If there is a criticism to be made, it is that it occasionally feels as if individual contributors took on large, complicated subjects and then chafed at the restrictions of the short essay form. Russell Meares, for example, tries to cram a century and a half of psychoanalytical history into eight pages. He does a remarkably good job under the circumstances, but it does pass by in something of a blur.

As a unified collection, however, On Psychology works very well indeed. It is consistently interesting and artfully arranged to draw out some of the essays’ overlapping themes. Frank Furedi’s Therapy Culture is the subject of a substantial review by Robert van Krieken, and several other contributors refer to the book, so that a debate springs up around Furedi’s arguments. Psychoanalysis is considered both as a social phenomenon and as a personal experience; and questions about the links between psychology and literature are opened up. I liked, in particular, Jane Adamson’s essay, ‘Talking with Oneself and Other Ostriches’, which contrasts the probing, open-ended quality of literary irony with the many manifestations of denial that can distort and damage human relationships.

The most astringent essay is the work of Mark Rapley and Alec McHoul. The pair argue provocatively that Attention Deficit Disorder is in fact a pseudo-condition. Their polemic is marred somewhat by its leaden sarcasm, but, if there is anything to their claims, the implications are truly disturbing. They suggest that tens of thousands of children, most of them unruly boys, are effectively being drugged into acquiescence on a daily basis.

There are some lighter essays, too, but the convivial side of On Psychology is best represented in its strong fiction contributions. There is an amusingly surreal story by Peter Raftos called ‘Unhinged’, which has some fun with the idea of taking Cartesian dualism literally. And the stories by David Cohen and Karen Hitchcock are similarly droll, providing a nice satirical counterpoint to the issue’s dominant themes and general seriousness.

The latest Overland has attracted an unusual level of attention thanks to Peter Hayes’s denunciation of Peter Craven’s influence on Australian literary culture. A serious critique of Craven’s work might well form the basis of an interesting article, but Hayes’s broadside does not rise to this level, being closer to an overwrought venting of spleen than the sober demolition job it perhaps wanted to be. Craven has his faults, of course. Yes, he is probably overexposed, and he does have the habit – picked up, I suspect, from Harold Bloom – of delivering his judgments as if he is Moses recently returned from Mount Sinai. But much of Hayes’s argument is spurious. Frankly, I fail to see how it is an offence against good taste to begin an article with a ‘famous name’, such as Ian McEwan, when the article in question is about Ian McEwan; nor does it seem unreasonable that Craven should fill his newspaper columns with his opinions. Like Hayes, I am not an admirer of Craven’s prose, but nit-picking a writer’s style is of limited critical value, particularly since Hayes begins his article with a disingenuous cliché (‘For good or bad ...’), is also guilty of name-dropping (‘Evelyn Waugh said that ...’), and does not seem to know what ‘to beg the question’ means.

There are some criticisms that Craven may want to answer, but Hayes has largely undermined himself with his inability to keep his cool. He is cheeky enough to lament Craven’s ‘tone’ when his whole essay adopts a tone of brittle outrage, and his argument is quite ridiculously overstated, assuming a pervasive level of influence that Craven simply does not have. Craven is certainly the highest-profile critic in the country, but it would not be difficult to name a dozen or more people who write regularly for the literary pages in the major newspapers, as well as any number of occasional contributors. Not as many as one might like, perhaps, but hardly a one-man show. Nevertheless, according to Hayes, Craven ‘dominates Australian book reviewing’; he is ‘unassailable’; he abuses his ‘power’; his influence is tyrannical, ‘grotesque’ and ‘the stuff of nightmare’; he has ‘driven real criticism out of circulation’. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Nathan Hollier, the co-editor of Overland, ‘ton[ed] down its excesses’ before running the piece. One wonders what else Hayes holds Craven responsible for. Remove the pettiness, the arguments recycled from Mark Davis’s Gangland (1997), and the more hysterical assertions, and Hayes’s attack begins to look decidedly flimsy.

There are, of course, more reasons to seek out Overland than Hayes’s attention-grabbing article. Andrew McCann, also known as the novelist A.L. McCann, has contributed a short, sharp attack on the market-driven conservatism that dominates Australian publishing. A more disciplined and effective piece than Hayes’s, it has, despite its brevity, a significant contribution to make to the ongoing debate about the malaise that is widely held to be affecting Australian literary fiction at the present time. Thomas Shapcott’s reminiscence about his time on the board of the newly formed Australia Council during the Whitlam years is fascinating. And, along with a wide selection of new poetry and fiction, there are substantial pieces of criticism by Georgie Arnott and Andrew Milner: the former making an interesting comparison between the politicised poetry of Judith Wright and that of Gig Ryan; the latter giving Dennis Glover’s book Orwell’s Australia (2003) a thorough review.

The emphasis in the summer issue of Conversations is on the poetry, which it puts up front. Joy Hooton is the best represented, contributing four poems, and her light style, with its air of quiet melancholy, is balanced by some knottier verses from John Stokes and Robin Wallace-Crabbe, among others.

The centrepiece of the issue, however, is Inga Clendinnen’s substantial essay on ‘The Art of Biography’, which was delivered as the inaugural Alan Martin Lecture at the Australian National University. Clendinnen, a former colleague of Martin’s, describes her experience of working with him at a time when he was writing a biography of Alfred Deakin. From there, the essay develops into an interestingly self-reflexive piece about the personal factors and the theoretical problems that are involved in the attempt to construct a rounded, human figure from the fragmentary evidence a subject leaves behind them.

Clendinnen’s essay precedes two ‘memoirs’ that also, in different ways, discuss the relationship between lived experience and the written word. The better of the two is by Bruce Bennett, Professor of English at the University of New South Wales (Australian Defence Force Academy) and former Editor of Westerly, who provides a gentle meditation on the seductive but ambivalent feelings evoked by his home state of Western Australia and its various literary manifestations. The issue is then rounded out with an inscrutable ‘picture essay’ and two pieces of short fiction, neither of them great works in themselves, but notable for the fact that both display a philosophical bent.

Summer Conversations is a slighter journal than its two better-known competitors. After the abundance and variety on display in Meanjin and Overland, it felt rather thin. But any journal that can boast articles of the calibre of Clendinnen’s and Bennett’s is worth seeking out.