2 - Literary and psychological models of the self

Summary

Literature is a wilderness, psychology is a garden. To a literary critic, the categories of the psychologist often look impossibly spruce and well kempt: a hierarchy of brains, graduating from the limbic reptile to the cortical human; a hierarchy of orifices, graduating from the juvenile oral and anal to the adult genital; a hierarchy of selves, graduating from the vegetable self, dumbly growing in its plot, to the master self that coordinates and supervises all the lower selves. The literary critic is inclined to regard all these neatly cut divisions as mythologies, not truths; as beliefs designed not to describe reality but to increase the power, prestige, and earning capacity of psychologists. But I imagine that psychologists (who seem to be more polite than literary critics) whisper behind closed doors characterizations of literary critics equally unfavorable – that literary critics have a vested interest in keeping all texts mysterious, in denying the possibility of truth or insight or wisdom, in reducing all human life to a thicket of darkly intersecting, self-contradicting systems of signs, a jungle in which literary critics, blindly refusing the existence of eyesight, will nevertheless volunteer (for a fee) to act as guides. Furthermore, I imagine that psychologists, though they have sometimes looked for inspiration or confirmation to the masterpieces of literature, sometimes shake their heads or stare at the ceiling or mutter to themselves at the notions of human identity to be found among poets and novelists – such ranting, such willful incoherence, so much that is extraneous, undigested, or formulaic.