Psychoanalysis and the novel: Roth, Hamlet

When you think of how much much mileage writers (and directors) have gotten from psychoanalysis as comedy, it's striking once in a while to come across a novel in which psychoanalysis is used in a straightforward manner for character development and insight - maybe especially striking that Philip Roth uses a visit to a psychoanalyst in this way in "Letting Go," when we think of his most famous (perhaps also most notorious) novel, Portnoy's Complaint, which is in fact structured as one long "complaint" from patient to analyst. In LG, one of the main characters, Libby Herz, a clearly disturbed, perhaps hypochondriacal, young woman, on verge of some kind of nervous breakdown, as she and husband are living in poverty, looking into adopting a child, which obviously makes her anxious, she has a terrible visit with man from the adoption agency, feels she has blowntheir chances, and then off to an analyst. Well, even in the 1950s I doubt you could call an analyst in the morning and make a 1 p.m. appointment - but that quibble aside, Libby's visit to Dr. Lumin is a great scene and Roth uses this narrative opportunity to have Libby reveal to the doctor some things - her lack of sex life with husband Paul, her attraction to novel's main character and sometime author stand-in Gabe Wallach - that she has never said aloud even to self - in this way analyst visit is something like an interior monologue but actually dramatized: imagine Hamlet's soliloquies as 50-minute sessions with a shrink.