Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Reader Response Author(s): Norman N. Holland, Marshall W. Alcorn, Jr.

and Mark Bracher Source: PMLA, Vol. 100, No. 5 (Oct., 1985), pp. 818-820 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/462104 . Accessed: 02/05/2013 10:00
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ing identification with a character or an author, literature might bring about new values, re-forming its reader's superego (rules of conduct) or ego ideal (ultimate goals). The theory is exemplary. Parenthetically, however, I feel impelled to point out that literarycritics want reading to have social, political, and moral efficacy. Such usefulness justifies their work. Here we should recognize that our wishes may color our theoretical account. This fact does not refute Alcorn and Bracher's claim, but it indicates that these claims, which are after all claims about the real world, deserve testing by methods more systematic than the impressions of teachers or the credos of critics. Alcorn and Bracher use reports from actual psychoanalyses to illustratethe re-formationof self that clinicians witness. But for reading's re-formation of the self, they turn to "the" reader of particular poems by Shelley and Yeats. I would have liked more evidence from the associations of actual readers. My momentary skepticism, however,does not extend to Alcorn and Bracher's conclusions. I think that literature does re-form ego, superego and ego ideal. My skepticism only reflects my desire for a more detailed account of how reading accomplishes the introjections and identifications Alcorn and Bracher posit. I do not doubt that "Both the ego ideal and the superego are thus subject to continual influence and modification through the reading of literature"(350), but I wish that a complicated psychological process were not subsumed in "influence and modification." I would like to have evidence of the changes and to know the particulars of the introjective process. It is, no doubt, my persistent questioning of the processes of perception and reading that led Alcorn and Bracherto conclude that I tend "to understandall identification as projective identification, in which the reader projects his or her fantasies and defenses on a text but does not introject or internalize alien characteristics encountered in the text" (351). But they are not quite accurate. It is true that in my pre-1976 writings (the authors, curiously, cite nothing later) I may have overemphasized what literary critics at that time thought farfetched, the surprising extent to which readers edit texts to suit their own fantasies and defenses. Then and since, however, I have also tried to understand reading in the light of general theories of perception: how we perceive anything, the alien as well as the congenial. Most recently in The I (New Haven: Yale UP, 1985), I have presented a model consisting of an identity that governs a hierarchy of feedback processes acting into the real world. This identity should be understood not only as the agency and consequence of the perceptions and actions it governs but as a theme-and-variations representation (not a Ding an sich). Such a model is not "solipsistic" unless most modern theories of perception are, since they also as-

appreciate Owen's attention to certain minor inaccuracies in the Norton edition that I did study in my article. As he points out, the editors retained capitals "only for the terms 'God' and 'Nature,' and for personifications that are clearly presented by the poetry as personifications" (511). I would want to quibble with the Norton editors about the clear exclusion of 1805's "valley" from this rubric, especially since the word is apposite to the phrase "thy vale, / Beloved Hawkshead" in the 1799 text. Even so, my overall point about the way book 5 "emphasizes the containment of [the boy's] movements by a supervising force" (99 [1984]: 928) survives without the support of the two details Owen has removed from consideration. As Owen suggested in a letter to me last April, it is probably advisable to use de Selincourt's edition rather than Norton's for information about the 1805 text-at least until the Cornell edition (by Mark Reed) appears, with its photographic reproductions of the manuscript-since the Norton normalizations can be misleading. Owen also advised me that his own edition of the 1850 text, with a generous list of accidentals, is being published this fall by Cornell. His contribution promises to be a valuable resource for those of us interested in Wordsworth's revisionary practices.
SUSAN J. WOLFSON

Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Reader Response To the Editor: In "Literature,Psychoanalysis, and the Re-Formation of the Self" (100 [1985]: 342-54) Marshall W. Alcorn, Jr., and Mark Bracherhave not just written a highly intelligent essay, unusually well informed with contemporary psychoanalytic thought, they have introduced into PMLA a kind of earthy psychoanalysis often missing from literary discourse. I probably should not ask for more, particularly since they treat my own writings generously. Nevertheless, I would like to call attention to methods beyond even their vanguard account of psychoanalytic criticism. Alcorn and Bracher propose that recent psychoanalytic theory can buttress the belief that literature "edifies-in the root sense of that term." It builds us. Literature, they note, might alter not only our cognitions but, more significantly, the internal structures of the self, and it is this kind of alteration that psychoanalysis helps us understand. Literature can achieve such a "re-formation" by processes analogous to those of psychoanalysis. Literature,for example, mobilizes infantile wishes, but it can only deny their gratification, as the psychoanalyst does, or supply a substitute. By promot-

