10 Norman Holland¹

[1. The key for Holland citations is: BRF: “The Brain of Robert Frost” (1983-84); CRAP: “Carlos Reads a Poem” (Holland & Kintgen, 1984); DGF: “Driving in Gainesville, Florida” (1984); DY: The Dynamics of Literary Response (1975 [19681); 5RR: 5 Readers Reading (1975a); 1: The I (1985); PIP: Poems in Persons (1973); and UITS: “Unity, Identity, Text, Self” (1975b).]

       Norman Norwood Holland displays no doubt about the proper source for literary theory. “Psychoanalytic psychology” is “our most fruitful way" of “relating literature to human beings,” and “the only psychology useful for studying literary response" (DY v, xiii). “Modern psychoanalysis” “offers the only psychology I know that can explain the choices of particular words which are, after all, the Stoff which I as a literary critic seek out, as well as a particularly important type of human behaviour” (PIP 135). “At the same time, psychoanalysis provides at least some insights into the larger aspects of human experience: learning, politics, the arts, religion, sex, science, love, youth, age, and all the things that make our lives lively. Until some other psychology offers such an extraordinary range from the particular to the general, I do not see how the literary critic has any other choice.”

        The typical salute to literature is performed in very broad terms. The “new psychoanalytic look” sees "literature as a human experience" with “a series of rich analogies and connections” to “life" (PIP 169, 134). “Once we insist" that “literature” is “an organic experience in the minds of men² [2. For Freudian critics, the reference to “men” is no more generic indefinite. Freud's thinking was powerfully determined by the male viewpoint. Holland, in turn, tends to introject the male child's fantasies, as in: “even in early infancy, the child has longed for exclusive possession of his mother" (DY 47). I return to this problem later.] and a part of the great continuum of human experience,” we are led into “very large questions indeed” (PIP 161). By acknowledging that “people are the natural habitat of literature" and of “literary theories,” we may find “ways to understand the most central processes of human life.” A reader who is "learning more about literature” also “learns more of his own inner dynamics” (PIP 134). “We feel the ordering and structuring powers of literature” “as though they were our own"; and become “a larger, wiser self, both deeper and higher-at least for the long moment of a. work of art” (DY 101, 103). We encountered the same thesis in the theorizing of lser (Ch. 8), who is closer to Holland than he acknowledges.³ [3. Both critics reassure us that not just any reading will work. Both distinguish a more uniform and a more diverse stage of reading. Both have a non-predictive conception of the reader. Both have a metaphoric idea of the text entering the reader's mind; Holland agrees more readily with Georges Poulet about this than lser does (cf. 5RR 18 vs. AR 153ff).]

       Again typically, Holland portrays his preferred theory not merely as attractive, but indispensable. “All literature has this basic way of meaning": to “transform the unconscious fantasy discoverable through psychoanalysis into the conscious meanings discovered by conventional interpretation” (DY 28). Hence, “the fantasy psychoanalysis discovers at the core of a literary work has a special status,” .occupying a special prior and primitive place in our mental life,” and “involving the deeper roots of our cumulating lives” (DY 27, 31, 29). So "the psychoanalytic meaning underlies all the others" (DY 27). “It is impossible to understand the “higher” levels," such as “verbal form,” “unless we first recognize the deeper fantasies they are designed to deal with” (DY 238). “We can only talk intelligently” about “form, language, character, plot, genre, sound" “if we recognize that they shape and balance a core of fantasy material” (DY 316). Other critical theories (who must be talking unintelligently) are accorded a derivative place: “a psychoanalytic reading of a literary work” is “not simply a reading parallel to other readings from ideologies, Marxist, Swedenborigan, Christian humanist, or whatever; it is the material from which other such readings are made” (DY 31).

       Holland's career has been shaped by a long struggle with a “bêtec-noire: the problem of subjective and objective” (DY 108). Originally, he was one of those "people" who “become distinctly uneasy at the idea of finding self-expression or personal style or subjectivity in the literary experience”; and who "would like that experience to be objective" (PIP 1). But if “it is impossible” “to look only at the words on the page without modifying them by one's own perceptual matrices,” .reading can never be impersonal and objective” (DY 108; PIP 117). Freud is hailed for his “great achievement" of "setting in motion" the "systematic study of subjectivity” (1, XiV).⁴ [4. Bleich salutes Freud for exactly the same reason (SC 30f). Yet Bleich is ambivalent about resemblances between Holland's theory and his own (Ch. 11). On one side, he told me flatly Holland's main “ideas" were “gotten” from him (an accusation I cannot confirm from studying their works); on the other, he swears that Holland's ideas are badly mistaken, whereas his own are correct.]

       For a time, Holland's solution was to divide reading into the “objective text" and the “subjective experience" (DY 108). The task was “not to sort out subjective from objective but to see how the two combine when we have experiences” (PIP 2). “We, as humans, live in a world which is both objective and subjective, a world where, in some way we have not yet understood, we are able to share subjectivities which remain nevertheless completely private and individual” (PIP 99). “Thus, paradoxically, only by beginning with different subjectivities can we arrive at that consensus about experiences that constitutes all the objectivity subjective beings can have” (5RR 231). “It is only by having objectivity limited that. we can have any objectivity whatever."

        These remarks from steadily later books signal a progression we find among numerous theorists on the contemporary scene -- - Fish, Bleich, Culler, and even (without admitting it) Hirsch. The subject-object division is attenuated by combining the cognitive conception of having knowledge with a performative conception of claiming to have it (Ch. 1). If "objective reality” and “pure experience” are themselves only useful fictions, vanishing points we approach but never reach” (PIP 2), asserting we know them must be an action in progress, a utopian projection. A critic who “claims his reading is “objective” or “authoritative" is.really” making the hopeful “assertion that others can share his private synthesis, using a communal acceptance to achieve personal mastery for themselves -- - and for the critic” (PIP 130). Still, Holland did not so much abandon his ambitions of objective mastery as shift them from one domain to another, as I shall try to make clear.

       Early in his career, Holland was “enormously influenced and pleased by the so-called “New Criticism" and became devoted to "the close examination of particular texts for plot parallels, repeated images, figures of speech, structure, myths, points of view” (DY xiii). He misprized traditional criticism as “literate, urbane chatter,” “emotional effusions," "maundering about in literary history or anecdote,” “morocco-bound and old-madeiraed musings, " and “a private, sanctum” for "mandarins," scholiasts,” and "panjandrums" (DY 309, 196; PIP 134, 101).⁵ [5; This low estimation clashes with the move whereby Holland finds “confirmation” in the way his model” “returns us finally to the very things literary critics have always talked about" (DY 316).

       In contrast, the New Critics performed “the one great achievement” in "literary studies of the past forty or fifty years” by introducing “the careful “objective” study of the literary work as a thing in itself” – “an analysis that often became as objective" as “behaviourist psychology or analytic philosophy” (PIP 101; DY 196).⁶ [6. Holland was for A time impressed by behaviourist psychology, perhaps because it suited his own bodily orientation. But he soon became disenchanted with its mechanistic mentality (cf. PIP 158f; 5RR 228, 275). The classic “physiological variables” such as “galvanic skin reaction” “are too crude, too limited in dimension and number, to correspond to something as subtle as affect” (DY 281). He pictures as “comedy” an experiment measuring the frequency of “fidgeting” in an audience (PIP 154), but elsewhere includes “fidgeting” among the “words people make with their bodies” and among the evidence available to “objective criticism” (5RR 215, 232).] All this was “compelling and attractive” to Holland's own personality, and still is: “I like examining the verbal surface of a text,” he confesses, “looking particularly for an “organic unity" (PIP 112). During his early period, he felt we should “talk, at least initially, about literary works as purely formal entities,” “without reference to author's intention, value, historical background, or anything except the text itself and some dictionary knowledge” (DY xvii). He focused on “observable elements in the literary text,” and “proposed to describe works of literature objectively, as so many words on a piece of paper or spoken aloud” (DY xiii, xvi). Only “then" would he “describe psychologically my own response to that objective stimulus" -- presuming that “the stimuli are, after all, the same” “for me" and “for you.'⁷ [7. The phrasing “objective stimulus” again signals a behaviourist outlook which is undermined elsewhere (see Note 6). Holland felt “the very notion of “response” presupposes a fixed stimulus” (5RR 43); but as far as I know, behaviourism never related the stimulus to a fantasy.]

       Later on, this project seemed unpromising: “the more I worked with real readers, the more I was reminded that a literary work is not a fixed stimulus” (5RR 43). “It is merely” the “language of formal explication which follows the less-than-candid convention that what I attribute to the poem is “in” the poem” (PIP 124). He recognized that his formalist training had given him “the habit of hiding behind a polite fiction, namely, that books do things to people, and critics merely witness their actions like innocent bystanders” (PIP 131, 3). He sees this tendency as a “modest, self-effacing convention," whereas I see it more as a self-aggrandizing tactic to expropriate the authority of the work for one's own reading (Ch. 3).

       Breaking this "habit” cost him considerable effort. "It has been hard for me to look at what goes on “inside” readers instead of simply confining my attention to the surface of the text and presupposing a response” (PIP 113). In the period when he used only his own responses, he did not uphold his promise to “use ‘I’ and ‘you’ and ‘we’ with some care to keep these three levels of discourse clear: subjective, objective, and commonly experienced” (DY xvii). His analyses reveal a mixture instead: “the poem is evoking in me” "primitive feelings”; “We experience sound as a distancing from a parent"; “one can find fantasies from all the levels of child development in this poem"; and so forth (DY 120f, 109, e.a.). Or he'd assign his version to the author: “in fiction” and "in narrative poetry, too, the writer presents a fantasy" (DY 159, e.a.). Or he'd hide behind the text: “the poem defends against the wish to see," or “tries to re-create in the relationship with a lover a simplified, more childish, but more satisfying version of an adult sexual love”; “the Tale starts with phallic, aggressive sexuality, regresses to a more primitive relation between taboo mother and passive son, and finally progresses to genital mutuality”; “the final line" “carries out a typical fantasy”; and so on (DY Ill, 129, 16, 36, e.a.).

