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Erich Heller
         The Dismantling of a Marionette Theater; or, Psychology_and_the
            Misinterpretation of Literature
         The force of [Heinrich von] Kleist's story "On the Marionette
            Theatre" . . . derives from roots deeply sunk into the soil of the
            past. It is a novel variation on a theme the first author of which
            may well be Plato. For according to Plato the human mind has been
            in the dark ever since it lost its place in the community of Truth,
            in the realm, that is, of the Ideas, the eternal and eternally
            perfect forms, those now unattainable models which man in his exile
            is able to see and recognize only as shadows or imperfect copies.
            And this Platonic parable of the damage suffered by man's soul and
            consciousness is not unlike the Fall as it is narrated in Genesis.
            The Fall was the consequence and punishment of man's free will that
            for the first time had asserted itself against the universal God
            and rejoiced in a consciousness and pleasure entirely its
            own tragically its own; for man had to forsake the indwelling
            in the supreme Intelligence and thus the harmony between himself
            and Being as such. The reward for this betrayal was the
            embarrassment and shame of self-consciousness, the hard labor of
            maintaining himself in his state of separation, and, soon to
            follow, the murderous misdeeds of the self-will named Cain. Better
            to have no mind than a mind thus deprived and impoverished and
            cruel.
             
            Erich Heller, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at
            Northwestern University, is the author of The Disinherited Mind:
            Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought; The Ironic
            Gentleman: Thomas Mann; The Artist's Journey into the Interior; and
            Franz Kafka. These books have also appeared in Germany in the
            author's own translations, and his Dir Wiederkehr der Unschuld[The
            return of innocence] was recently published there.
             
            See also: "Fiction, History, and Empirical Reality" by Murray
            Krieger in Vol. 1, No. 2; "Psychoanalysis and the Marionette
            Theater: Interpretation is Not Depreciation" by Margret Schaefer in
            Vol. 5, No. 1
Heinz Kohut
         Psychoanalysis and the Interpretation of Literature: A
            Correspondence with Erich Heller
         Dear Professor Heller . . . Your paper had started out superbly. It
            was a great aesthetic and cognitive pleasure to follow you as you
            guided us through the intellectual history of the main idea of
            Kleist's essay, from Plato through the biblical Fall of Man, to
            Schiller, and Kierkegaard, and Kafka. Indeed the perceptive
            listener's experience was so satisfying that his disappointment was
            doubled when he came to realize that all this erudition and beauty
            had been displayed only in order to serve as a contrast-providing
            background for the sharp delineation of a reductionistic
            explanation which you consider to be characteristic of
            psychoanalysis: the interpretation of the disturbance of man's
            naive, unselfconscious pre-Fall state as nothing more than a
            portrayal of sexual impotence the reduction of a deep
            existential preoccupation to a case of phimosis.
             
            I am certain that the relief I felt when you then took up Freud's
            demonological-neurosis paper was not an idiosyncratic response on
            my part but an experience shared by many open-minded listeners in
            your psychoanalytic audience. Let us, therefore, disregard the
            "text" of your sermon and consider the substantial questions that
            you raised after you turned to Freud; these are to my mind the most
            central ones that you undertook to examine in your despite
            its disappointing aspects splendid address to us. Put into my
            own words, your most important question was this: What is the
            purpose of the psychoanalyst's efforts outside the clinical
            setting, in particular when his contributions take the form of a
            pathography? That is, To what end do analysts study the
            psychopathology of the creators of great works? I, too, have asked
            myself this question, and since you read my old essay "Beyond the
            Bounds of the Basic Rule" (Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
            Association 7 [July 1960]: 567-86), you know some of my answers.
            But important basic questions are hardly ever answered once and for
            all; and I will, therefore, under the impact of your lecture,
            respond as if I had heard the question for the first time.
             
