SOURCE: "On the Naming of Tom Sawyer," in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Vol. XXIV, July, 1955, pp. 424-36.

In the following essay, which was first presented as a paper at the Midwinter Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in December, 1954, Barrett examines the psychological and mythological implications of Tom Sawyer's name.

All writers of fiction furnish their works with experience from their own lives. In a sense, no author can create a character not at least in part himself. Even so, each author has one book more intimately concerned than his others with the details of what he himself has known and done: his 'autobiographical' work. How an author titles this work, and how he christens his characters, is a subject of both literary and psychological interest. Freud, for instance, in The Interpretation of Dreams, ventures the theory that Zola, in his novel L'Oeuvre, offered 'a description of his own...