       Though he readily conceded that “meaning is not simply “there” in the text," but “is something we construct for the text within the limits of the text,” he was fond of saying that meanings, fantasies, or processes were “embodied” in or by the work (DY 25, 58, 67, 72, 75, 95, 139, 144, 202, 221, 222, 223, 274, 282, 294, 307, 310, 335) -- a fine Freudian locution circumventing the question of interpretation. In Poems in Persons, his diction was more cautious: “novels do not embody defensive strategies; people find them in novels"; “poems do not” "fantasize; people do” (PIP 98). In 5 Readers Reading, his former notion that “these fantasies" “were embodied in the literary work" is cast off as a “fiction" he no longer thinks “useful” (5RR 19).

      As we see, he only gradually repudiated the “older psychoanalytic concept of literature” wherein critics write “as though each literary work had a fixed fantasy content" (5RR 117). To be sure, “one has only oneself for a sensing instrument. I can respond and by a kind of self-analysis get at the things in the literary work that shape the less conscious aspects of my response. I can then guess the same or similar things are shaping the response of others” (DY 134). Yet “I do not mean to imply” that “my own responses” are "correct” or canonical for others"; "I simply hope that if I can show how my responses are evoked, then others may be able to see how theirs are” (DY xvi). His diction shifted accordingly. Early on, he'd say: "I assume you share" “the nuclear fantasy which I am experiencing" (DY 181). Later, he'd say: “naturally, I hope you share my reading, but I know that you may not” (PIP 124). Later still, he'd say: “the reader will use the materials in the story to build, not some fantasy ostensibly “in” the story, but his own characteristic fantasy” (5RR 119).

      And so Holland eventually discarded the idea that “the poem evokes the same experience in different readers -- it doesn't” (PIP 116). He had to revise his “simple credo” in order to face “a salient fact": “different readers read differently, and there seems to be no way of laying the differences to rest” (PIP 113). Although “consensus" may occur because “different readers are using the same material," any “consensus” “must begin, not with the poem," “but with the reader" who "reaches into the poem and takes materials from it with which to achieve an experience within the characteristic pattern of ego choices he uses to minimize anxiety and cope with reality” (PIP 115f).

       Once again typically, Holland, like Iser and Bleich, reassures us: “recognizing the reader's creative role" “does not imply that all readings of a poem have equal merit" (PIP 148). "Any given reader may neglect part of the text, assign idiosyncratic meanings, and be inconsistent or arbitrary." Also, "if we introject a literary work at all, we introject a ready-made psychological process to which only certain responses are possible" (DY 283). “Only some possibilities" “truly fit the matrix” that is "the literary text" (5RR 12).

       As a corrective recourse, "one can judge a reading by a variety of objective criteria: completeness, unity, accuracy, directness,” “logic, coherence,” and “universality" (PIP 148). We might then recognize when a reader is perpetrating “bizarre reworkings” and a “contortion of the words and the plain sense,” or "doing violence to the text or ignoring it” (PIP 116, 118).The theme or content of a poem has to be something one can achieve with a minimum of shoving, heaving, and hauling of the actual words." A "failure” may occur if the reader “lacks the skills" to “build up his psychological process from the work," or “he may be confronting a work which has features he simply cannot accept" (PIP 85f).

         Holland might have been content to let matters rest when he had “succeeded in mastering” literature to his "own satisfaction” (PIP 125). He might have found it sufficient to give readings that "combine” his “very personal feelings and intuitions toward the poem with more logical and objective analysis.” His model would then he a primarily personal construct, an account of what Holland himself, or critics with similar backgrounds, personalities, and interests, do with literary works. Such is the solution Bloom at least purports to adopt (Ch. 16).

       But Holland must contend with his "own characteristic demand for generality of explanation” -- related perhaps to his inclination “to cope with the interactions of people" around him "by finding generalizations from a safe distance” (5RR 277, x). So he decided that even if his response could not be correct or objective, his model could be. He displaced his search for mastery to the level of theory and appropriated a "psychology” he considered "adequate to the problem” of "what goes on in the mind of the reader" (PIP 60).

       His New Critical orientation persisted with a changed focus. He extolled his theoretical framework as "the only general psychology that can talk about an inner experience with as much detail and precision as a New Critic can talk about a text” (DY xvii). In this endeavor, “a reader uses the fine subtle listening” of the New Critics to “listen to himself and to others with the same attention to detail and nuance that formerly was reserved for literature” (PIP 134). By "looking at” “a person” "as if he were a text," Holland would see a "unity" he called “identity” (5RR 259).

        The reading of a poem thus resembles psychotherapy, since in both acts, a unifying scheme of meanings” is “brought to bear” “by the one who interprets" (5RR 260; Fingarette 1963). Diesing's (1971) "holistic" "case-study method" for “social scientists” is also thought to "look more and more like literary analysis as described by Frye or Spitzer” (5RR 261f). Such pronouncements indicate how Holland's career illustrates the application of the same interpretive acumen to a series of changing issues.

       Unlike most critics, Holland was actually trained in psychoanalytic method, rather than merely importing a few psychoanalytic notions that suit his purposes. He moved his centre of gravity to the other side by adopting classic Freudian psychoanalysis as an essentially correct, though incomplete, critical approach. He was resolved to revise literary theory as far as necessary to obtain a match with the Freudian outlook. He thus combined a radical critique of conventional literary theory with an orthodox credence in Freudian ideas. He developed a literary theory as faithful as possible to psychoanalytic theorizing. Most of the cited authorities besides Freud followed the latter fairly closely, such as Karl Abraham and Otto Fenichel.⁸ [8. Abraham (1927) “constructed the “oral character," so important for Holland, by analogy to Freud's "anal character" (Fisher & Greenherg 1977: 82). Rivals to the orthodox Freudian camp, including “existentialists" and "third force psychologists," and, specifically, “Reich, Marcuse, Laing, Lacan, Perls” are dismissed as "gurus” (PIP 164). Jung is snubbed, perhaps because Holland is anxious to dissociate his own method from “myth criticism” (DY 25ff, 260f), which it resembles more than he would like, as when it “claims a kind of validity or authority for” the myth it “prefers" (DY 245). Holland twists Jung's “collective unconscious" into an silly bodily concept assuming that “RNA and DNA" or “brain traces" “carry Grimm's fairy tales” (DY 244, 260).

        The privileged postulates in Holland's model were therefore destined to be the classic Freudian ones. Great emphasis was placed on infantile experiences and imaginings. "Clinical psychoanalysis" "traces the influence of early issues even to the end of life" (DY 32). “We know that character is formed largely in the oedipal and pre-oedipal stages" (DY 334). Moreover, the explanation for “art and life" and “virtually all that we know as living” was to be sought in the “compromise between the mighty opposites of drive and defense” (DY 53). “Any human's act satisfies for him some combination of pleasure-giving and defensive needs, inner inertia and outer pressures to change, personal demands and society's stringencies” (PIP 57). “It is a basic pattern in human behaviour to relate to the rest of the human and non-human world by constructing it from one's characteristic pattern of adaptations through which one then projects and introjects wishes and fantasies" (PIP 149f).

        Holland re-evaluated literature by extending these theses. "Writing itself -- even the very manner and matter” can be seen as the "ego's solution to the demands set by inner and outer reality" (PIP 57). “In the literary transaction, one's fantasies at “higher” levels represent transformations of more primitive fantasies associated with the earliest levels of human development" (PIP 167). “Literature transforms our primitive wishes and fears into significance and coherence, and this transformation gives us pleasure" (DY 30).

       This line of reasoning brings us back to Holland's main hypothesis: "the psychoanalytic theory of literature holds that the writer expresses and disguises childhood fantasies; the reader unconsciously elaborates the fantasy content of the literary work with his own versions of these fantasies" (DY 52). The most basic content of literature is not "conscious and adult and intellectual," but "infantile, primitive, bodily, charged with fear and desire” (DY 27, 29). “It is from such deep and fearful roots of our most personal experience that literature gets its power and drive" (DY 30).

     Freudian criticism faces the problem that Freud did not develop a special theory of language, perhaps because he assigned a determinate function to the early stages of infancy, when language is hardly developed beyond a few demands and commands. Holland remarks that “infant” is derived from “infans,” which “literally means “unable to speak"“ (DY 79). Mentally disturbed patients, Freud's main subjects, also tend to have a limited or disrupted control of language. The Freudian perspective therefore projects language in the subsidiary role of an expression, commentary, or disguise for mental images or fantasies related to drives or defenses, as when the “analyst" “transforms the patient's words into pictures and feelings" (5RR 257; Greenson 1960). Language appears less as a system with independent principles than as a superstructure imposed upon body-language and body-imagery-something to be "approached through the libidinal phases" (DY 34).

       A striking demonstration is Holland's straight-faced endorsement of Edmund Bergler's (1950) “suggestion: that writers may acquire their predisposition to become writers because in early infancy they use words coming out of their mouths as an important defense against masochist impulses aroused by their mothers putting food in" (DY 79). Conversely, “as readers, we do the opposite: we do not emit words to defend against passively being fed.” Bergler also speculated that writers emit words as a way of defending against the fearful desire to obliterate oneself in a total at-oneness with some primal mother” (DY 38). Another bodily explanation is that “the ear may come to stand for the anus -- sounds are common anal images” (IDY 40) (e.g. “farce” as “farts”?).⁹ [9 Holland's interpretations tend to rate “sound” rather low (“disillusioning," “harsh,” “agitated,” etc.) as compared to “sight" (“hopeful,” "sweet,’ ‘calm,” etc.) (DY116,119ff, 212;PIP123). For him, “sight becomes linked in our minds with being fed, with a nurturing mother,” whereas “we experience sound as a distancing from a parent" (DY 119f). However, Freud testifies that the "repetition” of word sounds is "a source of pleasure in itself” (DY 145). This association is argued on the grounds that attitudes toward language are formed" in the “anal stage," when “a good deal” of “language” is "devoted to commands and decisions" about "toilet training” (DY 39). By a further extension, “a writer, often, will collect jargons -- take them into himself and then excrete them in his works" (DY 40).

