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...