Upper-middle class literary types instictively divide all written fiction into two categories.

The first, bad, category is something that sometimes they call "commercial fiction" and (in their most emotionally honest moments) they call "popular fiction." This fiction is what the unwashed masses read to escape from the drudgery of their lives.

The second, good, category is s "serious fiction" or "literary fiction." It is the stuff they and their friends read and write. Every ode that they have ever written to this sort of fiction focusses on how they feel like they have "learned something" about Life when they read this sort of thing. Every freshman English class in the world teaches the silly, unargued dogma-as-definition that the Sole Legitimate Purpose of fiction is to shine light on the Human Condition.

In other words, the purpose of the good category, translating the chatter of the chattering classes into a simple English phrase, is to provide therapy for the reader.

The underlying assumption behind this dichotomy--that Good Fiction helps the reader learn about the human condition and thus enriches their life, whereas Popular Fiction merely helps people momentarily escape from their dim gray lives--is that it is a given that whatever the exact specifics, the purpose of fiction and the standard by which it must be judged is its utility to the reader in terms of their psychological reaction to their daily lives. Judged from this perspective, it makes good sense that the most one could hope for is a therapeutic value which actually helps people get through life most easily, while the least that could be hopes for is temporary release from that life.

The first problem is that I can see no good reason any one should accept the premise as remotely plausible, much less accurate--poke it with the thinnest stick, and it dissolves into dust scattered on the nearest wind. Furthermore, both the best and the worst case scenarios (that Robert Heinlein provides escape and William Faulkner provides human-condition insight) have bad track records--I have never once while reading one of Laurel Hamilton's Anita Blake novels forgotten for even a second to even the slightest extent that I was (a) a northerner, (b) male, and (c) not a vampire executioner, and not the southern female vampire executioner featured therein. On the other end of the equation I'm severely skeptical that even the best fiction can have the sort of therapeutic value that lit enthusiasts seem to imply as a given. Whatever Hemingway learned about the human condition didn't enrich his life enough to stop him from, um, killing himself.

Why, after all, should fiction be the only art form judged according to this perspective? No one, to the best of my knowledge, faults abstract paintings for being "escapist trash" or thinks that looking at realist portraits will shine light on the human condition, yadayayada. The standards one would judge either by would rather be how original and interesting it was, and how well whatever was being attempted was executed (how pretty the painting is). In other words, they would be aesthetic considerations. Some one might fault a painting for being boring, or ugly, or tacky, or looking just like a million other paintings, but (unless I'm severely mistaken) probably not for failing to provide insight into the human ciondition.

So, again, why would any one even think that literature should uniquely among the arts be judged on psychological utility considerations rather than purely aesthetic ones?

Some one is very confused here. I honestly don't know who.