Two facets of this aspect of the literary process have special significance for our time. One, a reservation on the point I have just made, is the phenomenon of pseudo thinking, pseudo feeling, and pseudo willing, which Fromm discussed in The Escape from Freedom. In essence this involves grounding one's thought and emotion in the values and experience of others, rather than in one's own values and experience. There is a risk that instead of teaching a person how to be himself, reading fiction and drama may teach him how to be somebody else. Clearly what the person brings to the reading is important. Moreover, if the critic instructs his audience in what to see in a work, he is contributing to this pseudo thinking; if he instructs them in how to evaluate a work, he is helping them to achieve their own identity.

The second timely part of this sketch of literature and the search for identity has to do with the difference between good and enduring literary works and the ephemeral mass culture products of today. In the range and variety of characters who, in their literary lives, get along all right with life styles one never imagined possible, there is an implicit lesson in differentiation. The reader, observing this process, might ask ``why not be different?'' and find in the answer a license to be a variant of the human species. The observer of television or other products for a mass audience has only a permit to be, like the models he sees, even more like everybody else. And this, I think, holds for values as well as life styles. One would need to test this proposition carefully; after all, the large (and probably unreliable) Reader's Digest literature on the ``most unforgettable character I ever met'' deals with village grocers, country doctors, favorite if illiterate aunts, and so forth. Scientists often turn out to be idiosyncratic, too. But still, the proposition is worth examination.