The New Paradigm: Subjective or Transactive?

Author(s): Norman N. Holland

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 7, No. 2, Poetics: Some Methodological Problems (Winter,
1976), pp. 335-346
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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The New Paradigm: Subjectiveor Transactive?

Norman
N. Holland
AM MOST GRATEFUL to the editor for asking me to comment on Pro-

fessor David Bleich's bold, wide-ranging paper. And thank you,

David Bleich, for laying it on the line to literarycritics in general as
you laid it on the line in June 1971 to this literarycritic in particular. As
you know, the shiftin perspectiveyou then proposed led me to a profound
turn in my own thinkingabout "objectivity."1 I hope it does the same
now for other criticsand theoristsof literature,for,as a group, we have a
way to go before we can say we have fully absorbed the world view established by developments in early twentieth-century
physics,mid-century
biology, the philosophical statementsthat have accompanied them or, I
would add, the growthof the social (human) sciences since the late nineteenthcentury. I am thinkingof psychoanalysis,of course, but also of the
relativismimplicit in cultural anthropology,the linguisticdemonstrations
(by Whorf and Sapir) that language shapes our perceptions, and, in
particular, the nearly-a-centuryof powerful research by psychologistsof
perception ("transactional psychology"), all leading to an overwhelming
demonstrationthat "perception is a constructiveact."
At the moment, however, my impression is that many, perhaps most,
literarycritics clutch the old paradigm and the illusion of objectivitylike
a securitycloth. Is it our fig leaf that we hang onto it so tightlyand so
obviously? The experimental psychologistsshow the same tenacity for a
model of science, but theyneed that supposed respectanineteenth-century
I
more
than we do-now. I think once we required New
bility, suspect,
or formalist criticism as a corrective to a long period of critical selfindulgence in impressionismand naive applications of history. Now, however, we can afford to recognize that even the strictesttextual criticism
expresses,willy-nilly,the critic's characteristicstyle. We can go on to the
next steps,like learning how to thinkand write in this new mode or evaluating structuralistand semiotic developments as to the degree to which
they accommodate the omnipresence of individual stylesof creation and
re-creation.
ProfessorBleich has set out the issues, however, and I cannot see how
any well-informedperson in this last quarter of the century can gainsay
his fundamental point. He may findmy drawing "auxiliary concepts and
constructs" from identitytheoryand clinical experience too complicated.
I may find his statementof paradigm too simple. We neverthelessshare

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336

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

one basic, rock-solidagreement: a profoundchange has taken place in our

expectations of "objectivity," and the old faith will no longer support
recent discoveries or structuremeaningfulproblems in this last quarter of
the twentiethcentury.
Further, this doubting of objectivityis becoming an important literary
groundswell, visible, for example, in the recent issue of College English
devoted to " 'The' Reader, and Real Readers," several seminars on this
issue at the 1975 Modern Language Association meeting, the movement
in the schools toward "response-centered"teaching, and, of course, in a
varietyof writings: David Bleich's fine,practical book, Readings and Feelings, Murray Schwartz's theoreticalessay, "Where Is Literature?" and my
own recent work,Poems in Persons and 5 Readers Reading.2 All question
the importance of the "objective" text in determining literary response
compared to the personality,experience, or skills the reader or member
of the audience brings.
David Bleich calls this approach to reading "subjective." I call it
"transactive," for reasons I shall shortlygive. First,however, I would like
to propose a term. If you write on literaryresponse or experience, you are
plagued by the lack of a word. Its absence has become all the more
annoying by these new discoveries about the ways we create literaryexperiences. We have no term for a person who is responding to a literary
work. Reader limits one to writtentexts-what about the spoken poem?
Audience seems too closely limited to film and theater,and one is forced
to constructa cumbersome singular, member of the audience. The OED
offers-ent as a suffixdenoting a personal or material agent. Then, if
novelist for one who creates novels, I propose novelent for one who recreates them as he reads or hears them read. Drama and dramatistwould
yield dramatent; essay, essayist,essayent; poetry,poet, poetent, and so on.
But for the one word needed, I suggest literent: one who responds tore-creates-literature. At any rate, I shall tryit out.
David Bleich persuaded me in 1971 of the importance of the literent's
"subjectivity." That is, he got me to recognize what now seems so obvious
and familiar that I wonder why I argued so long and so strenuouslywith
him, namely: books do not have fantasies or defenses or meaningspeople do. To understand responses to literature,I had to concentrate
not on the text alone or the literentalone but on the transaction3by which
we literentsbuild fantasies, defenses, and meanings from the materials
literatureoffersus. Once I did this,I and Murray Schwartz and others at
Buffalo's Center for the Psychological Study of the Arts found that we
could discover the intricacies of that transaction in precise detail. Moreover, what we saw forliteratureseemed to have a completelygeneral application. We were dealing with a general theory of the relation of personalityto perception.
This generalitycame about because, once we began thinkingtransac-