            Heinz Kohut, M.D., is Professorial Lecturer in Psychiatry at the
            University of Chicago and a teacher and training analyst at the
            Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. His works include The
            Restoration of the Self, The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic
            Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic
            Personality Disorders which has appeared in German, French,
            and Italian translations , The Restoration of the Self and
            collection of his essays, Scientific Empathy and Empathic Science.
            His "A Reply to Margret Schaefer"" was published in the Spring 1978
            issue of .
             
            See also: "Psychoanalysis and the Marionette Theater:
            Interpretation is Not Depreciation" by Margret Schaefer in Vol. 5,
            No. 1
Norman H. Holland
         Human Identity
         Holistic reasoning brings out the sustained and sustaining
            integrity of a system, be it a person, a poem, a neighborhood, a
            corporation, a culture, a crime to be solved by Sherlock Holmes, or
            an act of dreaming. Identity theory thus extends Freud's method of
            dream interpretation, explicating free associations, to the whole
            life of a person. We can talk rigorously about unique individuals.
             
            Yet that very talking is a human act, part of someone's identity,
            Freud's or mine. One has to distinguish (more sharply than
            Lichtenstein does, I think) between "primary identity," the
            hypothesis of a persistent sameness established "in" a person in
            infancy, and "identity theme," a second person's hypothesis for
            searching out a persistent style in what the first has done. In a
            strict sense, I can never know your "primary identity," for it is
            deeply and unconsciously inside you. Formed before speech, it can
            never be put into words. It is entirely possible, however, for me
            to formulate a constancy in your personal style from outside
            you but through empathy. Any such formulation of an "identity
            theme" will, of course, be a function both of the you I see and of
            my way of seeing my identity as well as yours. Another reason
            one can never know a "primary identity" is, then, that it is
            inextricable from one's own primary identity if there is such
            a thing. But there are definitely identity themes because I can
            formulate them.
             
            Norman N. Holland is professor of English and director of the
            Center for the Psychological Study of the Arts at the State
            University of New York at Buffalo. Two of his books, Poems in
            Persons (1973) and Five Readers Reading (1975), apply the concept
            of identity here developed to literary response. His contributions
            to  are "Literary Interpretation and Three Phases
            of Psychoanalysis" (Winter 1976) and "Why Ellen Laughed" (Winter
            1980).
Arthur F. Marotti
         Countertransference, the Communication Process, and the Dimensions
            of Psychoanalytic Criticism
         To stress the subjectivity of the analyst is to accept the
            centrality of countertransference in the analytic relationship.
            Psychoanalysts have long recognized the importance of transference
            in the analytic setting that is, the analysand's way of
            relating to the analyst in terms of his strong, ambivalent
            unconscious feelings for earlier figures (usually parents), a
            process whose successful resolution constitutes the psychoanalystic
            "cure." But, since the patient's transference is only experienced
            by the analyst through his countertransference responses, recent
            theorists have come to emphasize the importance of
            countertransference in psychoanalysis. In what Otto Kernberg calls
            its "totalistic" definition, countertransference refers to "the
            total emotional reaction of the psychoanalyst to the patient in the
            treatment situation."1 It is, therefore, a source of both empathic
            understanding and defensive misunderstanding, of distortion and
            insight. Hans Loewald remarks: "Since a psychoanalytic
            investigation can be carried out only by a human mind, we cannot
            conceive of one in which the analyst's [counter] transference and
            resistance are not the warp and woof of his activity."2
             
            · 1. Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological
            Narcissism (New York, 1975), p. 49.
             
            · 2. Hans Loewald, "Psychoanalytic Theory and the Psychoanalytic
            Process," The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 25 (1970): 56. Cf.
            Heinz Kohut, "Introspection, Empathy, and Psychoanalysis," Journal
            of the American Psychoanalytic Association 7 (1959): 459-83. For a
            clear discussion of the background of the countertransference
            concept in Freud, see Humberto Nagera, et. al., Basic
            Psychoanalytic Concepts on Metapsychology, Conflicts, Anxiety and
            Other Subjects (New York, 1970), pp. 200-206. Two surveys of the
            literature on the topic are particularly useful: Douglas Orr,
            "Transference and Countertransference: A Historical Survey,"
            Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 2 (1954): 621-
            70, and Kernberg, pp. 49-66.
             
