INTRODUCTION

I

This work is an endeavour to apply some of the methods of psychoanalysis to literature. It attempts to read closely between the lines of an author's works. It applies some principles in interpreting literature with a scrutiny hitherto scarcely deemed permissible. Only such suggestions have been set down whose application has been rendered fairly unimpeachable by science and experience.

In studying literature thus, I aim to trace a writer's books back to the outward and inner events of his life and to reveal his unconscious, or that part of his psychic life of which he is unaware. I try to show that unsuspected emotions of the writer have entered into his literary productions, that events he had apparently forgotten have guided his pen. In every book there is much of the author's unconscious which can be discovered by the critic and psychologist who apply a few and well tested and infallible principles.

This unconscious is largely identical with the mental love fantasies in our present and past life. Since the terms "unconscious" and "erotic" are almost synonymous, any serious study of literature which is concerned with the unconscious must deal impartially with eroticism.

Every author reveals more than he intended. Works of the imagination open up to the reader hidden vistas in man's inner life just as dreams do. As the psychoanalyst recognises that dreams are the realised repressed wishes of the unconscious, so the critic discovers in literary performances ideal pictures inspired by past repressions in the authors' lives. And just as anxiety-dreams spring largely from the anxieties of waking life, so literature describing human sorrows in general takes its cue from the personal griefs of the author.

A literary work is no longer regarded as a sort of objective product unrelated to its creator, written only by compliance with certain rules. It is a personal expression and represents the whole man behind it. His present and past have gone into the making of it and it records his secret aspirations and most intimate feelings; it is the outcropping of his struggles and disappointments. It is the outlet of his emotions, freely flowing forth even though he has sought to stem their flux. It dates from his apparently forgotten infantile life.

We know that a man's reading, his early education, his contact with the world, the fortunes and vicissitudes of his life, have all combined to influence his artistic work. We have learned that hereditary influences, the nature of his relations to his parents, his infantile repressions, his youthful love affairs, his daily occupations, his physical powers or failings, enter into the colouring and directing of his ideas and emotions, and will stamp any artistic product that he may undertake. Thus with a man's literary work before us and with a few clues, we are able to reconstruct his emotional and intellectual life, and guess with reasonable certainty at many of the events in his career. George Brandes has been able to build up a life of Shakespeare almost from the plays alone. As he said, if we have about forty-five works by a writer, and we still cannot find out much about his life, it must be our own fault.

Again we may deduce what kind of literary work would have been the result if there are given to us not only the hereditary antecedents and biographical data of an author, but a full account of his day dreams, ambitions, frailties, disillusionments, of his favourite reading, intellectual influences, love affairs and relations to his parents, relatives and friends. I do not think it would be difficult for us to deduce from the facts we have of Dante's life that he naturally would have given us a work of the nature of the Divine Comedy.

Literature is a personal voice the source of which can be traced to the unconscious.

But an author draws not only on the past in his own life, but on the past psychic history of the human family. Unconscious race memories are revived by him in his writing; his productions are influenced by most primitive ideas and emotions, though he may not be aware what they are. Yet they emerge from his pen; for the methods of thought and ways of feeling of our early ancestors still rule us. Nor is the idea of unconscious race memories idle speculation or fanciful theorising. Just as surely as we carry in ourselves the physical marks of our forefathers of which each individual has millions, so undoubtedly we must have inherited their mental and emotional characteristics. The manner and nature of the lives of those who preceded us have never been entirely eliminated from our unconscious. We have even the most bestial instincts in a rudimentary stage, and these are revived, to our surprise, not only in our dreams but in our waking thoughts and also occasionally in our conduct. We carry the whole world's past under our skins. And there is a sediment of that primitive life in many of our books, without the author being aware of the fact.

Thus a deterministic influence prevails in literature. A book is not an accident. The nature of its contents depends not only on hereditary influences, nor, as Taine thought, on climate, country and environment, alone, but on the nature of the repressions the author's emotions have experienced. The impulses that created it are largely unconscious, and the only conscious traces in it are those in the art of composition. Hence the ancient idea of poetic inspiration cannot be relegated to limbo, for it plays a decided part in determining the psychical features of the work. Inspiration finds its material in the unconscious. When the writer is inspired, he is eager to express ideas and feelings that have been formed by some event, though he cannot trace their origin, for he speaks out of the soul of a buried humanity.

There is no form or species of literature that may not be interpreted by psychoanalytic methods. Be the author ever so objective, no matter how much he has sought to make his personality intangible and elusive, there are means, with the aid of clues, of opening up the barred gates of his soul. Men like Flaubert and MerimÉe, who believed in the impersonal and objective theory of art and who strove deliberately to conceal their personalities, failed in doing so. Their presence is revealed in their stories; they could not hold themselves aloof. It is true we have been aided by external evidence in learning what methods they employed to render themselves impersonal; the real MerimÉe and Flaubert, however, were made to emerge by the help of their published personal letters. It matters not whether the author writes realistic or romantic fiction, autobiographical or historical tales, lyric or epic poems, dramas or essays, his unconscious is there, in some degree.

