Don’t Analyze Literature from the Psychiatrist’s Chair

Prompt: “The critic’s task is analogous to the psychiatrist’s. Agree or disagree?”

Salvador Dalí said, “The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” Now we are being asked to make a distinction very like this one: Are the artist and his work of art a species of madness, and ought we to diagnose them as such? For when we assert “The literary critic’s task is analogous to the psychiatrist’s,” we necessarily speak of pathology, and we consider the literary artwork as a patient presenting with mental disturbance. Of course it would be folly to say that literature has nothing in common with psychology. Both domains have a clear interest in the human person, and the human person possesses a set of mental constructs and personality traits which he can properly call his own. But we must not conflate the two domains. Neither must we compromise by remarking that, “Yes, literature is made of many themes, but psychology is foremost among them.” If we compromise on these grounds, we go on to apply the tools of psychology to the analysis of literature, and we limit our grasp of literature as an artistic whole. A good novel or poem or play does not reduce itself to the level of an individual person. Its borders are not coterminous with the life of the author or the protagonist or the reader, even though it is influenced by these things. If, indeed, literature remained at the level of person, Hopkins’s poems would be as ghosts to us, invisible because the Jesuit priest who wrote them died before their printing. Hamlet as a play would expire with the pierce of Laertes’s poisoned blade. The critic who treats of literature as a psychiatrist treats of his patients makes a gross mistake. A work of literature is a thing, not a personality: it cannot sit in the psychiatrist’s chair and talk about its troubles. And why must literature be beset by troubles at all? It seems to me that this is one of the greatest dangers of a psychiatric or psychoanalytic approach to literature: it pathologizes. It makes the writing into a disease, a neurosis, an irregularity to be treated; at the same time, it makes the writer into a diseased, neurotic, irregular fellow in need of treatment. This can only breed negative criticism – hardly the kind which Addison meant when he said, “A true critic ought to dwell rather upon excellencies than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation.” The critic who acts as a psychiatrist must finally seek to heal his patient – that is, the work of literature – and, at the end of thoroughgoing inquiry and intervention – obviate the need for further therapy, must he not? In other words, the final proof of his success lies in his reduced contact with the novel or poem or play. The book leaves the doctor’s office, and is healthier for it; and the doctor is glad to see it go. It is a vain gesture, and it reminds us of the limitations of the psychoanalytic method. If we see a great work of literature primarily as a psychological case study, we forget its broader significance. We mistake it for a person in therapy, rather than an essentially aesthetic creation.

Psychoanalytic criticism, with its roots in Freud, best exemplifies the model of literary critic-as-psychiatrist. In this tradition, four methods prevail. They are psychoanalysis (1) of the author, (2) of the character, (3) of the reader, and (4) of the formal elements which Freud calls the “poetical effects” of a work. None of these methods is very tenable. As to the first, psychoanalysis of the author, we see that it is a speculative business. Biographies remain but second-hand accounts, and even autobiographies must be limited. Our relationship with these accounts is static: we cannot, unlike the psychiatrist, pull out our notebooks and put questions to the author. Even if we could – and sometimes we can, when we are fortunate enough to interview a living writer – we run headlong into the intentional fallacy. We often commit it, although prudence would remind us that to treat the author and the speaker as one and the same is a very hasty thing to do. The gesture emphasizes external over internal evidence and forgets a simple fact: a literary work, once let go into the world, lives apart from its creator, even though it retains associations with him. We leave the scrutiny of an author’s personal life properly to the literary biographer and not to the literary critic.