            Arthur F. Marotti, associate professor of English at Wayne State
            University, has written a number of essays on Ben Jonson, John
            Donne, Thomas Middleton, and Edmund Spenser. He is completing a
            book-length social-historical and psychoanalytic study of Donne's
            poetry and a book on Jonson; some of the theoretical assumptions
            behind both projects are discussed in this article.
             
            See also: "Psychoanalysis and the Marionette Theater:
            Interpretation is Not Depreciation" in Vol. 5, No. 1
Peter Szondi
         Hope in the Past: On Walter Benjamin
         It is no accident that the book Benjamin wrote as a reader of
            himself, A Berlin Childhood, also begins with the description of a
            park, that of the Tiergarten zoo. However great the difference may
            seem between this collection of short prose pieces and Proust's
            three-thousand-page novel when viewed from the outside, Benjamin's
            book illustrates [his] fascination... A sentence in his book points
            to the central experience of Proust's work: that almost everything
            childhood was can be withheld from a person for years, suddenly to
            be offered him anew as if by chance. "Like a mother who holds the
            new-born infant to her breast without waking it, life proceeds for
            a long time with the still tender memory of childhood" (p. 152).
            Also reminiscent of Proust is the description of the mother who, on
            evenings when guests are in the house, comes in to see her child
            only fleetingly to say good night; so, too, is that of the boy
            attentively listening to the noises which penetrate into his room
            from the courtyard below and thus from a foreign world. The studied
            elevation of the newly invented telephone to the level of a
            mythical object is anticipated in Proust as well. And the
            relationship to and influence of the earlier work can be
            demonstrated even in the use of metaphor. But little is gained by
            this approach, and it would not be easy to refute the objection
            that such similarities lie in the authors' common raw material:
            childhood, the fin de siècle epoch, and the attempt to bring them
            both into the present.
             
            Peter Szondi was professor of comparative literature at the Free
            University of Berlin at the time of his death in 1971. His many
            influential works include Theorie des modernen Dramas (1956),
            Versuch über das Tragische (1961), and a five-volume collection of
            his lectures. Harvey Mendelsohn is the principle translator of the
            fourteen-volume Dictionary of Scientific Biography; he is currently
            working on translations of a French commentary on Heraclitus and a
            selection of Szondi's essays to be published by Yale University
            Press.
Fredric R. Jameson
         The Symbolic Interference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological
            Analysis
         However this may be, it is clear that the rhetoric of the self in
            American criticism will no longer do, any more than its
            accompanying interpretative codes of identity crises and mythic
            reintegration, and that a post-individualistic age needs new and
            post-individualistic categories for grasping both the production
            and the evolution of literary form as well as the semantic content
            of the literary text and the latter's relationship to collective
            experience and to ideological contradiction. What is paradoxical
            about Burke's own critical practice in this respect is that he has
            anticipated many of the fundamental objections to such a rhetoric
            of self and identity at the same time that he may be counted among
            its founding fathers: this last and most important of what we have
            called his "strategies of containment" provides insights which
            testify against his own official practice. Witness, for example,
            the following exchange, in which Burke attributes this imaginary
            objection to his Marxist critics: "Identity is itself a
            'mystification.' Hence, resenting its many labyrinthine aspects, we
            tend to call even the study of it a 'mystification.'" To this
            proposition, which is something of a caricature of the point of
            view of the present essay, Burke gives himself a reply which we may
            also endorse: "The response would be analogous to the response of
            those who, suffering from an illness, get 'relief' by quarreling
            with their doctors. Unless Marxists are ready to deny Marx by
            attacking his term 'alienation' itself, they must permit of
            research into the nature of attempts, adequate and inadequate, to
            combat alienation."1
             
            · 1. Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, p. 308. In fact,
            certain contemporary Marxisms most notably those of Althusser
            and of Lucio Coletti explicitly repudiate the concept of
            alienation as a Hegelian survival in Marx's early writings.
             