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tively,we found a great deal of prior research to confirmand structure

what we were observing in literents. Some came from the psychologyof
perception, and more from recent psychoanalytic psychology. One cannot know reality (I would agree with Bleich) apart fromoneself and one's
own way of knowing things, including oneself. I would add, however,
that one cannot know oneself without drawing on things one has learned
fromthe world-out-there(mother,food,and sensoryrepresentations).This
is the meaning of the psychoanalyticconcept of self-objectdifferentiation.
Beginning about the eighth month of life, the child firstlearns a reality
by the absence of his nurturingOther. By learning to conceive of that
Other as separate, he learns to conceive of himselfas a Self. Many people (among them Piaget) have now supported this idea by direct observation of children, and I think this is what ProfessorBleich adopts in his
own ideas about symbolism.
It is unfortunate therefore that Bleich dismisses D. W. Winnicott's
"potential space" so curtly. Winnicott does much more than describe "a
certain formof infantilebehavior," as David Bleich says. He has found the
origin and ground for a human adaptation fundamental to all ages and
profoundlyimportant,as Murray Schwartz showed, to the study of literature. True, the "potential space" begins with mothering,but in adult
life,as Winnicott says, "It is here that the individual experiences creative
living." "This intermediatearea of experience . . is retained in the intense
experiencing that belongs to the arts and to religion and to imaginative
living, and to creative scientificwork."4 (Think of being "absorbed" by
art, thought,or work.) In effect,in the early transactionsbetween child
and mother,we learn how to transact everythingelse. In child development, then, final reality is neither "objective" nor "subjective" but the
transactionbetween them,between the me and what I relate to as not-me.5
Beyond Winnicott or childhood, Heinz Lichtenstein's theoryof identity
and identitymaintenance provides a way of furtherexploring and articulating that potential space with adults. Preciselybecause I came from a
tradition of New Criticism, I found I could translate Lichtenstein's concept into operational terms: we can arrive at someone's identityby interpreting their behavior for an underlyingthematic unity just as we would
interpreta literarytextfora centeringtheme.6
Given such an identitytheme, I discovered how to analyze writers'and
literents' creations and re-creations of literature with precision. People
express a whole life-styleinvolving a long spectrum of human activitycognition, sexuality, political beliefs, intelligence, education, or interpersonal relations-in the literarytransaction,and they do so within certain
general principles. I could fleshout David Bleich's proclamation of "the
primacy of subjectivity,"providing both a theoretical base and a wider
application for his intuitionsabout response. In "Delphi seminars" at our
Center, Murray Schwartz, David Willbern, Robert Rogers, and I have
been able to catch these re-creative transactions in slow motion, as it
were, demonstratingto students and teachers alike how we all transact

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literaryworks and one another in the vocabularies and grammars of our