        Such explications show the reductiveness of using infantile body functions to derive language, crudely pictured as the movement of sounds in and out of bodily orifices. Among the most important factors that get lost (or Berglerized) are the specifies of meaning and the difference between speech and writing, the latter not being done with the mouth (not even by Flaubert when he drank ink in order to describe Emma Bovary's agonies). Since infants don't read or write (not even about food or excrement), these acts get forced into dubious analogies with the things kids do do.

       A less reductive approach would be to “extend” Freud's “linking of dreams and jokes into a model for literature in general” (DY 54). ¹⁰ [10. A joke is the lead example in Dynamics, (DY 3f, 8-12), and many more are treated in Laughing (1982), which is not proffered as literary theory. Holland suggests that jokes qualify as “literature," since they are "language with a literary form" (letter; cf. the juxtaposition of “joke" and “lyric,” DY 144). But for reasons argued in Ch. 2, I wouldn't accept any such definition.] These sources at least deal directly and subtly with symbolic imagery. Following “Freud's essay on jokes," Holland places "condensation," whereby “two or more lines of thought combine in a single representative," "at the root of all particular linguistic effects of literature,” such as “rhyme, alliteration, stanza-form," “ambiguity,” and “wit” (DY 58f). Similarly, “in dreams, any particular element in the manifest dream generally expresses several elements in the underlying dream thoughts,” and vice-versa (DY 59). Such parallels offer a bridge between presumed psychic events and the New Critical project of detailed interpretation.

        From the same Freudian sources came Holland's central proposal to construe the “intellectual meaning” of language (his name for what Hirsch might call “verbal meaning”) as a “transformation of the unacceptable fantasy content” (DY 180f; cf. DY 128).¹¹ [11. Holland also designates meaning as “the idea that informs” the text (DY 5, 21, 236, 306).] Meaning is (or “is analogous to”) the “sublimation of an infantile” or “primitive” “fantasy” “transformed” into “social, moral, and intellectual themes which are consciously satisfying to the ego” (DY vi, 12, 104). This “act of meaning” provides “pleasure" in several ways (DY 184). In addition to “economy, “ “condensation,” and “mastery” over the “fantasy,” the "feeling we are engaged in a socially, morally, or intellectually responsible enterprise assuages guilt and anxiety.” Holland magisterially declares "meaning” “a sop thrown to the superego,” here too a peripheral phenomenon or a pretext. In this scheme, we cannot analyse meaning without a critic who “listens with the analyst's “third ear" (DY 317).

      The Freudian concept of “defense” denotes “the unconscious process" “the ego puts into action automatically at a signal of danger from the external world, the id, or the superego” (DY 57f). Several types are distinguished (DY 53-56). "Repression keeps an idea or feeling from consciousness." “Denial” prevents seeing something in reality we don't want to see. " “Displacement” moves a value" from “one thing” to “another.” “Symbolization” connects via “physical or psychic similarity." “Reversal” and “reaction-formation” convert into “opposites" an “object” or a “response," respectively. “Projection” changes an "internal perception" into an “external" one. “Introjection" “brings inside” an “impulse initially perceived as outside the self. " “Splitting" "breaks up one thing into several. " And so on. Holland associates these "defenses" with traditional literary concepts. He links "symbolization” with “figures of speech,” such as the “trope” of the “simile"; "reaction-formation" with “irony”“; “splitting" with the "Complex, multifaceted work of art”; and so forth (DY 54, 57, 56). ¹² [12. "Splitting off different psychological positions into different characters" is detected in “myriad works,” where the “common ancestry" is “symbolized by kinship or juxtaposition” (DY 56). Fiedler makes much of splitting (WL 133, 200; NT 90; LD 218, 384).]

        This line of argument leads to his major notion of “form as defense” previously proposed by Lesser (1962). For the writer, the "hard work of formally shaping the medium also satisfies multiple needs of drive and defense" (PIP 56). For the reader, “many meanings are possible; many forms are not,” because .form operates defensively, against the press of the fantasy toward expression” (DY 189). So “form must be much more precise than meaning” (DY 314). In fact, “the slightest tinkering with the wording of a joke or a lyric radically changes its effect” (DY 144). This tenet pays homage not only to the formalist orientation of the New Critics, but also to the determinism of Freud, for whom "our psychoanalytic training forbids our assuming that these words can have been without significance or chosen at haphazard"; "an explanation must be found for every detail"“ (PIP 157; cf. 5RR 257).¹³ [13. Waelder's (1930) “theory of multiple function” also is deemed to show “how every psychic act is over-determined," because “any ego choice represents a new compromise among eight groups of problems” (PIP 47). Explaining the production or reception of an entire literary text in those terms would be an immense task]  Thus, Holland can be a servant of two masters and still attain his own mastery when he feels his “analysis" of the poem has both "justified" “the presence of every image and word in the poem" and “rationalized” his “pleasure" (PIP 124f),¹⁴ [14.This result wouldn't be terribly elevating if “rationalization” is "finding intellectual reasons for something patently illogical" (DY 57). I would rather define it as displacing one's real reasons with those more satisfying to the ego.] He has assuaged his anxiety that "'close reading"“ "often seems overly intellectual, even sterile, certainly far removed from the roots of our pleasure in literature” (DY 7).

       Holland divided his model into "four closely meshed principles" “governing the way a reader re-creates a literary work" (PIP 76-78; cf. 5RR 114-22; UITS 124-26). The model projects a “full circle” of confronting the text, moving away from it, and returning to it. First, “style creates itself: the reader tries, as he proceeds through the work, to compose from it a literary experience in his particular lifestyle" (PIP 77). Second, “defense must match defense”: "the reader" must re-create for himself from the text rather precisely all or part of the structures by which he wards off anxiety in real life." Third, “the reader can very freely shape for himself from the literary materials he has admitted a fantasy that gives him" "the pleasure he characteristically seeks." Fourth, “the reader “makes sense” of the text: he transforms the fantasy he has created from it to arrive at an intellectual or moral “point” in what he has read.” Though Holland suggests that the “four principles” "all go on together” (UITS 124), they seem to interlock in a real-time sequence or series of loops, each operation apparently needing the results of the one before it.¹⁵ [15. Compare the uses of the temporal “once": "once" the reader "has achieved the defensive forms and admitted at least part of the story into his psyche, he easily goes on to transform…”; “once the reader has achieved both the delicate matching of all or part of his defensive structure and the much more open adaptation,” “he will “make sense” of the text” (5RR 121; also in PIP 79; UITS, 125, 126). In the “feedback" model of DGF, timing would be organized in flexible configurations of loops, which looks more plausible.

 Making "acsthetic¹⁶ [16. The "aesthetic" is thus included in the unification of content. The concept of “beauty" has no role I can find in this model; it could only be some variant of “pleasure," presumably elicited by a successful transformation of fantasies that would not consciously he considered “beautiful.” Kant's conception of beauty as pleasure without interest is obviously ruled out. On Freud's neglect of “beauty,” see Note 22 to Ch. 10.] intellectual, and moral “sense" of the text (PIP 81) occurs fairly late in this model of the reading process, and in a subsidiary way to “consolidate and affirm” a “response" mainly determined by “the fantasy level" (5RR 286). Form figures strongly in initial reading, whereas content in the usual literary sense figures strongly in final reading; in between, the major activity is a defensive associating and transforming of fantasies. Where other critics envision a direct surface route from reading to verbal meaning, Holland envisions a deep and circuitous “tunnel" for much of the route (cf. 5RR 222); and his strong claims resemble a stringent ordinance that all traffic must pass through” the Holland tunnel. This commitment in turn favours a characteristic tunnel vision whereby Holland skilfully zeroes in on precisely the aspects of reading most amenable to his procedures and marginalizes the rest.

       The design of Holland's model situated meaning “in a space which reader and work create together” (PIP 98). “It does not matter whether the meaning is “in” the text or whether the reader supplies it”; “either way, meaning opens up a kind of sublimatory path for fantasy gratification” (DY 185). Since the reader “has duplicated his own style of mind, neither he nor we can see any difference between his characteristic mental processes and those that seemingly belong to the work” (PIP 98). Hence, “the question “Where is the fantasy and defense, in the work or in the reader?” ceases to have any meaning.” But this "question” was not laid to rest so easily, and Holland keeps revising his thinking as he tries to answer it anyway.

        Like Iser and Bleich, Holland views reading as composed of a more uniform and limiting stage followed by a more personal and freewheeling stage. “The reader reconstructs” "part of his characteristic defense pattern of adaptive or defensive strategies from the work, and this re-creation must be rather delicate and exactly made” (PIP 98). Thereafter, the reader can use “material” from “the work” in order to “very freely create the kind of fantasy that is important to him. He then (again, with great freedom) transforms that fantasy by means of the defensive strategies he has created toward the coherence and significance he consciously demands. "

       We again obtain a hybrid design. Fidelity to the text and its verbal forms, the New Critical response, goes to the earlier stage of reading. Freedom to create associations, the Freudian response, rules the other stages. The stability of the text is thereby prevented from clashing with the variation of responses.

