| Many people know Simon Lesser primarily as the author of Fiction and the Unconscious, the remarkable book that brought ego psychology decisively into literary criticism in 1957. In the context of his total work, that book is his theoria. These essays are the equally important praxis to complete and justify it. |
| In a larger context, the growth of psychoanalysis as a whole, Lesser challenged the early styles of psychoanalytic criticism in the best way, by invigorating them with the subsequent achievements of the parent discipline, clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis. Beginning with Freud's 1897 analysis of Hamlet, psychoanalysts understood literary works through the polarity between conscious and unconscious, demonstrated as general because of its presence across dreams, symptoms, jokes, and parapraxes. They thought of conscious and unconscious as systems or even physical locations in the mind. The early psychoanalytic critics found in literary works mostly variations on the two great divisions we face in the Oedipus complex: male and female, child and adult. Often, first-phase psychoanalytic critics relied on decodings into routinized anal, phallic, and oedipal themes, ingeniously creating a systematics of "Freudian symbolism" far beyond the limits Freud himself had set and common sense would confirm. |
| In the second phase of psychoanalysis, the structures of id, ego, and superego absorbed the old conscious-unconscious polarity, making it descriptive only. The psychoanalytic critic needed to do more than translate manifest content to latent. Lesser, in particular, found he could understand the reading and writing of literature as appeals to these three different agencies, and hence he could talk about the manifest content and its relation to the latenta major move forward as well as a recapturing of Freud's early concern with latent and manifest as process rather |
|
