Norman N. Holland

The brain of Robert Frost : a cognitive approach to literature

With Robert Frost as an example of both a writer and a reader, Holland develops a new way of thinking about literary criticism based on findings in brain research and cognitive psychology.

Literary Interpretation and Three Phases of Psychoanalysis

I am starting from an historical view, namely, that psychoanalysis and, with it, psychoanalytic literary criticism have (in their now eight decades of existence) gone through three distinct phases. All focus inward on Freuds original discoveries, but each successive phase moves outward toward a larger, more general human psychology. I would like to illustrate my point with a patient, but, since literary critics and psychoanalysts are both creatures of language, I will substitute for a lengthy patient a short poem. The patient as text, the text as patient, the patient text-

Twenty-five years and thirty days

One can imagine the history of psychoanalytic literary criticism (like psychoanalysis itself) as three phases, each enlarging and including the previous one: a classical phase that studied the oedipal conflicts of literary figures; an ego psychology that addressed literary structures; now, a psychology of the self that uses associations to unfold and deepen ones relations to literature. Psychoanalytic criticism used to be disdained in literary circles, but has become highly fashionable, for today other kinds of criticism also use associations. They do not acknowledge the critics self or countertransference, however, and their psychoanalysis is not the clinicians.

Tickled Rats and Human Laughter

The recent discovery that rats can be tickled suggests a deeper understanding of human laughter. We laugh when a system we share with other mammals is disinhibited. Laughter can thus be induced by direct action on the brain. In ordinary life, we have one physical response, laughing, but it can be induced by three very different stimuli or circumstances. One, we laugh when tickled. Two, we laugh for purely convivial, social reasons. Three, we laugh at jokes, wit, and less intellectual stimuli-like pratfalls and practical jokes. Leaving direct action on the brain aside, we can hypothesize that the latter three all involve the same psychological situation. Laughter is induced by, first, a mild, sudden, and playful threat to our ongoing process of maintaining and re-creating a personal style of responding to many things besides jokes followed by, second, the nullification of that mild threat.

The Critical I

Asserting that literary theory needs a dose of common sense, this treatise attacks Saussurean linguistics as outmoded and discredited in its elimination of its subjects. It claims that postmodernist ideas of the individual rest on false linguistic and psychological premises.