"If we pierce any artist's legend", Edel claims [in his latest book, Stuff of Sleep and Dreams], "we discover an all-too-troubled human." Piercing the artist, and the "human" behind the artist, he discovers an all-too-troubled legend. The legend is called "literary psychology".

Literary psychology seeks the emotions and the persona within the work as distinct from the person of the artist. It is an attempt to study the metamorphoses of the unconscious materials of literary art into conscious image and symbol; and the metamorphoses of fancy into the finished work shaped by language and tradition.

The finished work re-imagines or re-enacts the troubles of the life, and thus assists the writer to come to terms with them.

It is a powerful legend, ambitious in scope yet accessible to common experience. Edel means, I think, to test both its explanatory power and its aesthetic power. How much does it explain about the process of selection and reproduction which transforms unconscious motive into poem or novel? And even if it cannot be shown to explain anything, does it contribute to the pleasure we take in literature? The first initiative requires the legend to produce hypotheses which can be tried against the available literary and psychological evidence. The second allows it to remain an article of faith, but insists that it is a more useful article of faith than some others.

Edel often settles for the second and less arduous initiative. Even so, he does make large claims for the status of literary psychology as a discipline. "It is", he says, "the very secret of method; it takes some of us closer to scientific literary truth than any method we have found so far." Perhaps, but it may leave the rest of us wanting to know how it will cope with two crucial problems: the identification of unconscious motive, and the description of the way in which unconscious motive becomes language and form.

The psychological evidence from which we can deduce unconscious motive is said to include "dreams, imaginings, and observed human actions". Some chapters of Stuff of Sleep and Dreams are therefore essays in biography. Others are essays in biography laced with reflections on the many ways in which parents contrive to ruin the lives of their children….

In so far as the evidence concerns dreams and imaginings, literary psychology exceeds biography. But one may doubt whether it always exceeds biography in the direction of scientific literary truth. Edel seems to think that it is possible to identify an unconscious motive by making explicit what biographers have chosen to leave implicit. Unfortunately, though, his explicitness often produces emblems rather than aetiologies. Take, for example, his treatment of sexual imaginings.

An earlier book, Bloomsbury: A House of Lions, had contained the gratifyingly emblematic Lytton Strachey, a precocious satyr in girl's clothing: "under those petticoats there was a proud and active phallus, even if the child looked increasingly as if he would be a Victorian spinster". This sudden vision of popping seams is both too much and too little. It jars with the otherwise sedate narrative, making explicit what we could have imagined for ourselves. And yet it explains nothing.

Stuff of Sleep and Dreams offers Auden's dreams of castration and Eliot's stanza about masturbation (in "The Death of Saint Narcissus", as it happens). It also proposes to "illuminate" the psychopathology of James Joyce by citing passages from letters he wrote to Nora, "Krafft-Ebing perversions", warns Edel, "nauseating" to some readers, a "wallowing in excrement", "erotic sickness". "The sensitive civilized reader will cry Enough!", he concludes, after two lengthy quotations from letters in which Joyce's sexual imagining of his wife does not confine itself to the missionary position.

These quotations are so carefully framed by commentary that they cannot fail to illuminate Edel's moral obsessions rather more than they do Joyce's psychopathology. They have been removed from their context—from the relationship which provoked and assimilated them—in order to serve as emblems of (Edel's perception of) Joyce's depravity….

If Edel's identification of unconscious motive seems shaky, so does his description of the way in which unconscious motive becomes language and form. Take the chapter on T. S. Eliot. Eliot surely provides a suitable case for literary psychology, since his most famous poem was written during a personal crisis, and is generally assumed to re-enact that crisis….

Edel promises an "adumbration" of Eliot's crisis and its reworking as The Waste Land. On the whole he adumbrates rather less well than Lyndall Gordon has already done in Eliot's Early Years, a book he does not mention (although I was intrigued to find Ezra Pound cast as Eliot's father and mother). But there is a potentially significant change of emphasis. Whereas Gordon sees Eliot's crisis as mediated primarily by religious idiom, Edel proposes to explore the psychology of Roger Vittoz, who treated Eliot in Lausanne in November 1920….

However, Edel confines himself to some gossip about Vittoz's ability to sense the brain waves of his patients simply by touching their foreheads….

Edel ignores the theory behind the banal practice, and so misses the point that Vittoz cannot have told Eliot anything he didn't already know. Vittoz held that the mind has two "working centres", subjective and objective, "the subjective brain is in a general way the source of the ideas and sensation, and … the objective brain in a sense 'focusses' them." Neurasthenia occurs when one working centre fails to focus the ideas and sensations produced by the other. Which could hardly have been news to the author of "Prufrock", or to the critic who spoke of the artist as an eye patiently observing himself as a man….

Similar difficulties arise in another case where literary psychology might have hoped to succeed. Edel is on firm ground when he argues that Willa Cather's novel The Professor's House might be said to re-enact the sense of helplessness and betrayal she felt when her friend Isabelle McClung married the violinist Jan Hambourg. The biographical evidence is strong. I have no difficulty in following Edel when he suggests that the professor's loss of the will to live was Cather's, unexplained in the novel because she could not explain it herself; or when he suggests that the story of Tom Outland—a student of the professor who discovers a cave city in the high mesa, but is robbed of his finds by a companion—re-enacts Cather's own sense of betrayal.

Even so, both characters have cultural as well as autobiographical resonances. Edel refers Cather's statement that "the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts" entirely to a personal crisis. But the context of the statement, in the preface to Not Under Forty, makes it clear that the reference is to cultural crisis….

I would not press the objection if Edel's analysis of unconscious motive had succeeded in illuminating the texture of the novel. I would not press it, for example, against John Carey's book on Dickens, The Violent Effigy. Carey understates the scope of Dicken's imagining of social process, his reliance on collective representations. But he nevertheless works backward and forward between the novels and obsessions revealed in events or letters until he has isolated patterns and qualities in the writing which we would not otherwise have noticed. He shows us a reason for Dickens's greatness. Edel, on the other hand, never deploys to such effect the aesthetic power of the legend which connects creative impulse with obsession….

Taken as a whole, these experiments in literary psychology disappoint less because of their failure to explain the creative process than because of their clumsy handling of texts.