Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 439
from
Brown Corpus
In our own time we have seen that the novelist's debt to psychoanalysis has increased but that the novel itself has not profited much from this marriage.
Ortega's hope that modern psychology might yet bring forth a last flowering of the novel has only been partially fulfilled.
He borrows the insights of psychology to improve his impaired vision but cannot bring to his work the distinctive vision that should be a novelist's own.
He has been seduced by the marvels of the unconscious and has lost interest in studying the surfaces of character.
If many of the characters in contemporary novels appear to be the bloodless relations of characters in a case history it is because the novelist is often forgetful today that those things that we call character manifest themselves in surface behavior, that the ego is still the executive agency of personality, and that all we know of personality must be discerned through the ego.
The novelist who has been badly baptized in psychoanalysis often gives us the impression that since all men must have an Oedipus complex all men must have the same faces.
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