent book, The I , develops a widely useful model for thinking about humans’ perceiving, interpreting, reading, and generally I-ing. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry is “Interactive Fiction” in the September 1984 issue. (shrink)

Let me start with my general thesis: that psychoanalysis has gone through three phases. It has been a psychology first of the unconscious, second as psychology of the ego, and today, I believe, a psychology of the self. . . . To a surprising extent, the modern American literary critic has sought the same impersonal, generalized kind of quasi-scientific knowledge. We anglophones reacted against the over-indulgence in subjectivity by Victorian and Georgian critics. We also reacted against the uncritical use of (...) extraliterary knowledge, connections that were often aimless and unconvincing between literary works and their authors' autobiographies or literary periods. We sought instead an analytical rigor, at first by searching out the organic unity of particular literary works, then by extending the methods of close reading we developed that way to the total works of an author, to myths and popular arts, to the language of everyday life, and even to such artifices as Volkswagens, supermarkets, and political candidates. Norman N. Holland is professor of English and director of the Center for the Psychological Study of the Arts at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of six books, of which Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare , The Dynamics of Literary Response , Poems in Persons , and Five Readers Reading deal directly with problems of psychological criticism. His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Human Identity" and "Why Ellen Laughed". (shrink)

I propose this: Ellen [a graduate student] laughs because she is re-creating her identity. This theory differs from the others because "identity" is not simply a category that is filled or not, like "incongruity" or "superiority" which become variables in an "if this, then that" explanation. "If there is a sudden incongruity, people will laugh." Rather, identity is a further question, a way of asking, Can I understand Ellen's actions as a theme and variations? Moreover, any such interpretation is itself (...) a part of the interpreter's actions, hence a function of his - in this case, my - identity. The principle is general, but putting it into practice in each instance is unique. Unlike an "if this, then that" which leads to closure, an explanation through identity leads to a continuing dialogue. One asks questions of an individual situation, like Ellen's laughing at [B.] Kliban's cartoons. One gets answers that lead to a fuller understanding of that situation. The answers can be generalized into questions, leading to more and closer questioning and more answers that lead to more questions, all within the general principle of identity re-creation as embodied in the unique situation.Norman N. Holland is the James H. McNulty Professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has written a book on the theory of laughter presented in the present essay. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Literary Interpretation and Three Phases of Psychoanalysis" and "Human Identity". (shrink)

The structure of traditional fiction is essentially linear or serial. No matter how complex a given work may be, it presents information to its reader successively, one element at a time, in a sequence determined by its author. By contrast, interactive fiction is parallel in structure or, more accurately, dendritic or tree-shaped. Not one, but several possible courses of action are open to the reader. Further, which one actually happens depends largely, though not exclusively, upon the reader’s own choices. To (...) be sure, the author is still in overall control, since it is she who has set up the particular nexus of events, but the route up the narrative tree, the actual sequence of events, is generally affected, if not completely determined, by the reader’s responses to that particular reader’s specific situation. In an adventure, the sequence of action frequently depends upon the reader’s decision to go in one geographical direction rather than another. In the eliza sample, the content of the “story” depends on such particulars as whether this reader has a brother or not, whether she fears her father, and why she has consulted the terminal. In general, the text presented to the eliza-reader depends on what that reader has already said and how the computer has interpreted and stored it, and this is generally true of interactive fiction.Further, interactive fiction is, in principle , open-ended—infinite. A conversation with eliza could go on for as long as one with Woody Allen’s psychoanalyst—in principle, forever. It has no necessary terminus. The program will go one writing texts and answers on the screen as long as the reader or player chooses to supply responses. Further, the computer can act as a metafictional narrator like John Barth or Thomas Pynchon who can create a story within a story or a story that generates another story within itself which generates another story within itself and so on, fictions dizzying and dazzling. One senses one’s essential humanity wobbling in the midst of the infinite paradoxes of existence and meaning. Anthony J. Niesz, assistant professor of German at Yale University, is the author of Dramaturgy in German Drama: From Gryphius to Goethe . He is interested in the phenomenon of the meta-theater, especially in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German drama, as well as in the literature and cultural policies of the German Democratic Republic. Norman N. Holland is Milbauer Eminent Scholar at the University of Florida. He is the author of Laughing and The I. (shrink)