The second psychoanalytic method tries to psychoanalyze the protagonist or some other important character in a literary work. To be sure, this method may produce some interesting results. There is in fact a lucid and popular interpretation of Hamlet done in this vein. But those literary critics who wish to preserve the rigor of their profession must ask how reliable and how relevant such results can be. The most problematical feature of this method is its basic assumption that characters are real people. With this assumption, it becomes a matter of course to impose on characters the same standards of normalcy that apply to us. Freud believes that literature is, not a shadow or a reflection of the present reality, but a whole and an alternate reality. Why, then, does he subject his patient and the fictional character to the same norms of mental health? Often, fictional characters are so lovely to us precisely because they are privileged with a different set of norms. When does Alice in Wonderland stop to ask the way to the ladies’ room, or when does Humbert Humbert pause to prepare his taxes? There is something enchanting about their abstention from these mundane activities, when to neglect them ourselves would be cause for concern. Likewise, sometimes extraordinary events must be taken as the order of the day in a fictional universe. When Colonel Aureliano Buendia survives “fourteen attempts on his life, seventy-three ambushes, and a firing squad,” and when it rains “for four years, eleven months, and two days,” and when a priest levitates a piece of chocolate, the people of Macondo are not charged with insanity. García Márquez looks at the supernatural with an unflappable expression, and thence comes the power of magical realism. What use would it be to apply traditional benchmarks – to make a diagnosis from the DSM – in a world like that?

Another problem with psychoanalysis of a character is shared with psychoanalysis of the author. We cannot dynamically interact with the character, in the sense that we cannot ask him questions and challenge him with assignments the same way a psychiatrist might do with his patient. What is more, our acquaintance with the character may be indirect, passed through the mouth of another character or a partial narrator. It would be like psychoanalyzing a man only through what his wife says about him. Certainly this would not suffice to make a diagnosis inside the psychiatrist’s office, so why should we expect otherwise inside the critic’s library?

The third psychoanalytic method psychoanalyzes the reader based on her reactions to a text. The problems here are the same as above: the literary critic has scanty background information – a limited patient history, as it were – and is forced to make too many assumptions about our personalities and predispositions. This approach drastically discounts the versatility of individual experience. Moreover, it ignores a precept of psychiatry: that, in general, therapy should proceed with the patient’s cooperation. As readers, I am not sure we ever make this pact with the psychoanalytic critic, not sure we ever give him our cooperation. It would mean, for one thing, that we acknowledge in ourselves a need for therapy – a basis of psychological disturbance requiring treatment – and this, it seems, is an assumption the critic makes without consulting us.

The fourth psychoanalytic method tries to psychoanalyze the formal elements, or the “poetical effects,” of a work. Close attention to language may uncover, for example, a Freudian slip. Unfortunately, this approach regards syntax as a mere pointer to semantics and uses only a small subset of preselected meanings. It treats language as a human being, with a body and a mind. But where are the sexual impulses in a well-turned phrase? Freud relegates poetical effects to the status of “fore-pleasure,” declaring that the more important thing for literature to produce is the “liberation of tension in our minds.” Underlying meanings overshadow aesthetic virtues, and we lose an essential part of literature: its pure construction and its quality of formal beauty.

Now, a couple of things are left to remark. Firstly, psychiatry is outside the realm of the literary critic’s expertise. Psychiatry and literature belong to different provinces and each demands unique training. They treat of different subjects and seek different ends. If a psychiatrist pronounced literary judgment, the critic would probably laugh and shake his head. Why, then, should the literary critic pretend that he can diagnose mental health? By so doing, he borrows unscrupulously from a set of tools which do not suit his project.

Secondly, and finally, psychoanalytic readings simultaneously reduce and complicate. “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” That is what Einstein reportedly said. On the one hand, psychoanalytic readings oversimplify. They assume a roughly tragic childhood and attribute motivations to a person who may be fictional, and with whom psychodynamic interaction cannot be achieved. The psychoanalytic critic reduces a text to a pastiche of symbols, and usually the symbols are of a certain, narrow type. There are so many parts, it is hard to see the whole. Such reductionism misses the point. It fixates on seeing Plato’s cave as a womb, and ignores the larger philosophical questions. At the same time, psychoanalysis overcomplicates. Its unwieldy vocabulary and drive to diagnose lead the literary critic to call grief a “neurotic depression” or a “guilt complex.” This habit strips the critic of one of his great powers: to find the universals in a work of literature and explain why they resonate with humankind. When, instead, he pathologizes a universal, he makes it abnormal and unrelatable, something to be cured of. He calls the artist a neurotic and the art a neurosis. He forgets, as Lady Macbeth does not, that “Art not without the ambition, but without the illness should attend it.”