What makes one reader look for issues of social conformity in Kafka's Metamorphosis while another concentrates on the relationship between Gregor Samsa and his father? Self-Analysis in Literary Study investigates how psychoanalytic self-analysis enables readers to gain a deeper understanding of literature as well as of themselves.

In the past scholars have largely ignored self-analysis as an aid to approaching literature. The contributors in Self-Analysis in Literary Study boldly explore how the psyche affects intellectual discovery in the realm of applied psychoanalysis.

Jeffrey Berman confronts a close friend's suicide through Camus and his students' diaries, kept for an English class. Language, family history, and an attachment to Kafka are the focus of David Bleich's essay. Barbara Ann Schapiro writes of her attraction to Virginia Woolf during her emotional senior year of college. Other essayists include Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, Norman N. Holland, Bernard J. Paris, Steven Rosen, and Michael Steig.