No serious study of psychoanalysis in the work of Hawthorne can sidestep the work of Frederick Crews in The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes (1966), in which Crews explores the Oedipal complex at work in Hawthorne’s oeuvre, or the work of David Greven in The Fragility of Manhood: Hawthorne, Freud, and the Politics of Gender (2014), in which Greven considers the impact of Freudian and Lacanian literary theory on the construction of masculinity in Hawthorne through the myth of Narcissus rather than Oedipus. But David Diamond, a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist in clinical practice and professor of psychiatry, not only acknowledges the work of Crews, Greven, and others who have attempted to read Hawthorne through Freud, he challenges the conclusions at which they arrive. Crews himself challenged the thesis he advanced in The Sins of the Fathers, eventually retracting it, but not before it was widely disseminated. And...
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