The Story of a Psychoanalytic Critic Norman N. Holland As I look back, it seems to me that two discoveries shaped my intellectual life and career. The first was the New Criticism. It was in a poetry study group led by the poet Cid Corman that I found I had a peculiar knack for this method of reading texts. As I practiced it, the aim was to show how all the parts and aspects of a poem or story fit together into one organic unity. The method consisted in grouping details of the text into thematic clusters: images of disease in Hamlet, for example, or the different kinds of language and splits developed in that play. Then one grouped those clusters into larger themes: disease combined with images of rot or smell to make a larger theme of corruption; the interest in language contrasted with the discussions of action. Finally, I would bring all these themes together in a statement of a single unifying theme for the play, say, corruption as the failure to bring words and deeds together. Then one could go back down to the details of Hamlet. One could show how any given sentence related through one or more themes to the central core of the organic whole. This was the so-called New Criticism and, I would say, European structuralism as well. No doubt I am over-simplifying structuralism, as is my fatal habit. Nevertheless, it seems to me that if you strip the philosophy off, what you are left with is this method of reading texts for an organic unity. The method in turn is called by philosophers holistic method, and it is a well-recognized method. You see it somewhat in the natural sciences, for example, astronomy or geology. The greatest geological discovery of this century, the theory of plate tectonics, [End Page 245] consisted of putting together into a coherent picture evidence from a variety of sources, the study of earthquakes, of the reversals of the magnetic pole, the fact that South America can be fitted into Africa, and so on. Mostly, however, you see holistic method in the social sciences. You see it in clinical psychology, anthropology, geography, criminology, and, of course, in literary criticism, which I would describe as one of the social sciences. I could do New Criticism easily, convincingly, and well, and I liked doing it. I was delighted to find that journals would publish what I wrote, and my department rewarded my publications. And I found a small but passionate group of scholars in the field who welcomed a young and energetic newcomer: Leonard and Eleanor Manheim, who published the tiny journal, Literature and Psychology; Simon Lesser, author of Fiction and the Unconscious; Norman Kiell, who assembled the extraordinary bibliography for our field. Always something of a rebel, I came to believe passionately in this way of reading. I thought this method of reading loosened the grip of the authorities, the professors who knew all the questionable facts of literary history. New Criticism democratized literature. It opened the wonderful texts of English literature to ordinary students and readers. No longer were the great texts only for those of cultured, wealthy backgrounds. New Criticism seemed to me a high point in Western writing about literature. It still seems so to me, even after several decades of reaction and discrediting. Yes, even though later critics have proved the assumptions of New Criticism wrong, in my eyes, too. We were mistaken, but we did good work, given our premises. It was a way of admiring and respecting even the humblest works. My friends and I used to have a lot of fun analyzing B movies this way, as the Cahiers critics were doing at the same time. One looked at all of the movie or poem or novel at once. One showed how it had a wholeness, much as one might look at a painting or sculpture or a piece of music. I felt skilled and powerful doing New Criticism. I was teaching Shakespeare in those days, and I used to challenge [End Page 246] my students in my classes. Pick any five consecutive words from a play. If I can...