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Reading Between the Lines

Although psychoanalytic criticism once enjoyed a large following, it has been out of favor for so many years that today many mainstream literary critics have only a vague idea about what psychoanalytic critics actually do. Once, for example, after I told a colleague about my interest in this type of criticism, he disdainfully replied, "Oh, isn't that based on the idea of penis envy?" He looked a bit incredulous when I said that what most psychoanalytic critics are primarily interested in are the workings of the unconscious mind. It soon became apparent that my colleague based his prejudice against psychoanalytic criticism on a superficial reading of a few passages from Freud. In this regard, however, he is certainly not alone. Despite the fact that psychoanalytic criticism has been around for over threequarters of a century, it is as unfamiliar to many contemporary literary critics as the most recent ideas on deconstructionism. This situation helps explain why Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan decided to call their book Opening Texts: Psychoanalysis and the Culture of the Child. It would be more accurate, though, to use the word "reopening" in the title. The seven contributors to this book all engage in psychoanalytically informed criticism, but make diverse use of psychoanalytic theory. Some essays have psychoanalytic implications but contain no direct references to psychoanalysis per se. Others draw on the work of contemporary theorists such as Erik Erikson, Bruno Bettelheim, Alice Miller, and Jessica Benjamin. The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, is hardly mentioned by any of the contributors. Taken as a group, the essays provide ample evidence that psychoanalytic criticism need not be narrowly dogmatic. Diverse in approach and content as they are, a unifying theme runs through all of them. In one way or another, all deal with the underlying and generally unstated generational tensions between children and adults. "Some Representations of Childhood in Wordsworth's Poetry" by Steven Marcus, for example, focuses on three of Wordsworth's po-