        In this manner, Holland dissolved his original dilemma of different readings for the same work. If “all, really, that meaning-as-defense need do” is “offer a mastery of fantasy content," then “a reader does not” "need to settle for himself the exact, stringent" meaning of the text (DY 185). Nor “need there be only one central meaning; almost any kind of coherent thought about the work will open up paths of gratification, so long as it “makes sense” of the text” -- that is, makes it acceptable to the conscious ego and so permits the fantasy content a disguised and sublimated gratification.” “We can accept a wide variety of possible meanings to achieve literary pleasure; almost any kind of interpretation we derive from a text will get it past the censor and permit our egos to enjoy the fantasy content" (DY 314).

       Such tolerance toward meaning may seem reckless in a literary critic; but Holland could afford it because he had taken over the privilege of determining the (allegedly more important) fantasy. Later on, the marked variety of fantasies he detected in his readers forced him to relinquish this privilege in favours of the power to decide the reader's “identity theme,” a concept I shall examine soon. This theoretical development steadily shifted the critic's authority from one mode of ostensible stability to another: from textual meaning to central fantasy to identity theme.

       In Holland's "transformational” model, the fantasy is primary on the author's side as well. Instead of having formulated an “intention" “latent in the work as a “message"“ for the reader to “recover,” the author is claimed to have "begun with a fantasy," such as “feminizing a phallic symbol” (PIP 117; DY 28). The author's job is to deliver "building blocks” or “raw materials” for readers to use (PIP 143, 96, 117, 126; 5RR 201).¹⁷ [17. Holland recently deploys the term “promptuary,” “a type of book in the sixteenth century that stored quotations and other structured information from which one could copy to construct one's own book” (letter; cf. 5RR 286).] " The fantasy a reader creates may or may not coincide with the fantasy the writer had while writing” (5RR 117). "The poet does not speak to the reader directly so much as give the reader materials from which to achieve the poem in his own style” (PIP 99). “The maker cannot impose his meaning on any reader who does not wish to accept it”; “he can only exclude certain possibilities by the choices he makes which limit for once and for all the raw materials from which his audience will create its experience” (PIP 117). "Many writers, as they write, imagine a reader,” a process that “assuages the writer's inner needs"; but this construction (as lser also notes, AR 29) “does not predict the ways of real readers" (5RR 219).

       The overall purpose of “literary creativity" and "writing” is to attain the “ego's solution to the demands set by inner and outer reality" (PIP 57). Holland follows Robert Waelder's (1930) conjecture that “every psychic act results from the ego's actively and passively seeking an optimum balance of the forces impinging on it” (PIP 46). Hence, an author's “creative writing" “satisfies" a "combination of pleasure-giving and defensive needs” as well as "personal" and “social” “pressures” (PIP 57). This thesis seems to deny the special ontological status of literature, a move made by Hirsch for quite different motives. Holland was assailed by Iser for dissolving the "aesthetic quality" of literature (AR 40).

       “Creative style” “stabilizes the psychic economy" peculiar to the individual: it "is his and his alone" (PIP 57). "Writing” can become a permanent and preferred solution” if it "functions multiply for us." Though finding “the various attempts to define artistic creativity as a function of “neurosis" “clumsy and misinformed," Holland believes “mental illness" and "creative writing" share a common impulse, namely to “act out the same underlying myth"; “the key variable is style" (PIP 47, 58).

      The author's biography enters when we "read back from literary style to life style” (DY 241). "We can go from the text” to the “mind” of the “writer” and "from thence to his life to confirm a pattern of fantasy and defense" (DY 242). Again, New Critical formalism gets a Freudian turn: “a writer's biographer ought to be able to read back from his subject's preferred formal devices to the defenses they represent to the circumstances in life that charged those defensive modes with pleasurable possibilities” (DY 240f).

       However, Freudian research emphasizing infantile experiences is hard to integrate with the customary historical documentation dealing mostly with adult ones. “One does not come easily by materials from so early in life, and only a great deal of research could tell the full story of the poet's early development” (PIP 54). The critic may proceed by “inference,” or at worst, by “totally unprovable statements about authors” lives” (DY 241; PIP 165). Early childhood records would probably be unenlightening anyway, because, as I have said, the activities of infants are poorly differentiated in comparison to those of adults or to the layout of a literary text or corpus.

       In practice, Holland uses occasional biographical facts rather informally. The timing of H.D.'s “most distinguished creative work" during the World Wars is made into a “graphic illustration of the theory that artistic creativity stems from the wish to reconstitute what has been lost in aggressive fantasy" (PIP 38). “Frost's attempted suicide" in trying “to drown himself in the Great Dismal Swamp” is read as a "submission to a big mysterious entity,” in accord with Frost's “identity theme” (BRF 370). The “evidence that Conrad himself attempted suicide," on the other hand, is to indicate what a “swamp or sea might have stood for in Conrad's mind" – “irrational or self-destructive aggression" (DY 233f). As “confirmation” for the thesis that “the sea in “Dover Beach” evokes feelings like those toward a nurturing mother," Holland adduces “Arnold's letter” “describing himself as “one who looks upon water as the Mediator between the inanimate and man" (DY 122f). These accounts show the the problem I raised against Hirsch: that authorial evidence does not bring independent confirmation of verbal meaning, but only confirms what the critic has already postulated.

        Holland is delighted to have a better groundwork when an author, H. D., left an “account of her analysis by Freud” himself, which with “a little reading between the lines” can be “unscrambled” "to give an absolutely unparalleled picture of the infantile forces that engendered a poet's life pattern" and "the very style of her writing” (PIP 9). Her “longing” to “create a work of art" resulted from an intention to “immortalize an inner wish" and to “re-create a lost masculinity or a “hard” ungiving mother” (PIP 43). “Hard, firm works of art” might serve to “replace the missing part” and “the masculinity it represented" (PIP 52). "Signs” evidently achieved, with the least effort, the most effect in closing the gap" "between herself and her mother, her father, her brothers, a gap in her body" ,and she became a writer” (PIP 56).

        The most salient (not to say overweening)  fact in this biographical account is simply that H. D. was a woman. Undeniably, by any contemporary standard, orthodox Freudian theorizing is vehemently sexist -- virtually a phallic mythology of male superiority, as Millett and Irigaray demonstrate in detail (Ch. 18-19). Holland no longer holds the attitude wherein he once cheerfully wrote: women “have as it were, already been castrated"; “the little girl" “feels, as it were, that the damage has already been done”; "the mother is contemptible in that she too has lost the precious organ" (DY 48). But though “Freud was wrong about women in general,” he may have been right about this “one woman" (letter from Holland). ¹⁸ [18. “The research literature" summed up in Fisher and Greenberg's (1977: 395) comprehensive survey in fact “does not indicate that the female has a more inferior concept of her body than the male." Nor does it “support Freud's notion that the male has a dramatically more severe set of superego standards than the female.” Contrast Holland's remark: “Freud was fond of saying that in women the conscience was less developed” (DY 48).]

        The problem of sexism is somewhat attenuated by relating literary response to "the developmental phases prior to latency, before fantasies and reading choice became markedly different for boys and girls" (DY 51). But the model definitely projects the male reader's response, notably in the oral and oedipal fantasies about the desired mother; the few references to the father portray him mainly as figure competing with a male child, or threatening to castrate him (e.g. DY 42, 46).                                                       

       As an interpretive aid for his approach, Holland presents a “dictionary” of the “fantasies” “we find" “very generally in literature and in both men and women" (DY 62). This list is to illuminate how "the text" "presents us with a central core of fantasy that is evidently much more universal" than our “very personal and idiosyncratic” "associations to small details of the text.” The "dictionary must be confined" to "the libidinal phases,” and thus to “oral, anal, urethral, phallic, and oedipal fantasies” (DY 33). The justification is that “the reference of literature to the child suggests the universality of its appeal better than does referring to the more individualized adult.” Young children readily fall into "personality types,” whereas "by the time we reach latency or puberty, we have become quite individual"; "adolescence” is a time for “trying out a variety of identities" (DY 33, 334). Hence, the "fantasies of latency or puberty" and “in the adulthood beyond, are far too various to be generalized about.”

       This argument makes a virtue out of the standard Freudian liability of fixating all explanation on infancy. The undifferentiated nature of the categories is deployed to assert their universality. The same fixation obliges the critic to see reading as a regression sending the reader back to an age where Freudian concepts can take hold. For interpretation, the infantile phases handily limit the repertory of themes and images. Holland felt “stung by a comment” that every "traditional Freudian literary analysis" “turns out to say the same thing” (PIP 139). Though Holland's works disprove this charge, the set of childhood fantasies his “dictionary" contains is certainly far smaller than the set of literary topics, plots, and images avid readers could find in literature. This few-versus-many structure compels the interpreter to struggle with utmost ingenuity against reductionism and blurring of detail.

        Holland readily admits that “there are few symbols with universal unconscious meaning"; Freud himself "cautioned” "against one-to-one symbolic decodings,” wryly observing that “sometimes,” "'a cigar is just a cigar"“ (PIP 29; DY 60). Disdain is expressed for “the old-fashioned kind of symbol-twirling that used to pass for psychoanalytic criticism" (5RR 218). “Symbols are flexible and dynamic: they vary with the context. They do not represent a code of one-to-one correspondences that can be looked up in some “Freudian” dreambook. The only one who can really tell what unconscious meaning a symbol has is the one who is using or responding to it” (DY 57).

       Yet in his New Critical drive to "justify” "every image and word” (cf. PIP 125), Holland assumed that "all important objects" have the "dual reality” of "thing and symbol” (PIP 151). He had no doubt that “any plot or symbolism" "will express for us fantasies derived from our experience of our own bodies and our parents"“ (DY 261). Living up to that motto led to disturbing generalizations. He averred that "every woman in our lives is partly a mother, every man partly a father," so that “almost any interpersonal relationship has oedipal elements"; and drew the “general rule" that “a work of literature builds on an oedipal fantasy whenever it deals with a relationship involving more than two persons"; or that “any work of art dealing in depth with relations of love and hate between people is likely to contain some oedipal fantasies" (DY 46f). Though these "fantasies" may be "especially various," we can “easily” "identify" them "by looking at the fictional women as mothers and the fictional men as fathers and sons” (DY 50) (no daughters??). We can be particularly sure that "dark, unknown, obscure, banished, or debased persons" "symbolize" the “forbidden love object" (DY 49f).