several identitythemes.7
Very briefly,the literent (or the perceiver of another person or any
other reality) comes to that other reality with a set of characteristic
expectations, typicallya balance of related desires and fears. The perceiver adapts the "other" to gratifythose wishes and minimize those fears
-that is, the perceiver re-creates his characteristicmodes of adaptation
and defense (aspects of his identitytheme) from the materials literature
or realityoffers.He or she projects characteristicfantasiesinto them (and
these fantasiescan also be understood as aspects of identity). Finally, the
individual may transform these fantasies into themes-meanings-of
characteristicconcern (and, again, these themes and transformationscan
also be understood within the individual's identity). One can remember
these fouraspects of the transactionbetween perceiverand perceived in an
acronym: we perceive DEFTly--through defenses,expectations,fantasies,
and transformations.All, however, are aspects of a single principle: we
perceive so as to match our identitythemes (the essential sameness of ourselves) as best we can from the mixture of matches and mismatches our
environmentoffers.
Because DEFT, or the principle of identity re-creation, comes from
recent (and rather unfamiliar) psychoanalyticthinking,it is easy to miss
its generalityand importance. It is, so far as I know, the only psychological theoryofferinga comprehensive account of the way our personalities
affectour perception and interpretationof experience (including literary
experience). Further,once we see how perception replicates identity,we
can interrelate someone's interpersonal,political, sexual, or intellectual
acts through a concept of personal style (identity) to his or her ways of
creation and re-creation. A richer kind of "Life and Works" has become
possible, because we have found a form that underlies many kinds of
transactionbetween self and other, even interpersonalrelations (as in the
"Delphi seminars").
Bleich may find this principle relating perception to personalitycomplicated-actually it is not difficultonce one has worked with it a little.
In any case, DEFT is too importantto be put aside so easily, for it is the
firstarticulation of a trulynew paradigm. What we think of as the scientificachievement of the last three centuries restspreciselyon the belief
that we cannot talk rigorously about individuals; that therefore true
knowledge requires the splittingof the knower from the known or "objective" reality from "subjective." The principle of identityre-creation,
however,makes it possible to speak rigorously(if holistically) about individuals. It thereforemakes unnecessarythe Cartesian cleaving of the world
into "objective" and "subjective" realities. Rather, we can recognize
that "objective" studies of reality (such as science) are simplyspecial kinds
of perceptual transactions. Science ceases to be the norm to which other
disciplines must aspire (as the New Criticism so often did), and becomes
a special case of a general transaction between Self and Other that all

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humans experience all the time. Instead of two ways of perceiving reality,
one "objective" and one "subjective," we have only one way-transactive
-and various limitationsindividuals may put on their transactionswith
reality.
From this more advanced perspective, Bleich's resolute accenting of
subjectivityover objectivityseems but a firststep. Once I worked within
that choice and saw the articulation of subjectivity through identity
theory,I also began to see the change in paradigm differently.I do not
thinkwe are simplyshiftingfrom an objective to a subjective view of the
world. Rather, I thinkwe are givingup the assumptionthat underlies that
false dichotomy. The new paradigm we are beginning to accept is: one
cannot separate subjective and objective perspectives.8
From this point of view, it now seems to me that Bleich has simplynot
been radical enough. He has not gone to the roots of the existing paradigm. That is, he has accepted the dichotomy on which the old view
rests-that there are two equally possible alternatives,an objective view
of the world and a subjective. Then, rejecting the objective, he is left
only with the subjective. This lands him in the thicketof extreme Berkeleyan idealism: "An observer is a subject, and his means of perception
define the essence of the object and even its existence to begin with." Dr.
Johnson will kick that stone again, and we will have the usual thumping
arguments about the persistentthere-nessof tables and chairs.
Further, if all acts are subjective, then Bleich has not really changed
anything,any more than Bishop Berkeley did with esse est percipi. He
has only supplied a universal predication, as if to say all human acts take
place in real time or involve human neurons. As Tweedledum and
Tweedledee knew, nothing is changed, really, by discovering the universe
is only the Red King's dream. Instead of a paradigm "sufficientlyopenended to leave all sorts of problems" (Kuhn), the word subjectivitybecomes a thought-stopper.To be sure, if one is as skilled as David Bleich,
one may marvelously intuit relations between literents' perceptions and
their inner thoughtsabout deeply personal things,as in his sensitiveessays
and his book. But one can never interrelatethose intuitionsmore generally
since the label "subjective" (as Bleich uses it) leads to no furtherdifferences among acts. Merely calling reality"subjective" leads to the familiar
dead-end of solipsismor extreme idealism: one can draw no distinctions
between unicorns and horses or President McGovern and President Ford
(or, forthat matter,PresidentWashington).
Another trouble, of course, is that if we stop with the simple idea that
subjectivityis "paramount," we have no satisfyingway of accounting for
the various kinds of relationsbetween my subjectivityand the world "out
there" of Hamlet, Dr. Johnson'sstone, other people (with their subjectivities), or our necessities. If we are only subjective, we can feel hunger and
its cessation, but can we know food? If so, how? How could a purely
subjective being adapt to or master realities beyond his own imagination?
How can literentsrespond to texts-out-there?The label "subjective" does