But in a field which is largely new, it is best to take those works or species of writing where the existence of the unconscious does not elude our efforts to detect it. Therefore, much will be said in this volume of works where there is no question that the author is talking from his own experiences, in his own person, or where he is using some character as a vehicle for his own point of view. Such works include lyric poetry which is usually the personal expression of the love emotions of the singer. Burns, Byron, Shelley, Keats and Swinburne have left us records of their love affairs in their great lyric poems. Most of these were inspired by frustration of love, and were the results of actual experiences. And though much is said in them, other facts may be deduced.

It is also a fact that nearly every great novelist has given us an intimate though disguised account of himself in at least one novel (note David Copperfield and Pendennis as examples), while other writers have drawn themselves in almost every character they portrayed, Goethe and Byron being two instances. An author gives us the best insight into himself when he speaks frankly in his own person. His records are then intensely interesting and informative about his unconscious. But even if the author identifies himself with a fictitious character he speaks hardly less firmly.

II

Very important is the consideration of some of the literature where authentic dreams or dreams having the appearance of authenticity have been recorded. The connection between poetry and dreams has often been noted. The poet projects an ideal and imaginary world just as the dreamer does. He builds utopias and paradises and celestial cities. He sees visions and constructs allegories. I have interpreted, according to the methods of Freud, some dream literature like Kipling's Brushwood Boy and Gautier's Arria Marcella. These tales prove most astoundingly the correctness of Freud's theories about dreams being the fulfilment in our sleep of unconscious wishes of our daily life.

A literary production, even if no dream is recorded therein, is still a dream; that of the author. It represents the fulfilment of his unconscious wishes, or registers a complaint because they are not fulfilled. Like the dream, it is formed of remnants of the past psychic life of the author, and is coloured by recent events and images. Freud in interpreting the dreams of his neurotic patients, learns the substance, the manifest content of the dream, as he calls it, and inquires about the events of the preceding days and he evokes all the associations which occur to the patients. He learns something of their lives and finally after a course of psychoanalytic treatment frequently cures them of their neuroses by making them aware of the unconscious repressions or fixations from which they suffer. These are removed and the resistances are broken down. As critics, we may interpret a book in the same way. A literary work stands in the same relation to the author as the dream to the patient. The writer has, however, cured himself of his emotional anxiety by giving vent to his feelings in his book. He has been his own doctor. The critic may see how this has been accomplished and point out the unconscious elements that the writer has brought forth in his book out of his own soul. The critic, not being able, like the physician and his patient, to question the author in person, must avail himself, in addition to the internal evidence of the literary product itself, of all the data that have been collected from the author's confessions and letters, from the accounts of friends, etc. After having studied these in connection with the writing in question, he learns the author's unconscious. Shelley's Epipsychidion, for instance, is an autobiographical poem, Shelley's dream of love, and can be fully followed only when the reader has acquainted himself with the history of Shelley's marriages and love affairs.

I have interpreted a dream of Stevenson recorded in his A Chapter on Dreams, and have found in it a full confirmation of the Freudian theory of dreams. Stevenson, recounting at length a dream of his own, tells us unwittingly more about the misunderstanding that existed between him and his father and the difficulties he encountered before he married (since the object of his affection was separated but not yet divorced from her first husband) than his biography does. When the essay and the biography are taken together, we see the testimony before us as to why Stevenson dreamed this dream.

William Cowper's poem on the receipt of his mother's picture is a remarkable document in support of one of the tenets that are among the pillars of Freud's system, the theory of the Œdipus Complex. As is well known, Freud traced the nucleus of the psychoneuroses to an over-attachment that the patient had for the parent of the opposite sex, a fixation which was very strong in infancy but from the influence of which there had never been a healthy liberation. This fixation which is often unconscious plants the seeds of future neuroses. The victim's entire life, even his love affairs, are interfered with by this attachment. Any one who knows his Freud and has read Cowper's poem can see in it the cause of most of the latter's unhappiness and most likely his insanity. His mother died when he was a child, and many years later he was writing to her, almost with passion.

Both Stevenson's essay and Cowper's poem are self-explanatory to the disciple of Freud. If we had known nothing about the authors' lives, we would have seen beyond doubt that in the one case there was in actual life a hostility to the father, revealed by the dreamer's murdering him; and in the other case we would have known that a hysterical overattachment to the mother existed and that the writer's life would have been neurotic and that he might possibly experience an attachment to some older woman who replaced the mother.