            Fredric R. Jameson is the author of The Political Unconscious:
            Studies in the Ideology of Form. He is also the editor, with
            Stanley Aronowitz and John Brenkman, of the Social Text.
             
            See also: "Methodological Repression and/or Strategies of
            Containment" by Kenneth Burke in Vol. 5, No. 2
Cesare Segre
         Culture and Modeling Systems
         Despite the persistent affirmations of the ill-informed, the great
            promise of semiotics is the possibility it represents of welding
            together both language and text analysis and the analysis of
            pragmatic and ideological context. It is merely a matter of
            judicious planning if attention has so far been directed primarily
            to distinctive aspects of techniques and texts rather than to the
            general character of the frames of reference within which they
            operate. And yet, as we know, investigations of the total
            functioning of culture have been carried out with far-reaching
            results. This has been so particularly when the areas examined have
            been those, like the mass media, in which the weight of individual
            contribution is small.
             
            For culture in the widest sense of the term., the most highly
            elaborated hypotheses are those put forward by the Soviet
            semioticians, Lotman first among them. It is with these that I mean
            to deal here in an act of criticism which may also prove to be one
            of integration. Lotman's thought is clearly still in the making,
            and rather than follow out its likely developments, or, it may be,
            contradictions, it seems more helpful to get into its seams in an
            attempt to perceive alternative interlacings.
             
            Cesare Segre, director of the Institute of Romance Philology at the
            University of Pavia and the president of the International
            Association for Semiotic Studies, is coeditor of the journals
            Strumenti Critici and Medioevo Romanzo and the series Critica e
            Filologia. "Culture and Modeling Systems" originally appeared in
            his Semiotica, storia e cultura (Padova, 1977); his previous
            contribution to , "Narrative Structures and
            Literary History," appeared in Winter 1976. John Meddemmen teaches
            the history of the English language at the University of Pavia. He
            has worked on predominantly linguistic aspects of contemporary
            Italian authors such as Montale and Fenglio.
Tom Samet
         The Modulated Vision: Lionel Trilling's "Larger Naturalism"
         Trilling's "larger naturalism," acknowledging as it does the value
            of mystery and the power of fact, aligns him with Arnold and Freud
            and Forster in an effort to synthesize the legacies of the
            Enlightenment and of the Romantic movement: conscious of the
            authority of the imagination, he "never deceives himself into
            believing that the power of the imagination is sovereign, that it
            can make the power of circumstance of no account" (OS, p. 41);
            committed to reason and to an ideal of rational order, he is yet
            continuously aware of the limits of reason, of the rational
            intellect's potential tyranny over the emotions, of those forces
            within men and without which frustrate the mind's will to organize
            and control experience.1 And this "larger naturalism," with its
            emphasis upon  "a social tradition," implicates Trilling in a
            particular view of the novel - a view which may be said to inform
            all of his thinking but which achieves its fullest and clearest
            expression in such well-known essays as "Manners, Morals and the
            Novel" and "Art and Fortune."  "The novel," he remarks in the first
            of these polemics, "...is a perpetual quest for reality, the field
            of its research being always the social world, the material of its
            analysis being always manners as the indication of the direction of
            man's soul" (LI, p. 205).
             
            ·  1. Nathan A. Scott, Jr., makes substantially the same point in
            his superb and very nearly definitive account of Trilling's
            "Anxious Humanism" (Three American Moralists [Notre Dame, Ind.,
            1973], p. 170).  Readers familiar with Professor Scott's study will
            recognize at once the deep and general indebtedness which I am
            pleased to acknowledge here.
             
