Freud’s narrative acumen and his acute interest in the details of memory and thought have been largely forgotten; his legacy, in the popular mind, consists largely in this: that he taught us to mistrust the individual’s knowledge of herself. That insight was not wrong, but it opened the door to something altogether bad: the subordination, at the level of our own psyches, of individual experience to scientific knowledge.
If I am right that the statistical study has supplanted the novel as the implicit model of character, it is not because people now read studies instead of novels (although lately this may in fact be the case*), but because the study has taken on the truth-revealing power that formerly belonged to lived and imagined experience.
(*In that, so far as I can tell, most educated adults nowadays read articles rather than books and, if they read books, read mostly non-fiction. Clearly, novels almost never site statistical studies, whereas articles and non-fiction books do quite often.)
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Literary characters are a mix the general and the specific. Even Hamlet is a Hamlet. Anyone entirely unique would be unlike anyone else and, thus, inert.
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