Mr. Magoo as Public Dream

FROM THE TIME OF ITS introduction into America in the late thirties, the psychoanalytic approach to the study of mass entertainments has steadily won adherents and sometimes transformed them into partisans. Its root proposition is now very well known: the contents of popular entertainments may be symbolically reduced and translated so as to provide a picture of the unconscious needs and fears of their audiences. Production workers, critics, and social scientists have, in the main, been willing to accept this proposition; to grant that entertainments are public and saleable dreams. But, in recent years, they have come to suspect that