SOURCE: "Freudianism, American Romanticism, and 'Young Goodman Brown'," in The CEA Critic, Vol. 33, No. 3, March, 1971, pp. 3-6.

In the essay below, Campbell rejects psychoanalytic interpretations of "Young Goodman Brown," which see the story as an allegory of the conflict caused by sexual sin.

Certainly Freudian criticism has made substantial contributions to the understanding of some aspects of American romanticism—in studies of the sexual symbolism in much of Whitman's best poetry, the tortured ambiguities of Melville's Pierre and some of his short stories, and the relation between Poe's probable impotence and his creative work, to mention only a few examples that come readily to mind. It has even been said that some of the American Romanticists themselves anticipated Freud in describing the shadowy subliminal origin of some of their images. It seems to me, however, that in the twilight area between the unconscious and the conscious of the...