20th century literary critic Frederick Crews noted that the story, similar to other Hawthorne tales like "The Birth-Mark", is one of many in which a character avoids or fears marriage or features an inexplicably absent female lover/wife.
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As an undergraduate Bollas studied intellectual history with Carl Schorske, psychoanalytical anthropology with Alan Dundes, and psychoanalytic critical theory with Frederick Crews.
Literary critic Frederick Crews writes that Sulloway "revolutionized our idea of Freud's scientific affinities and habits", and helped pave the way for subsequent works such as Adolf Grünbaum's The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (1984), and Malcolm Macmillan's Freud Evaluated (1991).