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not let us discover the complexities of personal perception, because it

obscures the differencebetween the act of perception and the object of
the act.
The psychoanalystGeorge S. Klein was one of the most cogent and
thorough investigatorsof the overwhelming effectmotives have on perception. He puts the question. "How is it that, if motives influenceperception, we can perceive so effectively?. . . There is in fact impressive
evidence that actions based on perception are efficiently
coordinated with
the attributesof objects toward which action is directed. Perception can
do its job of discriminationremarkablywell. It creates workable notions
of what thingsare in accord with what one wants, of where thingsare to
be seen when one wants them."'9It seems to me we will answer Klein's
question, not by looking wholly at the perceiver nor wholly at the objects
perceived but at the transactionbetween them.
If we simplysay everythingwe know or do is "subjective," then we have
no way of accounting for the outward, intersubjectiveeffectivenessof such
admittedly"subjective" acts as perception,adaptation, or communication.
Professor Bleich says we can establish common worlds of thought and
sense "by extended negotiation among the perceivers." Yet, again, in a
solipsisticworld where we are all simply "subjective," I do not see how
such negotiationsare really negotiations,or (in the word I prefer) transactions. In fact,Bleich's failure to take advantage of these new discoveries
about identityreplication and DEFT perception leave him no way at all
to account for the re-creation of private experience into intersubjective
consensus.
Further, Bleich's own examples of "subjectivity" answer better to a
transactive paradigm which locates fundamental reality in the relation
between the me and the not-me than theydo to the one-word abstraction.
Language is not "subjective." English grammarexisted before I came and
will be here after I am gone-but I do not know English apart from the
way I speak, hear, or, in general, performit to replicate my own identity.
The fundamental reality is the way I re-create my personalityas I use
English.
In the same way, I use the resourcesof my body to structureand achieve
inner and outer states. In effect,my body provides me with a symbology
and a syntax. This is the thrustof Piaget's example of the sixteen-monthold girl who used the opening of her mouth to understand the opening
of a matchbox. An ear or an arm would not have provided a suitable
resource. A teddy bear would not have been describable by a mouth.
Another child might have used hand or eye. It is the transactionbetween
thischild and the resourcesof the world (body, matchbox) as theyrelated
to her that is the fundamental reality. By close observation,I can discover
how this child expressed her identityin her bodily achievement of the
innernessof thisobject..
We circle back to the same problem again and again with Bleich's
insistenceon the dichotomybetween subject and object and his choice of

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the subject. The "primacy of subjectivity"will not account for relations

between subjectivities and other entities, either physical or subjective.
How can one square Piaget's or any biologist'sconcept of adaptation with
the belief that the subject's "means of perception define the essence of the
object and even its existence to begin with"? Yet I can understand
symbol,adaptation, the child with the matchbox, and even that sentence,
once I concentrate on transactions between Self and Other within the
principle of identityre-creation. I can explore those transactionsin great
detail and generality,but I cannot for the life of me (and that is the
appropriate oath for this problem of adaptation) see how the unitary
termsubjective will explain as much.
I can summarize what I am saying most directlyby resortingto a series
of simple equations. The Cartesian paradigm on which the three centuries
of classical science restcan be stated:
(1)

Perception- Pobj + Psubj

Within this paradigm, I attain objectivity by subtracting the subjective

fromboth sides (for example, by restrictingmyselfthroughthe procedures
of science) :
(2)

Perception- Psubj - Pobj

Thus, in the July 1975 ScientificAmerican, I read of a Harvard astronomer rejecting a piece of research for "intimationsof subjectivity."
The trouble is, how do we subtract the subjectivity out? Doing so
involves us in a perception of our own perception, and it, too, must have
its subjective and objective components:
(3)

