Short Bio
I received a Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University in 1959 and have taught at Lehigh University, Michigan State University, and the University of Florida, where I am Emeritus Professor of English, having retired in 1996. My primary areas of interest have been, in the order of their emergence, Victorian and comparative fiction, the psychological study of literature, Shakespeare, and the life and work of Karen Horney and her place in the history of psychoanalysis.
My first book, Experiments in Life: George Eliot's Quest for Values (1965) was a revision of my doctoral dissertation and reflects my training in thematic analysis and the history of ideas. My subsequent work in literary criticism has been devoted to the development of a psychological approach to literature based on the theories of Karen Horney and other Third Force or Humanistic Psychologists, particularly Abraham Maslow. I have written six books applying this approach to a variety of texts and critical issues: A Psychological Approach to Fiction: Studies in Thackeray, Stendhal, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, and Conrad (1974); Character and Conflict in Jane Austen's Novels (1978); Bargains with Fate: Psychological Crises and Conflicts in Shakespeare and His Plays (1991); Character as a Subversive Force in Shakespeare: The History and the Roman Plays (1991); and Imagined Human Beings: A Psychological Approach to Character and Conflict in Literature (1997); Rereading George Eliot: Changing Responses to Her Experiments in Life (2003). In addition, I have edited Third Force Psychology and the Study of Literature (1986). Four of the above-mentioned books are out-of-print and are available in electronic form via links from this website. Some essays of mine have been posted here and also some chapters from Imagined Human Beings.
In addition to my work in literary criticism, I have written a biographical study: Karen Horney: A Psychoanalyst's Search for Self-Understanding. In this book, I explore the relationship between Horney's personal history and the evolution of her psychoanalytic ideas. I also try to present a thorough account of her thought, to place it in relation to the history of psychoanalysis, and to make a case for its enduring power and importance. In the course of doing research for my biographical study, I discovered a number of unpublished essays and lectures by Horney, and I have edited these and her uncollected writings in two volumes for Yale: The Therapeutic Process: Essays and Lectures (1999) and The Unknown Karen Horney: Essays on Gender, Culture, and Psychoanalysis (2000). In the early 1990s, I founded the International Karen Horney Society (IKHS), of which I am Director. The Society now has a website on which information about Horney and postings of some of my writings can be found (see Links).
In my most recent book on George Eliot, I trace my shifting responses to her fiction over the years and use myself as a case history to study the psychology of reader response. I also provide close readings of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, which many think to be her masterpieces, from my present perspective. I was a true believer in her Religion of Humanity when I wrote Experiments in Life, but I now strongly disagree with her values and with her interpretations and judgments of her characters. But she is a far greater genius than I realized back then in the creation of psychological portraits of imagined human beings. A draft of the first chapter of Rereading George Eliot is posted on this site, and a version of my analysis of Dorothea Brooke can be found in the 2000 volume of PSYART (see Links).
For more details about any of the above, please see the descriptions of my books and the longer version of my bio.