The Fall into Eden: Landscape and Imagination in California (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

The second reason is what I see as a fatal conceptual flaw. There is much of interest here about the relationship between California as a locale and the writings and personalities of Steinbeck, Austin, and other Californian authors. But the author insists on attributing how they experienced the land in terms of "projection," a psychological concept heavily criticized for its dualistic nineteenth-century thinking. It originated in Freudian psychoanalysis, where even there it was never used so freely; analysts point out that only when something is conflictual and repressed do we "project" it--and only then onto people, not places.

Nowadays analysts talk less about projecting than about intersubjective fields in which all participants make a psychic contribution. Something analogous (suggests depth psychology) might be true of place. As indigenous peoples insist, we do not animate places with godlike beams of projection; we interact with them in much more complex and mysterious ways--and sometimes even through our psychological weaknesses. (For more about this, see the writings of Robert Romanyshyn and Keith Basso.)

This could be an outstanding book if it took the voice of landscape seriously and on its own terms instead of reducing it to geography and psychology. At the very least the point of view of indigenous writers deserves a mention.