       This breezy generality is typical of much of Holland's “dictionary." Again privileging the male viewpoint, he, says “the phallus can be expressed in an astonishingly wide range of symbols" (DY 60). “The entire body” or "the hands" or “anything that keeps the hands busy, " such as “camera, “ “tools, " or “playing cards, “ “can be defensive substitutes for a phallus" (DY 59f). Moreover, “because the child's interest in his genitals is involved with his sexual knowledge and discoveries, his mind itself can sometimes serve as a symbol for these parts of his body” (DY 43). Indeed, “the "eyes, hands, legs, head, or mind can all symbolize the phallus in castration fantasies.” Or, "the phallus becomes the visible narcissistic embodiment of one's own autonomy." In literature, "almost any strongly aggressive or assertive plot is likely to be phallic," as well as "stories that sharply distinguish the sexes,” or even stories that don't, for instance, by "bringing in homosexuality” (DY 43). The "threat" of “castration” is “symbolized” by “cutting off the head, loss of self-determination, loss of sanity" (DY 15).

       The “primal scene fantasy," wherein the child “watches what he takes to be the sadistic, bloody violence of his parents in the struggle of love ending in a death-like sleep," is to be assumed for such “clusters of images” as "darkness, a sense of vagueness and the unknown, mysterious noises in night and darkness"; “vague movements, shapes shifting and changing, nakedness, things appearing and disappearing”; or "images of fighting and struggling, blood, the phallus as weapon" (DY Ill, 46).¹⁹ [19. And any weapon gets interpreted as a phallus as a matter of course, even that of Sir John Falstaff (Phallstaff?) (DY 59), whose amorous initiatives always miscarry as badly as his martial ones

       Equations of such breadth should be applicable to nearly any literary work. But should something appear unrelated, it can be interpreted as a defense against the images one wishes to find. For example, “fog, mist, sweet smells, pure air, light, even, ultimately, logos, the word of God” are all classified as "transformations” of an "anal" "preoccupation with dirt” (DY 40). The "primal scene" fantasy is diagnosed not merely in “images of fighting and struggling," but in “images of quietness” and “motionlessness” (DY 46). The "urethral" focus on "fluids" is extended to “their opposites, such as fire" (DY 41). This tactic further extends the critic's leeway to get a Freudian reading even when textual evidence appears contradictory or missing. Since Holland believed the "primal scene" to be the "well-documented and well-nigh universal unconscious meaning” of “watching stage performances" (DY 110f),²⁰ [20 If so, it's odd no play I can think of -- not even by authors who revelled in openly presenting sexuality and brutality for shock effect, such as Hebbel, Jahnn, and Artaud -- shows a child watching parental intercourse as murderous rape. Novels could be a better place to search, as Fiedler remarks (LD 345).] he set to work showing that Shakespeare's “To-morrow” soliloquy (Macbeth, V, iv, 19-27) is a “handling" of "a familiar fantasy --. perceiving and denying the primal scene" (DY 114). I wasn't a bit surprised to see the “candle” enlisted in “phallic symbolism” (DY 111) -- par for the (inter)course.²¹ [21. In his classic book on dreams, Freud refers to the use of candies in female masturbation, in connection with a ribald student song.] But I was nonplussed to read that "walking distances sexual activity into another kind of erect action," on the grounds that “the phallus with its power to stand erect becomes identified with the boy's own recently acquired power to stand up" (DY 11, 42).²² [22. This “identification” seems to conflate disparate senses of the term “erect,” one spatial (as in rectangle"), one anatomical (as in “rigid”).] To extract the “primal scene,” Holland converts “days" into “nights," and the “player” into a “parent” (DY 112). Far from feeling that Shakespeare's imagery has been explained, I am more perplexed than before at the new text that has supplanted the original.

       Holland says his reading can resolve the "illogical" movement of the passage "from metaphor to metaphor” by uncovering “the basic pattern of impulse and defense" (DY 107). In Elizabethan rhetoric, though, the mixing of metaphors was so common and luxuriant that such a passage would hardly seem incoherent enough to require translation into a different construct.

       Besides, Holland ignores the lines immediately preceding the speech, where Macbeth is told of the queen's death and says "she should have died hereafter": “there would have been a time for such a word” (V, iv, 16-18). The theme is therefore set as junction and disjunction between “time" and “word" in regard to death. The passage can be read by constructing a network of conceptual associations among its terms: time (“ to-morrow,” "yesterdays,” “time," "day," "hour"), word (“ syllable,” “tale"), sound (“ heard," "told," "sound," “fury"), movement (“ creep,” “pace," "way," "walking," "struts"), illumination (“ lighted," "candle," "shadow"), end ("death," "out," "last,” “no more”), and insubstantiality (“petty," "brief,” "poor," "shadow,” "fools,” “idiot," "signifying nothing") (cf. Beaugrande 1979a). I feel reassured to hear that the loss of life – and not “the tense terrible sexual imaginings of the night" -- "signifies nothing" (cf. DY 111f). I can only conclude that Holland himself happens to be strongly “interested" in "seeing and then not seeing primal scenes" (DY 143).

        Holland seemed willing to call such “readings" “farfetched," or “strange," “astonishing,” “lame," etc. (DY 112, 156; PIP 121; DY 32, 137). (“ Positing farfetched connections" is at one point listed as a "sin" that does "violence to the text,” PIP 146.) But these admissions were usually preludes to a series of defensive maneuvers during which his reading was not retracted. One "farfetched” reading received "confirmation” from the “faintest echoes” detected in the "more conventional readings” of “other critics”; another “peeped through" their “phrasing” (a good Freudian locution too, that) (DY 112f, 271). If a critic doesn't get the same reading, then such "fantasies are less available or less threatening to him"; to find out why, we might need to “know unseemly things" about his "personality” (DY 114). This prospect could discourage a critic from disputing a Freudian reading.

        Holland is extremely gratified when a work "coincides quite strikingly with clinical phenomena”; H.D.'s poem “There is a spell" uses “shellfish" imagery that “in a dream" or a “free association” would be "almost certainly drawing on fantasies, themes, or issues from that first chapter of infancy when the mouth was our chief way to meet the world" (PIP 107f). But Holland digs further down when such coincidences aren't manifest. Reading Matthew Arnold, he says that “though they are very deeply buried, words like “organs”, “ends,” and “serve” have sexual connotations” which “Arnold did not consciously intend" (DY 156). Nonetheless, the words suggest that “Arnold's quite reasonable intellectual position, that criticism should eschew practicality, has unconscious roots in a wish to avoid sexual touchings.” The inverse of this claim should be that critics who stress practical ends, such as Fiedler, Bleich, and (in a special sense) Bloom, must be unconsciously eager for sexual touchings -- an "unseemly” theorem indeed.

       Certainly, Freudian readings seem apt for works with appropriate themes and expressions. The selection of explicitly sexual materials, such as a Playboy joke, or the Wife of Bath's tale, greatly enhances the plausibility of Holland's libidinal interpretations -- no doubt the reason he put them at the beginning of his Dynamics (DY 3-4, 8-27). A Rose for Emily, the featured text for 5 Readers Reading, is eminently designed to bring up Freudian issues, such as anal fixations on dirt, Oedipal wishes between daughter and father, primal scenes with love enacted as murder, and so on. The scene in On the Road where the characters "urinate off the back of a speeding truck" is enlisted for the idea that "the early restless novels of Jack Kerouac instance quite fully the urethral in literature" (DY 41).

        Yet overt correspondence is problematic if our theoretical premise is that libidinal content must get transformed before it can be expressed. Explicit representations of fantasies should logically count as refutations rather than as confirmations of the premise. The recourse of assuming that the fantasies escaped the writer's vigilance is hardly plausible if writers are masterfully defensive in their control of literary form. The presented fantasy might be the transformation of some other fantasy, for instance, Kerouac's urination image being a disguised homosexual fantasy; yet in that case, it would not “instance the urethral,” but the “phallic" (cf. DY 43).

       The only forthright solution I can see is to limit the universality and probability of fantasy responses by gauging the design and themes of the works as well as the identity and predispositions of the readers. Certain works encourage readers to associate with infantile fantasies more than others do; and writers may consciously and deliberately exploit that aspect, especially after Freud's theories were popularized (D. H. Lawrence, for instance, cf. SX 346f, 353f). We might obtain some gradients for measuring how likely Holland's "transformational” model is to apply in particular cases. So far, though, he resists this reservation.

       Holland once condemned criticism that makes “psychological assumptions about the impact of poetry and fiction on men's minds," but no "attempt to validate them” (DY xii). “Inevitably, the critical conclusions” “are the weaker," a complaint he apparently lodges against a whole parade from Plato to the New Critics (DY ix-xii). Like Robert Lane (1961), Holland “takes literary critics to task” for their “almost willful refusal to use ordinary systematic procedures of classification, theory testing, or methodology" (DY xviii).

       In contrast, Holland's Dynamics vowed to “create” "at least a testable hypothesis” (DY xvii). “Experimentation” can determine “whether the model itself” is “correct”; "a psychologist skilled in designing experiments could confirm or deny the conclusions reached here" (DY 316, xvii). This factor was thought to make his model “unlike most literary theories” (DY xvii), but I think every literary theory may imply a testable hypothesis which the critic usually fails to see as such, let alone to look for empirical confirmations from representative groups of authors or readers.