            Tom Samet is an instructor in literature at Douglass College,
            Rutgers University.  He is currently preparing essays on Henry
            James and on Conrad and Hemingway.  "The Modulated Vision" is part
            of a study, in progress, of Lionel Trilling and the Anxieties of
            the Modern.
Joyce Carol Oates
         Lawrence's Götterdåmmerung: The Tragic Vision of Women in
            Love
          
            In his travels, and in his accompanying readings, he had come to
            the conclusion that the essential secret of life was harmony. . . .
            And he proceeded to put his philosophy into practice by forcing
            order into the established world, translating the mystic word
            harmony into the practical word organisation.1
             
            Harmony becomes organization. And Gerald dedicates himself to work,
            to feverish, totally absorbing work, inspired with an almost
            religious exaltation in his fight with matter. The world is split
            in two: on one side matter (the mines, the miners), on the other
            side his own isolated will. He wants to create on earth a perfect
            machine, "an activity of pure order, pure mechanical repetition"; a
            man of the twentieth century with no nostalgia for the
            superannuated ideals of Christianity or democracy, he wishes to
            found his eternity, his infinity, in the machine. So inchoate and
            mysterious is the imaginative world Lawrence creates for Women in
            Love that we find no difficulty in reading Gerald Crich as an
            allegorical figure in certain chapters and as a quite human, even
            fluid personality in others. As Gudrun's frenzied lover, as
            Birkin's elusive beloved, he seems a substantially different person
            from the Gerald Crich who is a ruthless god of the machine; yet as
            his cultural role demands extinction (for Lawrence had little doubt
            that civilization was breaking down rapidly, and Gerald is the very
            personification of a "civilized" man), so does his private
            emotional life, his confusion of the individual will with that of
            the cosmos, demand death death by perfect cold. He is
            Lawrence's only tragic figure, a remarkable creation on a
            remarkable novel, and though it is a commonplace thing to say that
            Birkin represents Lawrence, it seems equally likely that Gerald
            Crich represents Lawrence in his deepest, most aggrieved,
            most nihilist soul.
             
            ·  1. All quotations from Women in Love are taken from the Modern
            Library edition.
             
            Joyce Carol Oates' works include the novels Childhood, Son of the
            Morning, and a collection of short stories, Night-Side.
            "Lawrence's Götterdåmmerung" is part of a larger
            work exploring tragedy and comedy. Her contributions to Critical
            Inquiry include "Jocoserious Joyce" (Summer 1976), and "The Picture
            of Dorian Gray: Wilde's Parable about the Fall" (Winter 1980).
Frank Kermode
         A Reply to Joseph Frank
         I'm pleased to have been offered the chance of replying to Joseph
            Frank's criticisms ("Spatial Form: An Answer to Critics," Critical
            Inquiry 4 [Winter 1977]: 231-52). He is a courteous opponent,
            though capable of a certain asperity. . . . Frank complains that
            his critics appear incapable of attending to what he really said in
            his original essay. It is the blight critics are born for; and it
            is undoubtedly sometimes caused by the venal haste of reviewers,
            and sometimes by native dullness, and sometimes by malice. But
            there are other reasons why an author may sometimes feel himself to
            be misrepresented. One is that a genuinely patient and intelligent
            reader may be more interested in what the piece under consideration
            does not quite say than in what is expressly stated. Another is the
            consequence of fame. Frank's original article is over thirty years
            old; it crystallised what had been for the most part vague notions,
            ideas that were in the air, and gave them a memorable name.
            "Spatial form" entered the jargon of the graduate school and began
            an almost independent existence. The term might well be used by
            people who had never read the essay at all; or they might casually
            attribute to him loose inferences made by others from the general
            proposition inferences he had already disallowed and now once
            more contests. It must be difficult, particularly for an
            exasperated author, to distinguish between these causes of apparent
            misrepresentation. But sometimes it can be done; and then it will
            appear that the effect of the first is far more interesting than
            that of the second cause. For the suggestion then must be that the
            author has repressed a desire to take a position which, in his
            manifest argument, he differentiates from his own. This, as it
            happens, is what he advances as an explanation of certain
            ambiguities in my Sense of an Ending; the least one can say is that
            it is perfectly possible.
             
