Surveying Hawthorne's entire career, from his earliest surviving stories through the romances left unfinished at his death, Frederick Crews defines the terms of Hawthorne's self-debate as revealed in his fiction. Hawthorne emerges from this study as a writer of acute psychological awareness, whose characterizations anticipate to a remarkable extent the conclusions of Freudian psychoanalysis and whose own self-criticism rescues his fiction from popular...

An assessment of psychoanalysis and the views of its creator reveals Sigmund Freud's blunders with patients, his misunderstandings about the psychological controversies of his time, and how he advanced his career on the appropriated findings of others. Since the 1970s, Sigmund Freud's scientific reputation has been in an accelerating tailspin - and for excellent reasons. Nevertheless, the idea persists that some of his proposals were visionary discoveries....