The Talking Cure: Literary Representations of Psychoanalysis

Library Journal

Berman (English, SUNY at Albany) examines a distinguished group of authors with disparate attitudes towards psychoanalysis: early 20th-century feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, F.Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Joanne Greenberg (Hannah Green), Doris Lessing, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, and D.M. Thomas. He explores various issues but tends to return to the relationship between the creative process and the therapeutic process: how artists can heal themselves and others by turning their sufferings into art. But his book needs editing for focus and concision: too often it gets bogged down in amassing background detail, psychoanalyzing characters, and developing themes and interpretations that are not particularly penetrating or illuminating. Richard Kuczkowski, Dir. Continuing Education, Dominican Coll., Blauvelt, N.Y.