            Frank Kermode is the author of The Sense of an Ending: Studies in
            the Theory of Fiction, Continuities, and Shakespeare, Spenser,
            Donne: Renaissance Essays; his works also include The Classicand
            The Genesis of Secrecy. His contributions to  are
            "Novels: Recognition and Deception" (Autumn 1974), "A Reply to
            Denis Donoghue" (Spring 1975), and "Secrets and Narrative Sequence"
            (Autumn 1980).
James E. Ford
         On Thinking about Aristotle's "Thought"
         An adequate approach to any of Aristotle's qualitative parts of
            tragedy must be grounded in an understanding of their hierarchical
            ranking within the Poetics. Any "whole" must present "a certain
            order in its arrangement of parts" (1450b35-36),1 and in a drama
            each part is "for the sake of" the one "above" it. Contrary to
            Rosenstein's formulation, for instance, the Aristotelian view is
            that character as a form "concretizes" and individualizes thought
            as matter. Rosenstein's question as to whether "these . . . indeed
            form a genuine disjunction" (p. 552) should not even arise. By
            ignoring the hierarchy, and therefore collapsing it, Rosenstein
            weakens his otherwise sound assertion that tragedy is not
            philosophy. Such is the result, whether intended or not, of holding
            that "thought must also be some form or concretization of action,
            just as plot and character are" (p. 554). This vocabulary seems to
            suggest in the end that a tragic work is organized by philosophical
            "themes." "To understand spoken thought as an object of imitation
            in this manner is to understand it not merely as a content or
            object being imitated . . . but as the supposedly valid expression
            of an interpretation of the doings of the aesthetically worked
            world generally. . . . Thought in this sense becomes theme" (p.
            558).
             
            ·  1. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of Aristotle are from
            The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York, 1941).
             
            James E. Ford responds in this essay to Leon Rosenstein's "On
            Aristotle and Thought in the Drama" (Spring 1977). An assistant
            professor of English at Brigham Young University Hawaii
            Campus, he is currently writing on interpretative theory.
             
            See also: "Metaphor and Transcendence" by Karsten Harries in Vol.
            5, No. 1
Leon Rosenstein
         Rethinking Aristotle's "Thought": A Response to James E._Ford
         Let me repeat one of my main points of my article: that "all three
            subjects of tragedy plot, character, and thought are
            reciprocal and correlative concretizations of a particular action
            and that thought bears this relation and makes its appearance with
            respect to each . . . in a definite way."1 This would be
            "understanding the interdependence or reciprocity of the three
            objects of imitation as functioning dynamically within an organic
            unity" (p. 554n.). Thus, in one of the instances to which Ford
            refers, the question I raise as to disjunction of the three
            subjects of tragedy is not a question for me at all, except
            rhetorically, since it is based upon the suggestionof Jones, a view
            which I reject, but the mention of which allowed me to consider its
            possibilities first. (One sometimes reads anticipators who raise
            interesting possibilities which, on reflection, one is forced to
            discard but not forced not to mention.) In the other instance, and
            again with respect to Jones, the "double awkwardness" to which
            Jones originally refers is alleviated through clarification and
            interpretation by Jones himself, whose position in this matter I
            expand upon and interpret more widely. Thus, there is no
            "disjunction," and there is no "doubleness" of plot and action,
            nor, as I myself went on to show, any tripleness and quadrupleness
            either in relation of action, plot, character, and thought. Really,
            what we have here are different ontological orders of the subject
            of tragedy, a relation between the general and specific, the
            abstract and concrete, the concept and its instance, a relation
            like that of energy to the incandescent light (such that "energy"
            can be said to be "concretized" in "incandescent light").
             
            ·  1. "On Aristotle and Thought in the Drama,"  3
            (Spring 1977): 561.
             
            Leon Rosenstein is an associate professor of philosophy at San
            Diego State University.
             
