ABSTRACT
Many readers have doubted the wisdom of psychoanalytic criticism of Jonathan Swift. But even though such criticism usually has a weak basis in insufficient or conjectural biographical data, certain psychological concepts, used judiciously to interpret Swift's poems rather than their author, can help to illuminate them. These concepts may reveal that 'Strephon and Chloe' has a greater degree of thematic or didactic integrity than has generally been perceived. Swift could not have been familiar with the concept of narcissism as a neurosis; but especially in his portrayal of Strephon he seems to have exposed that neurosis which current critics like Christopher Lasch and Richard Sennett have begun to regard as a major psychological ill of late twentieth-century American society. According to Sigmund Freud, society or community is the closest synonym to civilization; but the 'great society in stinking' established by Strephon and Chloe after their wedding night is only the noxious, unsublimated travesty of civilized society.