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sume the perceiver has top-down, inside-to-outside domination over bottom-up, outside-to-inside stimuli. An identity-governing-feedback model might dovetail nicely into Alcorn and Bracher's thesis, indicating how "influence and modification" take place. It could unpack such crucial phrasings as "Literaturepressuresthe self" and "Literature promotes re-formation of the self," enabling us to sort out what the literatureand the self do in these transactions and to formulate the processes Alcorn and Bracher postulate. We can image those processes in ways consistent with psychoanalysis; with recent work by perceptual and cognitive psychologists, brain physiologists, and artificial intelligencers; and with what specialists tell us about how children and illiterates learn to read. A second thing I would wish into Alcorn and Bracher's essay is a generalization of my first question about the process of reading. Alcorn and Bracher say that literature changes the superego and the ego ideal and the balance between them. Fine. But in resting their account on the structures(i.e., long-term functions) central to the theory of ego psychology, they are doing what I call second-phase psychoanalysis. Would it not be better to replace these structures with the processes they admittedly are and thus avoid the problems of pointing to "things" or "agencies" in the mind that no one can see? Alcorn and Bracher will recognize that I am asking the same kind of question that Roy Schafer does in his critique of ego psychology's reifications, A New Language (New Haven: Yale UP, 1976). Like many other psychoanalytic theorists of today, Schafer points us toward a third-phase psychoanalysis, a psychology of the self, and Alcorn and Bracher say they too are taking that step. To make this move, however,we probably have to rethink such ego-psychological structures as the superego into more theoretically open processes of internalization or accommodation and assimilation or feedback. In other words, their essay evokes a fascinating and extremely complicated question. What is the relation between the structures of second-phase psychoanalysis and the account of selfprocesses in third-phase psychoanalysis? This query, of course, puts Alcorn and Bracher's original, bold, and vigorous essay where it deserves to be, in the middle of the challenging transitions taking place in today's clinical psychoanalysis.
NORMANN. HOLLAND

819

University of Florida

Reply: We thank Norman Holland for his insightful comments, which point out a number of important ways in which our theory of reader response needs to be questioned and elaborated.

We are in complete agreement with Holland's observation that since critics want to believe that reading makes a difference, our hypothesis that reading re-forms the self needs to be tested in a rigorous and systematic manner. We hope that such testing can be done in the near future-by others, if not by us-both to guard against the danger of the theory's being merely a wishfulfilling fantasy and to provide material for refining and elaborating on the theory. Of course, such a project would be difficult. In addition to the difficulty of identifying and controlling the numerous variables involved in reading and interpretingliterature,there is the problem that psychoanalysis itself has been plagued with when trying to provide evidence of its own efficacy: how can one identify and measure, in an objective manner, significant changes in the self? Furthermore, any testing of our theory would need to recognize that the theory offers not so much an account of what actually occurs in the reading and study of literature as a view of what is possible as a result of reading. The value of the theory lies in its ability not to mirror the reality of the reading process but to change that reality-to explore new possibilities for reading, studying, and teaching literature. Holland is also right in observing that we need "a more detailed account of how reading accomplishes the introjections and identifications" that we posit. The identity-governing-feedback model that Holland proposes looks quite promising in this regard. Our own attempts to elaborate on the process by which literature elicits structural changes in the self are focusing on Lacan's account of the roles played by language and the imaginary in structuring the self. If language-the key term missing from the theory outlined in our PMLA article-is a significant structural element of the self, then literature,insofar as it dislocates, manipulates, and alters language, can produce fundamental changes in the self. Moreover, by including linguistic phenomena-such as metaphor, metonymy, repetition, and disjunction-among its key terms, the Lacanian model provides clear avenues of interchange with more traditional literary critical models, including New Criticism, structuralism, and deconstruction, as well as thematic and moral criticism. We also agree with Holland that our theory would benefit if it employed concepts that refer to (observable) processes ratherthan to things and agencies that no one can see. Such concepts would not only make our theory more accessible and more testable, they would also give a more adequate reflection of the nonsubstantiality of the self. We would emphasize, however, that it is impossible to do away completely with concepts referring to unseen agencies: if, as Hume pointed out, we cannot directly apprehend a cause as such, neither can we function for very long without the conceptparticularly in the realm of theory. Theory, despite its etymological roots, inevitably invokes the unseen; inso-