Perception (of perception)= P(P)obj

+ P(P)subj

And to sort those out would involve us in still another mixture of subjective and objective and so on into an infiniteregression. In practice,
of course, people tryto minimize the element of subjectivityby following
rules such as the ethics and restrictionsof experimental science or the
formalistliterarycritic's demand that one pay attention only to the text.
But these rules are not themselves sacrosanct. They only express paradigms by which a certain group of practitioners define themselves (as
"Copernican" astronomers,"quantum" physicists,or "New" critics). One
cannot elude the subjective element in either one's choice of or one's perspective on such rules. Further,because uncertaintyand randomness have
become so importantto physicsand adaptation so fundamental to biology
in this century, and because (more recently) we have begun to know
something about how literentsre-create literature, those rules have become verymuch open to question.
At this point Bleich takes this questioning to mean there is no such

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thing as objective perception. He accepts the dichotomyassumed in (1),

which is the root of the trouble, but he rejects its variant (2), making
Pobj equal zero. Hence,
(4)

Perception = Psubj

This, as I have said, is not an adequate paradigm for explaining how perceptions get "negotiated" into consensus or express other things besides
raw personality ("subjectivity"). How can there be a consensus like
"Darwinism" or "New Criticism" if each member of the consensus is
respondingonly to his own inner promptings? What an extraordinarycoincidence theywould represent! The odds must surelybe veryhigh against
such consensuses, if, for example, meetings in my department are any
sample of the difficultyprofessorsfind in negotiating agreement among
personal points of view. It is well to remember the wisdom of Max
Planck: "A new truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents
and making them see the light,but ratherbecause its opponents eventually
die." 10 Tenacity, not negotiation,is the human style,for we use the ideas
we hold to re-createour veryidentities.
In contrastto Bleich, the position I and my colleague Murray Schwartz
take is that (1) itselfimplies an error. (3) shows that one cannot simply
remove Psubj from Pobj, not even in the physical sciences and certainly
not in human sciences or interpretivearts like literarycriticism. Ample
reasons and numerous examples are given by Kuhn, Piaget, and many
authoritiesbesides those Bleich cites (Cassirer, forexample, Dewey, Langer
-or Whitehead properlyunderstood). Rather, Psubj and Pobj cannot be
separated, and (1) should be replaced by:
(5)

Perception- f(Pobj, Psubj)

Perception is a functionof both its objective and subjective components.

A mere plus sign expresses that functionmisleadingly,for it suggeststhey
can be subtracted or separated from each other.
In fact, it seems to me that it is preciselythe use of the adjectives "subjective" and "objective" that leads to misunderstandingthis new paradigm and approach to literature. The words themselvessmuggle in the
assumption that the two can be separated. According to my American
Of or having to do with a material
Heritage Dictionary, "OBJECTIVE:
object as distinguishedfrom a mental concept, idea, or belief." "SUB. . . Proceeding from or taking place within an individual's
JECTIVE:
mind such as to be unaffected by the external world." To add to the
murk, when used adjectivally, they imply a neutral noun which can be
interchangeablyeither (or neither?): subjective/objectiveperspective,or
subjective/objective reality,or subjective/objectivestate of mind. (Thus,
the nouns subjectivityand objectivityintroduce the same assumption as

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the adjectives.) Since these words presume precisely the matter at issue,
the highly suspect postulate (1), I think they are poor tools with which
to approach a discussion of that postulate or a new paradigm squarely
contraryto it, based in the inextricabilityof "subjective" and "objective."
Those words will only muddle our dearly bought twentieth-century
knowledge that science itselfis relativeand our more recentdiscoveryof methods
to explain our differentexperiences of literature. "Subject" and "object"
may still be useful,but I prefer"self" and "other" or "me" and "not-me"
because they bring no confusingabstractionsor adjectives with them.
Further, in place of Bleich's "subjective paradigm," I propose the
following paradigmatic assumption. In the terms of our equations, perception is a functionof identity(I) and the resourcesofferedby realityas
they relate to that identity (Ri, which is "environment" as Bleich defines
it). Hence:
(6)

Perception = f(I, Ri)

