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I have received particular help with my chapter on “The Clerk’s Tale” from Marie Nelson, my medievalist colleague at the University of Florida, and astute comments on my chapter on The End of the Road from Andrew Gordon, my Americanist colleague and fellow member of the Institute for Psychological Study of the Arts at UF. Diane Hoeveler and Beth Lau made valuable suggestions for improving the much briefer version of my reading of Jane Eyre that was published in the MLA volume they edited on approaches to the teaching of that novel (Paris 1993a).
Other portions of the present book have also been previously published. Chapter 1 draws on “A Horneyan Approach to Literature” (Paris 1991c) and the Introduction of Third Force Psychology and the Study of Literature (Paris 1986a). Chapter 2 draws on Karen Horney: A Psychoanalyst’s Search for Self-Understanding (Paris 1994a). Part of the discussion of A Doll’s House in chapter 3 was published in The American Journal of Psychoanalysis (Paris 1978a), and a version of chapter 6 was published in the same journal (Paris 1989b). A preliminary version of my reading of Madame Bovary was published in The Literary Review (Paris 1981), and a modified version of the present chapter on that novel was published in The American Journal of Psychoanalysis (Paris 1997). A portion of chapter 13 was published in Women and Literature (Paris 1982) and another portion in “Third Force Psychology and the Study of Literature, Biography, Criticism, and Culture” (Paris 1986b). The Conclusion draws on Third Force Psychology and the Study of Literature (Paris 1986a), “A Horneyan Approach to Literature” (Paris 1991c), Bargains with Fate (Paris 1991a), and Karen Horney: A Psychoanalyst’s Search for Self-Understanding (Paris 1994a). I wish to thank the journals and presses that have previously published portions of this book for allowing me to include this material here.
I wish to extend my deepest thanks to Jeffrey Berman, the General Editor of the New York University Press’s Literature and Psychoanalysis series, and to my wife, Shirley. This book probably would not have been written without Jeffrey Berman’s invitation, and he has given me sound advice and encouragement at every stage. It was a great help having him in mind as my reader as I sat at my word processor. As always, Shirley has lived through the process of creation with me and has given me the benefit of an immediate perceptive response. She has been my first and best critic and my most precious source of support. I dedicated my first book to her in 1965. It is time for me to dedicate another book to my very dear wife.
1 Applications of a Horneyan Approach
It is not difficult to see why psychoanalytic theory has been widely used in the study of literature. Psychoanalysis deals with human beings in conflict with themselves and each other, and literature portrays and is written and read by such people. What is confusing is that there are so many psychoanalytic theories, each with its claims and proponents. It clearly makes sense to use psychoanalysis in literary study, but which theory should we employ?
I do not believe that literature should be placed on the Procrustean bed of any one theory. Human psychology is inordinately complex and can be approached in many ways. A number of theories have accurately described certain aspects of it, but none has the whole truth or is universally applicable. Many theorists have derived global models of human nature from the limited range of phenomena they understand well, or have tried to explain too much with too limited a repertory of motives. We need a wide range of theories to do justice to the richness and diversity of human experience and to the literature that expresses it. Some theories are highly congruent with certain works and some with others, and often several can be employed in studying the same text or aspect of literature. There is a large body of Freudian and Jungian criticism; and the ideas of Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, Wilhelm Reich, Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, R. D. Laing, Fritz Perls, Heinz Kohut, Jacques Lacan, and others have also been profitably used in literary studies.
Another psychoanalyst with an important contribution to make is Karen Horney. Her theory fits numerous works from a wide range of periods and cultures and illuminates a variety of literary issues. It yields a distinctive set of insights and is a valuable critical tool.
When I first read Horney in 1959, at the suggestion of a colleague in psychology, I was deeply impressed by her theory. She not only described my behavior in an immediately recognizable way, but she seemed to have invaded my privacy and to have understood my insecurities, inner conflicts, and unrealistic demands on myself. Above all, she enabled me to comprehend a mysterious change that had taken place in me since the completion of my dissertation.
I was originally a specialist in Victorian fiction who was trained at Johns Hopkins in the explication of texts and the history of ideas. In my doctoral dissertation, I examined George Eliot’s thought in relation to her time and her novels in relation to her ideas. While I was working on my dissertation, I felt that George Eliot had discovered the answer to the modern quest for values, and I expounded her Religion of Humanity with a proselytizing zeal. When I completed the dissertation, I found that although I still felt my reading of George Eliot to be accurate, I was no longer enthralled by her ideas. I could not understand my loss of enthusiasm, which had left me feeling painfully disoriented and uncertain about my beliefs.
Reading Karen Horney helped me to understand what had happened. Horney correlates belief systems with strategies of defense and observes that when our defenses change, so does our philosophy of life. I had had great difficulty writing my dissertation, for reasons that therapy later made clear, and had frequently felt hopeless about completing the Ph.D. Faced with the frustration of my academic ambitions, I found George Eliot’s Religion of Humanity to be exactly what I needed: we give meaning to our lives by living for others rather than for ourselves. But when I finished my dissertation and was told that it ought to be published (Paris 1965), I could once again dream of a glorious career. Since I no longer needed to live for others in order to give meaning to my life, George Eliot’s philosophy lost its appeal. In Horneyan terms, my inability to write my dissertation forced me to abandon my expansive ambitions and to become self-effacing, but on triumphantly completing it, I became expansive once more, and George Eliot’s ideas left me cold. This was an unconscious process of which I first became aware through my reading of Horney and that I understood more fully in the course of psychotherapy.
While in therapy in the early 1960s, I read a great deal of psychoanalytic theory, often using it as an aid to self-analysis. I did not connect it to the study of literature until one memorable day in 1964 when I was teaching Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. Again it was Horney who helped me to understand what was mystifying me. While arguing that the novel is full of contradictions and does not make sense thematically, I suddenly remembered Horney’s statement that “inconsistencies are as definite an indication of the presence of conflicts as a rise in body temperature is of physical disturbance” (1945, 35). In the next instant I realized that the novel’s contradictions become intelligible if we see them as part of a system of inner conflicts. I have been unfolding the implications of that “aha” experience ever since, with profound effects on my view of literature.
As we shall see when examining The Awakening, there are other works like Vanity Fair in which thematic СКАЧАТЬ