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Two facets of this aspect of the literary process have special significance for our time.

One, a reservation on the point I have just made, is the phenomenon of pseudo-thinking, pseudo-feeling, and pseudo-willing, which Fromm discussed in The Escape From Freedom.

In essence this involves grounding one's thought and emotion in the values and experience of others, rather than in one's own values and experience.

There is a risk that instead of teaching a person how to be himself, reading fiction and drama may teach him how to be somebody else.

Clearly what the person brings to the reading is important.

Moreover, if the critic instructs his audience in what to see in a work, he is contributing to this pseudo-thinking ; ;

if he instructs them in how to evaluate a work, he is helping them to achieve their own identity.