Perception means: the individual apprehends the resourcesof reality (including language, his own body, space, time, etc.) as he relates to them
in such a way that they replicate his identity. Then, I define identity
operationally: it is the unity one discovers in an individual's behavior
(just as one would look at a literary text for unity). Naturally, one
pursues this inquiry through one's own identity.11"Fundamental reality"
thus becomes a field of interactionsbetween selves-identities-and other
entities,animate, inanimate, and symbolic.
It is the transaction between self and other which is paramount.
Transactive (instead of subjective) denotes a genuine change in paradigm: the assumption-or recognition, I think-that humans cannot
separate subject and object, no matter which we value more: what we
know is the transaction between self and other-but we can know that
transactionverysubtlyand intricatelyindeed.
"'Reality,' " writes Heinz Lichtenstein, "is the product of a complex
process of actively 'fitting' reality to the given circumstances of one's
existence-namely, to make possible for the individual 'the sense of oneness of man among men.' " "There can never be an 'objective sense of
reality,'only one selectivelychosen by 'unconscious intent'-one which excludes other aspects of realityexperience and definesidentitiesin its own
specific way, as every shared sense of reality must do." Reality "is, in
other words, a 'tendentious' perception of reality,fittingthe need of those
who 'promote' it at a given time and place. It is 'tendentious' even if we
acknowledge that only by this 'shaping' of the sense of reality are we
enabled to live as humans." For literarycritics, this paradigm leads to
important new inquiries, for "it is through language that a political and
social order is imposed, which derives from the shared sense of what is
real among those whose 'language' prevails." And similarly, "Psycho-

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analytic theoryneeds to apply its veryown principlesto the analysis of the

unconscious determinantsof realityperception-not just of an individual,
but of the shared reality of one's historical existence."12 These are but
two possibilities (political and psychological) among the many large
"problems" (in Kuhn's sense) the new transactive paradigm suggests.
There is, however, one particular problem that always crops out among
literaryscholars in a discussion of Bleich's, Schwartz's, or my, or anyone's
focus on the literaryexperience as such. That is the problem of the recurrence of responses. One can no longer sustain the idea that "objective"
factors determine response. How then do we critics explain the commonalities of response? Most educated literentswould regard Paradise
Lost as an epic but not "L'Allegro." An overwhelmingmajorityof literents
prefersHamlet to Titus Andronicus. ProfessorBleich says, "Only through
interpersonaland intercommunalnegotiation does any particular form of
knowledge come to prevail." True enough, but it seems to me that his
insistence on "subjectivity" obscures that process. Subjects, he says, "define the essence of the object and even its existence to begin with." I
think I know what he means, that I create my own Hamlet each time I
experience it, but it sounds as though he thinksI created the Hamlet all
those other literentsprefer to Titus! The mere choice of "subjectivity"
over "objectivity" yields, so far as I can see, no way to articulate those
puzzlingly interlocked phenomena, the variability and regularityof response.
By contrast, the transactive paradigm points directly into this issue.
First, each of us accepts external knowledge or the opinions of others as
we find we can use them to re-create our several identities (a transactive
account of Bleich's "interpersonaland intercommunalnegotiation"). But
second-why can some works or ideas be accepted by many people and
others by only a few? Evidently a text rewards some structuresin my
re-creation of it and not others, and I favor some structuresand not
others. Sometimes the text and I match and sometimeswe don't. Because
many literentsdo or do not share my experience, we come to the question
of Hamlet and Titus.
Bleich, Schwartz, I, and others have all grasped the literent'srole in
that re-creation of identitywhich is the literarytransaction (all in our
characteristicallydifferentways, to be sure). Now we need to look at
that transaction the other way, at literature's role. What does a text
make possible for a literent? Why, when confronted with Hamlet and
Titus, do so many literentswith differentidentities all jump the same
way, like Maxwell's demons?
Under the old objective paradigm, centuries of critics have looked for
the answer "in" Hamlet or Titus-and not found it. "Subjectivity" seems
to me only a firststep away fromthis false trail and toward more fruitful
inquiry. In the transactive paradigm, the question becomes still more
pointed: What can I (or you) find operating in people's relations to
Hamlet that will explain why so many differentliterentsfrom so many

