A Critical Look at Psychology

a field not his own, particularly when that field is as multiverse as psychology. The presumption increases when the criticism is based on a reading acquaintance with only the tiniest fraction of the literature in one small area, and a few friends in the field who must be thoroughly unrepresentative, in that they exhibit none of its defects or failings. All I can say in extenuation is that it is the engagingly old-fashioned habit of literary criticism to insist that it still takes all knowledge to be its province, and that the impulse is friendly, based on an enormous respect for the field of psychology and a sharing of its aspirations. Sometimes an amateur can see things that the professional misses, or at the very least his insolence can annoy the professional into considering matters usually outside his specialized sphere. Still, perhaps "look" in my title is overambitious. Call it "glance" or "squint." Psychology arose historically as a branch of philosophy (where it is still ensconced in some booksellers' catalogues, if no longer in academic departments). The earliest development of its insights, however, came from writers, Sigmund Freud repeatedly credited the poets with anticipating his discoveries (by delving into their own psyches, he said), and how could he have acknowledged the debt more prettily than by naming the complex he considered nuclear after the protagonist in two plays by Sophocles? Thomas Hardy knew psychoanalysis, Freud once told C. P. Oberndorf, meaning it in the sense in which we rediscover the mechanisms of depth psychology each time we open Shakespeare.