ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud's analysis of Gradiva, which has often been cited as an example of psychoanalytic criticism, provided him with the raw material for Creative Writers and Daydreaming. Marie Bonaparte expanded the use of psychoanalysis in literary criticism when she examined the mental processes and their accompanying effects during literary creation. In the America of the 1960s and 1970s Freudian critics were more numerous and their writing more varied; but they theorized less. They had so little in common that one can give only examples of the applications of psychoanalysis to literature. As Freud became increasingly busy with the spread of the movement and with reworking the central concepts, he seemed to be less inclined to try to legitimate psychoanalysis via literature. In sum, French classical analysts, like their American counterparts, wrote about questions of the unconscious in Western literary traditions and in specific works.