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differenttimes,places, and cultures can re-create their differingidentities

fromthis one set of symbols? What is it in people's relations to Titus that
inhibits that re-creation? As I see it, I need to look for the answer not
"in" the texts nor "in" the literentsbut "in" their-but firstof all, mytransactionswith the text.
In the briefest terms, "objective" literarycriticism seeks out the recurrences in literaryresponse. Thus structuralist,phenomenological, and
semiotic approaches as well as the more familiar formalistcriticismare
all kin: theyall claim intersubjectivevalidityin the manner of the natural
sciences, often simply assuming a uniformityof response. Bleich's "subjective" criticismseeks out the variations in literaryresponse,and they are
far greater than "objective" critics seem to realize. Finally, however, it
is only by means of a transactive paradigm that one can consider both
variations and recurrencesor, more exactly,the recurrencesin response as
interactionsamong variations.
How do we do this? Right now, I'm not sure, but I know I shall continue to explore these questions.13 They admit (in David Bleich's words)
an invigorating"activity of the intellectingmind adapting itself to ontogenetic and phylogeneticdemands." In my terms,they make possible an
exciting re-creationof our identitiesas we transact literature,psychology,
literarytheory,and ourselves. In these transactions, I look forward to
future discussion with David Bleich, both on and off the printed page,
forI have learned much fromhim in the past.
CENTER

FOR THE PSYCHOLOGICAL

STUDY OF THE ARTS

STATE UNIVERSITY

OF NEW YORK,

BUFFALO

NOTES
1 I have chronicled this indebtednessin "A Letter to Leonard," Hartford Studies
in Literature,5 (1973), 9-30.
2 David Bleich, Readings and Feelings: An Introduction to Subjective Criticism
(Urbana, 1975); Murray M. Schwartz, "Where Is Literature?" College English,
36 (1975), 756-65; Norman N. Holland, Poems in Persons: An Introduction to
the Psychoanalysisof Literature (New York, 1973) and 5 Readers Reading (New
Haven and London, 1975). The last three items come fromthe so-called "Buffalo
school of psychoanalyticcritics," and David Bleich is an Associate of Buffalo's
Center for the Psychological Study of the Arts.
3 While this essay was in manuscript,David Bleich called my attention to Louise
Rosenblatt's Literature as Exploration (New York, 1938), which anticipates two
of my favorite terms for this process: re-creation and transaction. Rosenblatt
recognized that each literentactively resynthesizesthe text. Lacking in-depth case
studies of reading transactions or an adequate psychology,however, she simply
concluded that the text's causal role in the transactionequaled its perceiver's.

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346

HISTORY
NEWLITERARY

4 "The Location of Cultural Experience" (1966) and "Transitional Objects and

Transitional Phenomena" (1953) in Winnicott's Playing and Reality (London,
1971), pp. 103, 14. Schwartz (in "Where is Literature?") extends the concept to
literentsand literature.
5 Roger Poole, so heavily relied on by Bleich, actually develops the philosophical
correlative of this developmental discovery,a transactive epistemologyof relationship, not simply subjectivity. Murray Schwartz discusses the cited passage in
"The Space of Psychological Criticism,"Hartford Studies in Literature, 5 (1973),
X111.
6 Lichtenstein's key article is "Identity and Sexuality: A Study of Their Interrelationship in Man," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 9
(1961), 179-260. The reader will find a variety of restatementsof Lichtenstein's
theories in my works cited above. The centralityof Lichtenstein's theories in the
work of the BuffaloCenter does not stem fromthe accident of his physical presence
here, although that is a coincidence for which we are repeatedly grateful.
7 Norman N. Holland and Murray M. Schwartz, "The Delphi Seminar," College
English, 36 (1975), 789-800.
8 See my contrast of "additive" and "subtractive" epistemologiesin 5 Readers,
pp. 281-83.
9 George S. Klein, Perception, Motives, and Personality (New York, 1970), pp.
257, 46.
10 Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, tr. Frank Gaynor (New York,
1949), pp. 33-34.
11 See my "Unity Identity Text Self," PMLA, 90 (1975), 813-22.
12 "The Challenge to PsychoanalyticPsychotherapyin a World in Crisis," International Journal of PsychoanalyticPsychotherapy,2 (1973), 149-74, 165-68.
13 As in "Hamlet-My Greatest Creation," Journal of the American Academy
of Psychoanalysis,3 (1975), 419-27, and Norman N. Holland and Leona F. Sherman, "Virtualites du gothique," RomantismeNoir, ed. L. Abensour and F. Charras
(forthcoming,Paris: L'Herne, 1976).

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