In his attempt to apply psychoanalysis to the career of Edgar Allan Poe for purposes of literary criticism [Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius], Joseph Wood Krutch exhibited a commendable degree of competence for a layman. He seems to have had at his command a fairly good, though incomplete, outline of psychoanalysis as it was constituted circa 1926 and a serviceable understanding of the nature of unconscious conflict as well as certain of its overt manifestations. The psychoanalytic concepts which he uses are interpreted, for the most part, with a fair degree of accuracy. What is especially noteworthy is that even technical terminology is correctly employed. By 1926 enough of the basic material of psychoanalysis had reached print—much of it in English translation—so that it was theoretically possible to go even further than he did, but although his knowledge of it was not very extensive he seems to have understood better than most people what he had read. He is nowhere guilty of the gross falsification of psychoanalytic doctrine which was so common then, and which even now gives trouble. His competence served him well—up to a point.
That point is reached when he tries to evaluate Poe's writings solely as manifestations of psychic conflict without regard for their aesthetic character. Up to then he is on perfectly solid ground. A poem is, as he indicates, as much a psychic product as a slip of the tongue or a hallucination, but it is of course something else besides, and Krutch's application of psychoanalysis does not tell us anything useful about what that something else may be. But perhaps this failure is not altogether his fault…. At the time when Krutch wrote his book there existed only tentative formulations in many parts of [psychoanalytic research]…. Nevertheless, despite the circumstances, this gap in Krutch's chain of reasoning is a major flaw which is not mitigated by the note of caution on which he ends the book: …
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