        Before he began testing, Holland sought to confirm his model by invoking previous findings of “psychoanalysis," which, he avowed, “is not an ideology” because it is “clinical and experiential” (DY 31). He felt “very close to the immediate data of couch and clinic,” to the mass of evidence” from “thousands of case histories” (DY 32, 245, 27). The “impulses” and “defenses” he postulated “are not “constructs” or “hypotheses" but "things that many people have directly observed in dreams, in children's play, and in the psychoanalyses of both children and adults" (DY 32). He reassured us that “psychoanalytic studies by the hundreds demonstrate the presence of these fantasies in literature" (DY 52). “Because we know these fantasies clinically, because they have to do with the primitive, unconscious part of our mental life, we can safely say they are what gives literature its astonishing power over us” (DY 310).

         This argument raises three serious problems. The first is that, as far as I have been informed, the clinical evidence is not literary, and the literary evidence is not clinical. ²³ [23 I am indebted to the late Michel Grimaud of Wellesley College for his comprehensive and expert opinion on this question.] Virtually all these “demonstrations” consist of psychoanalysts or literary scholars discovering “fantasies" in literary works much the same way Holland did, by magisterial assertion. Since these analysts were extremely interested and skilled in detecting such fantasies, the evidence is circular. What is proven may be not that the works contain infantile fantasies, but that the latter can always be projected by people highly trained and determined to do so. As we have seen, the categories are flexible enough to apply to almost anything, and the procedures of application offer wide leeway for finding correlations. Holland should have warned us that his “clinical” “evidence” included few experiments with representative reader groups experiencing literature. ²⁴ [24. Such evidence is not for instance provided by either of Holland's most favoured source works, Kris (1952) and Lesser (1957) (cf. DY xii; PIP 174). And evidence in older research may not support a model that renounces the basic procedures, such as sifting “works of art" for “clues to the writer's childhood, neuroses, or sexual idiosyncrasies"; or assuming that art “transmits" “drive gratification with relatively little modification from form” (PIP 142; DY 296f; cf. Alexander, 1963).]

        The second problem emerges when Holland explains how to look for “fantasies" in "dreams, slips of the tongue, clichés, jokes, advertising, myths, folklore, proverbs, and of course, in works of art of all kinds (even philosophies and scientific disciplines)” (DY 51f). We can get “quite overwhelming" “evidence" "for these fantasies” if we “look" at “the world of human behaviour around us” in “a disinterested, scientific frame of mind” (DY 51). Precisely this “frame of mind” is what Freudian theorizing denies: “we are not quasi-scientific observers of a phenomenon outside ourselves” (DY 272). "The scientifically minded man will see verifiable realities” which are actually a product of “transforming” a “fantasy" "into a synthesis and unity that he finds consciously integrating and satisfying" (5RR 125). An analyst who, like Freud and Holland, already believes that at “virtually every moment of our lives we manage fantasies defensively" (DY 161) will be “satisfied” by bringing the “realities” into line.

.      The third problem is to portray this model as a result of making a universal principle more specific. “To explain a phenomenon is to relate it to principles more general than itself; therefore, “to say one can analyse literary experiences by principles applicable to all human experiences is simply to say one can explain “literary experiences” (DY 309). This argument has force only if Holland can genuinely show that “we absorb literature like the rest of the outside world” (5RR 210), an assumption convincingly contradicted by most aestheticians (Ch. 2). Even he may say the contrary: “the most basic of artistic conventions” is “that "literary or artistic experience comes to us marked off from the rest of our experiences in reality,” by virtue of a “far more orderly structure,” “a longer, deeper range of response,” and so on (DY 70, 101, 283). If this assessment is valid, then we cannot so easily jump from “the world of human behaviour" over to literary response.

       The problem remains if that response is instead compared to abnormal behaviour. This tactic surfaces when Holland offers “clinical evidence," not merely as “analogies,” but as "confirmations" -- the processes of "psychoanalysis, hypnosis, and dreaming,” involving a “persistence of adult ego-functions along with an encapsulated regression” (DY 89). "We might well be in the same schizoid state when we are engrossed in a literary “entertainment”; certainly, the behavioural signs” of that engrossment resemble our behaviour in analysis, hypnosis, and dreaming." “Absurd” theatre in particular “creates in us a state approximating schizophrenia, affectlessness, concretised metaphors, klang associations, depersonalisation, an unclear relation of self to object"; “intellection” can then be applied as “a self-defeating way of dealing with this miniature psychosis" (DY 177).²⁵ [25. If the “crisis of self-object differentiation” is "described” as “an inability to distinguish between subjective struggle to master such a "crisis.”]

        The same mode of comparison adduces “motor inhibition” to explain the "basic convention” that “we do not expect to act as a result of literary or artistic experience"; “the work of art” “presents itself as divorced from usefulness" (DY 70). Such analogies preserve the difference between everyday behaviour and literature by situating the latter in the domain of the neurotic; and this thesis too is far from proven (cf. Wellek and Warren).

        In any case, Holland's argument by “clinical evidence” fades when he repudiates the "older psychoanalytic concept of literature” whereby “each literary work had a fixed fantasy content" (5RR 117). Psychoanalysts are understandably reluctant to admit that their diagnoses project their own fantasies into the patient. But Holland gradually acknowledged as much for the literary works he interpreted. “I much prefer to look at the fantasies in literary works through what we know of the fantasies typical of the various libidinal phases associated with child development” (DY 33). This preference is “close to clinical observation” in a more unflattering sense than he realized: by putting the fantasizing analyst at the centre of the transaction.

       To describe the role of personality in response, the reader was assigned what Heinz Lichtenstein (1965) called an “identity theme”: an “invariant style running all through a person's chosen behaviours" (DY vif). “Once a person's identity theme is established, it never changes”; “but the individual can grow and change infinitely within that style” (5RR 60). "Adding variation” to an “identity theme” is thus a “general model" of how “a human being experiences” (5RR 231). “Identities in this sense begin very early, presumably with one's biological endowment and prenatal influences" (5RR 58). The theme might be “inherited" (Freud) or “imprinted on the infant” by "the mother" (Lichtenstein) (5RR 58, 223).

        Again, Holland jumps from general experience to literary response. During reading, “we each transform the resources the work offers us so as to express our different identity themes” (5RR 231; DY vii). For every reader, this "reading style” is “deeply ingrained, more deeply than even a professional's training as a reader; far from changing one's reading style, critical skills, specialized knowledge, and the experience of many books will all serve as ways of fulfilling it and carrying it into practice" (PIP 114).

       Holland's own style manages to invest his professional training very handily: he finds identity themes with the same methods he uses for analysing texts. “One abstracts an identity theme from the myriads of ego choices a person reveals much the way one abstracts a central theme to express the unity of all the many words in a literary work" (5RR 111). “I can abstract, from the choices in life I see, facts as visible as words on the page, various subordinate patterns and themes until I arrive at one central, unifying pattern" (UITS 121).

     To verify his model conclusively, Holland “hoped to do an ‘experiment’ in stimulus and response, complete with rigorous hypotheses, predictions to be confirmed, measurements, repeatable data, isolation of the experimenter from his material," and “objective tests like questionnaires that could be analysed statistically" (5RR 42). “Abruptly, and rather painfully," he “realized that none of this fit the problem.” So he “gave up questionnaires and group experiments with statistical possibilities" (5RR 43f). Indeed, if “psychoanalysis” is “the science of human individuality," he says it must “necessarily give up repeatable experiments” (5RR 10). His research would not be “looking for classes or categories of behaviour that could be considered the same," but for “the uniqueness of each response” (5RR 63). Efforts to “correlate” “responses” with “characteristic patterns of adaptation, discovered by interview or projective test,” will not lead to successful “predictions" (5RR 48f). “One cannot predict" what a reader “will say or do, although one can understand it quite exactly in retrospect” (PIP 127).

        Holland elected for the “holistic" method used in the social sciences. According to Diesing (1971: 258), a “holistic theory” need not “contain rigid formal definitions" or “yield predictions or deductive explanations” (cf. 5RR 270). "Where the experimentalist puts method before matter, the holist puts his unique subjects first" and thus grants a "primacy of subject matter over method" (5RR 273). Yet “the psychoanalytic study of cases" is still asserted to “have led to a truly universal theory of human psychology, markedly more general than the fragmentary “laws” of experimentalists” (5RR 274).

       Holland “decided to fish for a method by seeing what issues emerged” from “more or less undirected interviews with a few readers who had taken standard personality tests,” the “Rorschach” and the “Thematic Apperception Test," in which people describe what they see in inkblots and pictures, respectively (5RR x, 52).²⁶ [26. Most recently, he uses his own “I-test,” where "the testee is asked to say which two” in a group of three items “seem more alike, and which one less like the others, and why" (CRAP 479).] "The interviews” were treated “as the primary source of data on personality," and "the tests as only supplementary,” subject to being "overruled" (5RR 52). The "crucial data" were “the words the readers used about what they had read” (5RR 46; cf. PIP 161). Holland would pose questions like: “what did you think of it?”; "what does he seem to be saying?"; "are there any phrases that appeal to you?”; “what catches your eye?"; "do you like that?”; “does that statement make you feel good"?; and so on (PIP 70-74).

       The “phrasings" of the answers were the main “evidence" about "each reader's synthesis and achievement” (5RR 46). “The problem became interpreting what he said.” Holland tried to listen in the way he recommended for the "analyst's ‘third ear’": "with some knowledge of the issues clinical experience has found important," and "with an open, free-floating attention to the kinds of things people are likely to say or think about parents, their own bodies, authorities, desires, or fears” (DY 317; 5RR 52). He sifted his transcripts for "misrememberings,” “opinions usual and unusual, misreadings [i.e., miscues], slips, special wordings, body symbolisms" (5RR 64f, 45) --pretty much what a psychoanalyst looks for. It "was not essential" that “what my readers said about their feelings at the time they read the story was true"; “free associations reveal the synthesis and creation" behind the feelings, whether they are being “invented” or “recalled correctly” (5RR 45). Thus, the reliability of the data was not endangered by the possibility of his test persons, or “testees” as he calls them (apparently with a straight face), being evasive or defensive during the interviews.

