SOURCE: “Prufrock's Defenses and Our Response,” in American Imago, Vol. 26, Summer, 1969, pp. 182-93.

In the following essay, Waldoff examines Prufrock's defense mechanisms of passivity and self-criticism.

In The Dynamics of Literary Response (Oxford, 1968), Norman Holland writes: “the literary work acts out a psychological process which we introject. That process is the transformation of a central fantasy toward a central meaning” (p. 101). The key term is “introject.” With it Holland shifts our attention from the mind of the author and the supposed minds of the characters to the mind of the reader or audience. This shift, similar to the one toward the appeals of literature in Simon O. Lesser's Fiction and the Unconscious (1957), reminds us that in psychoanalytic criticism we very often read about the motives and actions in a literary work, but seldom about the psychological appeals of the work and our response to it. A good example...