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Understanding the receptivity of literature, how one work admits many readers, begins with an analogy: unity is to text as identity is to self. Unity here means the way all a text’s features can be related through one central theme. Identity describes a person’s sameness within different behaviors as variations on one identity theme (Lichtenstein). To find unity or identity, however, the interpreter himself plays a behavioral variation on his identity theme. In interpreting, his identity re-creates itself as he shapes the text to match his characteristic defenses, fantasies, and coherences. Thus, what a poet says about fictional, political, or scientific texts expresses the same identity theme as the poems he writes. To understand reading, criticism, and any knowing or making in symbols, then, we need to let go the Cartesian craving for objectivity and accept the themes in ourselves with which we construe the world—including literary works.

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Thanks to its clarity, this is a book that allows us to raise the whole issue of Lacan's version of psychoanalysis."The aim of this book," its first sentence says, "is to give a clear introduction to the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan" (p. 9). In this, Benvenuto and Kennedy have succeeded admirably. If you are looking for a book to guide your students or yourself through Lacan's version of psychoanalysis, I know of none I would recommend more highly. Lacan's writing is witty and playful, but notoriously difficult. Benvenuto and Kennedy include just enough quotations from Lacan (notably in their chapters 9 and 10) to make one grateful one is reading a summary and not the original.Lacan is difficult to read because he limits his vocabulary to three fields: (a) the elements of the oedipal stage: father, mother, phallus, vagina, and castration; (b) emotionless words out of the French philosophical stylebook, disembodied, either/or words like: possibility, impossibility, absence, presence, lack, and desire (without a desirer); and (c) puns. With this sensational, if limited, lexicon Lacan discusses neurosis or psychosis (in just those global terms) or hysteria (which has come back into fashion in Lacanian circles). One will look in vain to Lacan for the careful, scientific distinctions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (3rd ed.; DSM-III; American Psychiatric Association, 1980). Absent, too is the everyday language with which we discuss, no matter how lamely, love, sexu-Requests for reprints should be sent to