        The test materials in these interview studies were all literary texts reprinted often enough in anthologies to qualify as representative. This choice removes one problem I found in the earlier work, where his demonstrations were often not done on literary texts at all.²⁷  [27 Holland might want to include them in a very broad definition of "literature,” as proposed for jokes (Note 10).] But the broad claims of his model should cover many other text types. Dynamics is illustrated repeatedly with films (DY 74, 82f, 94, 150, 162-174, 211, 218-223, 253ff, 272, 282f, 294, 333), perhaps because Holland was for some years a film critic on television. He "likes to work" with films “because they are all surface”; and because audience response is observable in a “curious collectivity” (PIP 111, 128). Yet films differ crucially from the literary text (cf. Iser's remarks, AR 137ff) and appeal to fantasy content much more strongly. As Fiedler also observes (cf. WL 50, 137f, 140), “entertainments" are generally more apt to provoke regressive responses and to provide "fairly primitive artistic experiences” centred on "pleasure” (cf. DY 74). Absorption in the experience is likely to be very powerful, whereas “harder literature usually requires an effort that keeps one aware of oneself” (PIP 84) (cf. Chs. 8, 10, 14).

        Holland's interview transcripts (5RR 130-200, 300-393) contain a rich documentation of associations, mental images, affective responses, and personality traits. Of course, the testees did not report responses to all words or elements from the text; they focused mainly on the portrayal of characters and scenes, especially where dramatic incidents were involved. This result fits Holland's supposition that “most" "defenses (or displacements)” “shape plot" more than “purely linguistic form” (DY 58). We could thus formulate another reservation: that fantasy transformation is selective in preferring not only one work over another, as I maintained, but also certain elements or aspects within the same work.

        For each of his five student readers, Holland hypothesized an identity theme (5RR 201-03).²⁸ [28.The Index of the book makes it clear that these statements convey the readers” "identity themes"; the term also appears earlier in a similar context (5RR 110).] Sam “wanted to be helpless so as to take in supplies of love or admiration from outside; but then, by identifying with the source of those supplies, he would make himself strongly, safely, and separately male." "Sandra sought to avoid depriving situations and to find sources of nurture and strength with which she could exchange and fuse.” “Saul sought from the world balanced and defined exchanges, in which he would not be the one overpowered.” “Sebastian wanted to unite himself with forces of control, to which he would give something verbal or intellectual, hoping to sexualise them and get back something warm, dirty, or erotic." “Shep charactertistically evaded human relationships, which were charged with aggression for him, by polarizing them into extreme opposites. "

        These descriptions are far more individualized and less reductive than the characterology of early psychoanalysis," according to which "Sam and Sandra” are "'phallic” characters,” “Saul and Sebastian" are "anal"“ “characters,” and "Shep" is an "oral” personality" (5RR 110). But the newer terminology still reflects Lichtenstein's (1965) definition of “identity theme" as an “infinite sequence of bodily and behavioural transformations" (5RR 201, e.a.).

        Holland soon made the “surprising" and “troubling" “discovery that my critical method, disciplined, professional, accredited, also acts out my identity theme" (PIP 112). He conceded that “identity themes” “are drastically open to the biases of the interpreter's own style” (5RR 110). In the 1975 volume, he finesses the problem by splitting himself into a reader he liked to call “Seymour”²⁹ [29 Inventing names beginning with “S-” "testifies to an ex-engineer's nostalgia for the rigor of statistical work with objective Ss that so sternly commands attention in psychological journals" (5RR 44).],  whose interpretation was no longer claimed to be representative; and a theoretician (perhaps aptly called “Norm”) whose model of the act of reading is ostensibly universal and correct. He oscillated between these two egos while he supervised his interviews, offering his interpretations as mere suggestions, but never doubting the validity of his search for childhood fantasies and identity themes. By 1984, he no longer assumed that these themes are “in" readers; they too are his own “representations" (BRF 380). “My formulating a theme and variations for you or any other reader is just as much my act of interpretation as your reading of a poem is yours" (DGF 11).

        If we tried to find Holland's own identity theme in his books, we would most likely classify him as an oral type. He eagerly assumes that "it was through the mouth” and “out of the rhythmic cycles of hungering and being fed by another that each human being set up his identity theme” (PIP 108) (if so, everybody should have much the same identity). Even sexuality is subsumed: “fantasies about male and female interaction as the balancing of strengths derive from still earlier fantasies about being fed” (PIP 80).

        By the same token, the “aesthetic pleasure" afforded by works of art is traced back to “our first experience of pleasure, being held by a nurturing mother and being fed” (DY 75). “We take in the literary work, all literary works, in a very primitive oral way: what is “out there” is felt as though it were neither “out there” nor “in here --boundaries blur" (DY 83). "No matter what other issues from later stages appear in a literary work, one almost always finds at the core some fantasy of oral fusion and merger” (DY 38). This description of reading links it with a “regression to our earliest oral experience of a pre-self in which we are merged with the source of our gratification" (DY 89). “We approach a literary work with two conscious expectations: that the work will give us pleasure; it will not ask that we act on the external world”; “these two conscious expectations find a matrix in us, a memory of the primal at-oneness with a nurturing other,” “the giving mother" (DY 260; PIP 85).

        Such theses suggest how "literature seems to build on orality": “of all the different levels of fantasy in literature, the oral is the most common (at least in my range of reading)” (DY 38).³⁰ [30. Elsewhere, he says that “the single most common fantasy-structure in literature is phallic assertiveness balanced against oral engulfment” (DY 43). If “absolute words” like “all” “often go with oral fantasies,” (DY 37), then Holland's use of “all” in his generalizations (DY 15, 28, 77, 83, 99, 103, 105, 172, 174, 244, 269) could further signal his oral emphasis. ] “Much of Poems and Persons is “built around this one type of fantasy, the oral";  obviously, I have reasons for doing so which stem from my own personality structure” (PIP 139). Holland is certainly talented in detecting orality beneath all sorts of activities and expressions. The “fantasy" of a “wish to eat mother" or a “fear" that "she will eat you” is argued  from locutions like "Sweetie," "Honey,"“ and "'You're so cute, I could eat you up" (PIP 136f; DY 3 5). "'Feasting one's eyes" and "taking in” through our eyes” are listed to show that “unconsciously, to look at is to eat, as when we “devour” books” (DY 37).³¹ [31. Fenichel (1953) is the authority for this equation of looking with eating, the logic again probably being that “pre-verbal life consists mostly of looking at mother, taking her in” (DY 76, 21" (see Note 9). "Even as adults we associate reading with eating": we say “a man “devours books" or is “a “voracious” reader”; “a certain novel may be a “treat"; “a parody may be “delicious"; and so on (DY 75; cf. PIP 85). The logic is the same when "orality explains the open-mouthed wonder with which we “absorb” a theatrical performance" (DY 76) (though I surmise the reference is to the gasping for air in astonishment).

        Turning to literary works, Holland finds Wordsworth "saying': “something that would ordinarily he felt as an unpleasant, anally toned restraint can become a source of oral pleasure and merger” (DY 239). Holland thinks it "striking that the same pattern occurs in Keat's less well known “Sonnet on the Sonnet."“ But the coincidence is hardly remarkable for an analyst with such an oral fixation. Orality dominates again when Holland avers that "particular sounds” in “poetic language" "involve muscular actions that somehow match the sense” (DY 136). The mere "repetition of vowels or consonants” is “a source of pleasure," according to Freud (who is “no doubt” “correct”) (DY 145). “We ask that the sounds act out for us some management of the fantasy the sense embodies” (DY 139). Holland's illustrations of “movements of the mouth that simulate muscular ways of dealing with fantasy content” -- 'spitting out, hissing at, biting off, striking, stopping, and so on” -- (DY 142, 158) are among the most breathtaking romps of his Freudianized New Critical ingenuity. A “stanza with its ‘s's, ‘t's, ‘th's, and ‘f’s” “makes the mouth spit out a hurly-burly of sensual aggression and love”; "the deletion of the ‘d’ from “elated” does something” “to control the feminizing of the masculine train”; in Prospero's announcement that "'our revels now are ended" (Tempest, IV, i, 148), "the double ‘d’ that stops these revels acts out the psychological denial" of a “primal scene"; and so on (DY 208, 328, 143).

          These oral tendencies bear out Holland's recognition of the role of the researcher's personality in postulating and generalizing a model. Orality and related fantasies become the framework for describing not merely the hidden content of works, but the functions of language and reading as such. The reader accordingly seems to regress back to infancy through multiple channels that reinforce each other in much the way a New Critical interpretation shows the art work thematising its own composition and structure. This resemblance is no accident, given Holland's dual loyalties and his shift from text over to reader. The “identity theme" is a strategic concept for suggesting that the regression varies a parameter that is essentially constant anyway.

The darkest implication of such a vision is that higher culture looks ultimately hollow and phony, like a collective superego legitimising intellectual disguises for shameful fantasies. ³² [32. Holland conjectures that “an individual's own psychic structure makes much more of a difference in response" than “culture” does (DY 335). This idea might suit Bleich, Paris, and Bloom, but hardly Frye, Fiedler, Hirsch, Jauss, or Culler.]  Holland's references to “intellectual” acts routinely portray them as a devious or defensive veneer (cf. DY 57, 104, 128, 156, 171, 177, 184, 187, 222; PIP 47, 77, 81, 160; 5RR 116, 122, 201). Public institutions devoted to art -- museums, academics, and even criticism -- would be communal laboratories for defending against, or transforming, ideas and images which everyone is obsessed with, but which no one can bear to confront. The various arts and genres are merely “different ways of managing fantasy content" (cf. DY 315).