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(PMLA 98 [1983]: 800-14) I have spent some time exploring how other writers anticipated or used the "Ruines complex" of vocabulary, sentiment, and concerns. Thus one of my functions in a collaborative effort with Charles and Kent Hieatt has been to modify the claims my colleagues put forth; like an ungrateful third grace, I reduce the benefits they advance. In this retrogressive role I have found some phrases that we think Shakespearetook from Spenser in poets working before-or during-the probable time of the Sonnets' composition. Two such exceptions have been already noted, one by Gary Schmidgall, who in a letter to PMLA (99 [1984]: 244) pointed out that Barnabe Barnes in 1593 also associated "outwear,""devouring," and "time," and the other by Kent Hieatt himself, who added in his answer to Schmidgall that Spenser had used "time . . . outwear" in The Shepheardes Calender (1579). Nicholas Grimald's verse also shows a liking for "time" and a form of "wear" (see no. 36 in Tottel'sMiscellany [1557], ed. H. E. Rollins). Salisbury'scomplaint in The Mirror for Magistrates (1559) mistrusts fame, "Which time it selfe must nedes devour" (ed. L. B. Campbell, 143), anticipating Ruines of Rome 3 and 8 and Sonnets 19. True, the Ovidian "tempus edax" would have encouraged this metaphor, but writers often preferred "consume" or "eat," and "devour" is fairly unusual. Then, in the 1587 Mirror, one finds Burdet's complaint referringto "Britaynesfirst antiquities" (476), another somewhat unusual word that Kent Hieatt considers a link between Spenser and Shakespeare. I have found only a little of the Ruines of Rome complex in the 1560s or 1570s, but in the mid-1580s it reappears, particularly in the work of Arthur Gorges and Geoffrey Whitney, both of whom knew Du Bellay's poetry and had connections with Spenser or his friends. Gorges, too, conceived of time as wearing. For example, "That to revive which wronge of tyme might weare" (Poems of Sir A. G., ed. H. E. Sandison, 67) translates Du Bellay's "Pour se venger du temps injurieux" in Olive 34. In his Choice of Emblemes (1586) Whitney writes that Elizabeth's fame "no time, nor envie can devower" (106). Time also "wears" in these poems, particularly in the emblem "Scripta Manent" 'WritingsEndure,' describing Troy'smarble monuments eaten and worn "with tracte of stealinge time" (131). And as in Ruines 7 and Sonnets 15-16, time does battle: it will "winne the feelde" so that our "wonders"are "out of memorie worne" (167). Whitney was keenly interested in how "Rome doth ruine feele" and "Tempus omnia terminat" 'Time ends all things'; before Daniel and Shakespearehe was the poet closest in spirit (if not in talent) to Spenser when writing of such matters. During the 1590s the Ruines complex may be found fleetingly in the poems published with Constable's Diana (1592) and in Lodge's verse introduction to Phillis

far as it offers explanatory (and not merely descriptive) power, it must posit what cannot be directly observed. Holland's theory of identity is evidence of this fact: despite Holland's caveat that "this identity should be understood . . . as a theme-and-variations representation (not a Ding an sich)," identity, like cause, remains inferred rather than seen. And if identity does not quite have the status of agency in Holland's theory, other terms (for example, feedback) do appear to have this function. This only goes to show that any theory must ultimately posit causes, unseen agencies-precisely at the point, as Lacan notes, where there is a gap in understanding. Because of this necessity, we find Lacan's model preferable to Schafer's. For while Schafer is quite successful in avoiding the reifications of ego psychology, he pays a price in explanatorypower. Lacan, in contrast, retains such concepts as ego ideal, superego, phallus, and castration, thus preserving the discoveries as well as the explanatory power of traditional psychoanalysis. And by reinscribing these concepts as algorithms that cannot be understood apart from all the other algorithms in the psychic equation-many of which involve experienceable linguistic, cognitive, and affective phenomena-Lacan avoids the reifications of ego psychology. Lacanian theory thus offers what we feel is one of the most fertile answers to Holland's question, "What is the relation between the structuresof secondphase psychoanalysis and the account of self-processes in third-phase psychoanalysis?" The fact that this question, as Holland points out, is central to clinical psychoanalysis itself, points to another crucial question not explicitly addressed by our article, which a psychoanalytic theory of reader response must eventually come to grips with: which model of mind gives the most complete and accurate account of the psyche's functioning? Anyone who attempts to gauge the power that literature can have in human affairs must have an (implicit or explicit) answer to this question. Holland's work over the past two decades is evidence that he has seen this point more clearly and pursued it more vigorously and successfully than anyone else in our profession, and we thank him for once again directing our attention to it.
MARSHALL W. ALCORN, JR.
MARK BRACHER

Tulane University

Kent State University

Shakespeare and Spenser To the Editor: Since A. Kent Hieatt discovered the impact of Spenser's Ruines of Rome on Shakespeare's Sonnets

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