        To be consistent, Holland should predict that extremely active and diverse epochs in the arts would develop in correspondingly repressive, defensive cultures. Yet this ratio does not hold. Licentious periods such as the Elizabethan era or the 1920s brought culminations in the literary arts; the prudish, repressive systems of Stalin and Hitler left almost no literary art works of merit. Moreover, repressive peoplem like the modern “Puritans" Fiedler portrays, entertain a “deep” “fear of art" (LD 430), whereas they ought to seek it as a respectable disguise for an otherwise forbidden release -- Holland, "something of a Puritan,” does (DY 222).

        In his letter responding to a draft of this chapter, Holland challenges me to give “evidence" that "literature is a progressive social force.” I could cite his own credo that through “the work of art" we become “a larger, wiser self” (DY 103), but that opinion is not well borne out by his analyses. I could cite the models of lser, Jauss, Bleich, Jameson, and Millett, or of critics outside my survey, such as Lukács, Sartre, Adorno, Bloch, and Marcuse, all of whom assert that art holds at least the potential for progressive action. That potential is the strongest claim we can make, because nobody can actually force art to be used in one specific way.

      Freudian models, also scant on “evidence,” issue the self-fulfilling prophecy that art is regressive and offer all-too-patent alibis for the failure of culture to mature and develop, to get beyond the basic but monotonous drives of infancy, or to openly and honestly satisfy human desires. If art only serves to “hallucinate gratification” and "ego mastery"“ (DY 181, 202), the only progress could be hedonistic and private: finding better ways to maximize pleasure and minimize anxiety or guilt. Art could not engage the history of ideas or the ideologies of society in the ways our other critics demonstrate.

        Another troubling implication of Holland's approach is that the literary transaction should be fundamentally altered when a critic consciously perceives and explicitly exposes the normally unconscious fantasy content. The whole mechanism of defense and denial should break down when the materials are brought to the surface. Holland proposes that “critics" can "give us new intellectual associations which we then preconsciously or unconsciously add.to our analogizings to a given literary work'.(DY 332). But, quite aside from the practical problems of making such a transfer, the “unconscious” is not an “intellectual" domain in Freudian theory, and the associations Holland supplies are mainly libidinal ones.

        Freud originally assumed that the conscious recognition of the fantasy causing a neurosis promoted therapeutic insight. Holland's criticism might thus have a quasi-therapeutic function. He does envision “teaching actively" by “suggesting a slant on a particular work” that can enable students to "absorb it through their defenses” (5RR 217). Moreover, “with a positive and supportive discussion," he has "seen students -- out of their own curiosity about themselves -- become strikingly aware of their own feelings and associations, and from that awareness followed an understanding of their synthesis of the work" (5RR 218).

        Yet Holland would not call this process “therapy": it is “only understanding within and for a limited, literary purpose." Besides, what he says of the author should go for the critic as well: “when a writer chooses to air his fantasies, he is likely to arouse the reader's defenses” and elicit “a negative reaction” (5RR 221). To avoid such dangers, Holland's approach “requires sophisticated students, ideally those with some insight into themselves arrived at in a clinical setting.” And the “insight” that "enables a teacher to direct what he is saying" to a particular "student” can be "not easily won and rather exhausting to live with” (5RR 217f).

        Throughout his career, Holland has sought to resolve his original dilemma of different readings by combining two frameworks that are heavily deterministic. For New Criticism, the text is decided by the writing on the page. For Freudian theory, the personality is decided by early experiences. Holland concurs: “the words on the page and the character patterns a reader brings to them,” as well as “the psychological transformation in the work itself," are "fixed” (PIP 127; DY 329). These “fixed" or invariant aspects were to be the critic's concern. "A psychoanalytic reading can reveal “deep” fantasies that many people are likely to experience in a literary work, but it cannot generalize about certain very intense sources of pleasure at a relatively conscious level” that “come from one's own highly individual experience” (DY 50). He later propounded a corresponding inner-outer duality: “facing outward," readers’ “experiences point to a shared reality having a centring theme"; “facing inward, their experiences become private assimilations to a series of individual centres” (5RR 291).

        Most recently, he invokes the cybernetic concept of “feedback," which had been mentioned only marginally before (DY 132; 5RR 288). (Perhaps he likes the term for its oral and anal undertones?) In a “feedback loop,” "input" is registered and compared to a “standard or reference signal”; any “difference" leads the system to adapt (cf. BRF 372). In DGF, his example is driving on the pavement by adjusting to road conditions (a “cliff,” a “puff of wind,” a “pick-up truck”), which still suggests a fairly deterministic conception. “Identity" is now depicted as “a theme with its history and its variations, which governs and permeates” a “hierarchy of feedback loops” by "generating” “hypotheses,” “hearing the return," and “feeling the discrepancy” regarding "inner standards" (DGF 10f; cf. BRF 380).

        In this new scheme, the "loop part,” associated with "lower-level physical and physiological” acts, is “more or less the same for all of us"; “the standard is individual" (DGF 7f). Also, “higher" “levels" such as skills we use in reading, especially literature," are "more personal" (DGF 9). Or, in the “comparison" "against" the “standard,” “the cognitive part may be automatic and physiological, not individual, while the emotional part is likely to be quite personal” (DGF 7). I'd say just the opposite: people differ more in their cognitions than in their emotions, though maybe not in the mental operations of driving a car.

         Holland would like to think, along with Ernest Jones, the champion in Freudian hyperbole, that master Freud “anticipated the whole science of cybernetics” (DGF 2f). But I can see a parallel at most between Freud's mechanistic notions of mental energy and the part of cybernetics dealing with servomechanisms.³³ [33. Such mechanisms have already been built by Japanese engineers to steer a car with a vision and computation system (Tsugawa, Yatabe, Hirose, & Shuntetsu, 1979), a fairly simple design apart ftom the problem of visual recognition.] “Driving a car” was also Holland's “analogy” for Waelder's concept of the “ego balancing forces,” whereby the driver at least got some “pleasure” (e£ PIP 46). All such mechanisms lack the "active, creative element” Holland assigns to "identity" (DGF 13). He doesn't explain how "creativity" got there (identity was derived from being fed, a hard act to do creatively), nor how it can evolve if identity always duplicates its own style. In his cybernetic model, creativity would have to be introduced through some new “standard or reference signal" against which to measure performance; and he hasn't explained how that might occur.

        Still, the feedback model is more neutral and general than Holland's earlier ones. “Social and cultural codes" and “interpretive communities" can now he represented in the “hierarchy of feedbacks" wherein "the higher loops provide reference signals for the loops below them” (BRF, 381, 373). This expansion might help him align his research with that recently carried out in the “psychology of perception, cognition, and memory,” “brain physiology,” and "artificial intelligence" (BRF 379; cf. 5RR 252).

        But these disciplines do not share his fundamental thesis that “psychoanalysis is a general account of humans, including literature” (letter). Holland brackets this problem in recent papers (CRAP, BRF, DGF) by avoiding the “old fashioned tone, the body-language about fantasies” of DY and considering these things “matters of style rather than conceptual problems.” For example, he devises fairly abstract and symbolic “identity themes” for an author like Frost (“ to manage great unmanageable unknowns by means of small knowns,” BRF 367) or a reader like “Carlos” (“to be active, dominating, distinguishing, and distinguished,” CRAP 490). Yet he feels he is merely “talking" in the “transformed forms” of “a language that translates body terms into" the kind of “theoretical discussion” “encouraged” by “our profession" (letter). This evasion is surely not what most researchers on cognition believe they're doing.

         Holland opines that "psychoanalysis grows not so much by dropping earlier positions as by incorporating them into a larger and more all-embracing conceptual framework” (letter). This proceeding befits “the holistic both-ands of psychoanalysis” that cause “difficulty” for “logically inclined people” (like me) operating with “either-ors or if-thens." Dreams, desires, and emotions can evidently embrace all manner of contradictions and opposites; and literature seems to share this capacity. But I doubt if the study of cognition can be content to proceed the same way. Contrary to popular belief, there is a huge body of empirical tests for Freudian theory (summarized in Fisher & Greenberg, 1977), and a number of his “positions” have fared quite poorly: that infantile experiences accurately predict character traits; that every dream is motivated by a repressed wish; that women consider their bodies inferior; and so on. ³⁴ [34. Compare the important revisions in views on dreaming (e.g. Lipton, 1960; French & Fromm 1964; Rycroft, 1979). Work in progress by Francis (“DNA”) Crick and Graeme Mitchison suggests that dreaming may simply be the way to clear brain cells of stored information; the imagery is generated when the forebrain attempts to interpret nonsensical signals from the brain stem (cf. Melenchuk 1983).] Such “positions" should now be “dropped," not maintained out of nostalgia or reverence to Freud.

       All the same, the most interesting aspect in Holland's work may be his own lengthy and intricate maneuvering to adopt new positions without vacating old ones. He has translated his theses from model to model with a minimum of recantation. Without much impairment, his authority shifted from analysing meanings to uncovering fantasies to diagnosing identities. He refocused his preoccupation from testes to testees, from id and titties to identities, in defiance of all the headaches entailed in trading fantasy for empiricism.

       Whatever proved not to be universal for all humanity or all reading was salvaged over into Holland's personal style. And even this tactic conserves more than it renounces, since he still regards himself as a typical enough reader to merit public description. Most of our theoretical critics have this divided ambition to be both representative and yet very special, to be the epitome of reading yet set apart not only from ordinary readers but from their non-theoretical colleagues — and even other theoretical colleagues. However, in few of those critics are the results of this tension so intriguing and elaborated as they are in Holland's case.

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