Further, just as there are typical dreams from which alone the psychoanalyst can judge the wishes of his subject without asking him any questions about himself, so there are literary compositions wherefrom we can learn much of the author's unconscious, without probing into the facts of his life. Typical dreams in which certain objects like serpents or boxes appear, or in which the dreamer is represented as flying, swimming or climbing, have a sexual significance. Freud has shown this after having investigated thousands of such dreams and noted the symbolic language and customs of our ancestors. Literary works also speak per se for the author when they abound in similar symbolical images.

III

We now come to another species of literature that is important for the psychoanalytic critic. This is a class of writing which delineates primÆval and immoral emotions. It often shows us the conflicts between savage emotions still lurking in man, and the demands of civilisation. Either force may triumph, but the real interest of these works is that they show the old cave dweller is not yet dead within us, and that civilisation is achieved gradually by suppressing these old emotions; sometimes these needs are strong and must not be extirpated too suddenly; in fact in some specific cases must be granted satisfaction. Among some of the interesting books in recent years have been tales where primitive emotions have been depicted as conquering their victims. Note Conrad's Heart of Darkness, where it is shown how the old barbarian instincts and the cry of the forest are part of us and may be revived in us. Jack London's Call of the Wild is an interesting allegory on the subject. It is well known that we are descended from forbears who were wilder than the most savage tribes of to-day. Naturally some of the emotions they felt are not altogether extinct in us. Civilisation is after all but a veneer and slight causes may stir up brutal sensations in many people. They are still in our unconscious and form for the literary man very fascinating though often dangerous material. Shakespeare understood this when he drew Caliban.

Poe once said that no writer would dare to write truly all his inner thoughts and feelings, for the very paper would burn beneath them. What he meant was that all writers, even the bravest, suppress those unconscious elements in their nature that are related to immorality, indecency, degeneracy, morbidity and cruelty. It may not be advisable for writers continually to remind the reader of the remnant echoes and memories of our primitive state, which have fortunately been made quiescent but not been completely exterminated by culture. In the confessions of criminals, in the pathological disclosures of sexually aberrated people given to physicians, in the records of atrocities committed in time of war, we have illustrations of the atavisms of our day. Often a diseased literary man ventures far in baring his soul and we get the morbid and immoral material that provides food for the unhealthy.

As a rule the author's sense of propriety and prudence act as a censor for him and hedge in his dormant savage feelings, so as not to allow them to find a direct voice in his art. Yet we can often pierce through the veil and observe exactly where the censor has been invoked and guess fairly accurately what has been suppressed.

Some authors who relax the censorship voluntarily and appear to be without a sense of shame, give us some of the immoral literature which the world publicly abhors, but which individuals often delight in reading in private. I do not refer to the really great literature which has been stamped "immoral" by prudish people, because its ideas are too far advanced for them to appreciate, and are different from the conventional morals of society. I do not refer to the hundreds of great works which give us true accounts of the natural man, books whose irresistibility cannot be evaded except by hypocrites. I do not include novels and plays wherein the authors have realised that we are exerting too great a sacrifice upon our emotions and that many souls are starved by lack of normal gratification on account of the harsh exactions of conventional society. But there is a real immoral (or rather indecent) literature where the author allows his savage instincts to come to the surface and trespass on those aspects of his personality which civilisation should have tamed. He may suffer from the vice of exhibitionism and think he is frank, when he is merely showing he has no sense of shame; and he may cater to a market merely for money, in which case he acts like a mercenary harlot. He may try to gratify himself by sexual abandon in art because he has never had the craving for love satisfied in life. He gives vent to instincts that are still ruling him because of his own atavistic or neurotic state. Psychoanalytic literature puts in a new light immoral literature, which hitherto has been dealt with from a moral, and not a psychological, point of view. This literature should be explained and its sources traced; these will be found in the infantile love life of the authors. Such writings should not be condemned offhand just because they stir our moral indignation. They must be interpreted so that we may learn the nature of their authors.

I have also made a study of so repulsive a feature in the lives of our earliest ancestors as cannibalism. It is one of the most primitive emotions. The discoveries of archÆologists show that cannibalism prevailed in Europe before the dawn of history; Greek plays show its early existence in Greece; and we know that it still prevails among savage tribes to-day.

Many of the views here presented will be strange and novel to those unacquainted with or hostile to Freud's theories, or to those who wish to ignore the fact of the existence of primitive emotions in man. The ideas advanced here will displease the puritanical opponents of scientific research. But it should be borne in mind that a study of the unconscious must necessarily deal with much that is obnoxious in human nature.[A] A study of this unpleasant element leads to the attainment of a more natural and moral life. But we should also remember that the unconscious, besides containing the seeds of crime and immorality, also is the soil of all those finer emotions that the church and the state cherish. Conscience, self-sacrifice, moral sense, love, are unconscious sentiments.

I should have liked to treat of the literature of metempsychosis. In this literature where people are depicted as remembering past existences, as in Kipling's tale, The Finest Story in the World, George Sand's Consuelo, and Jack London's The Star Rover, there may be possible avenues to race memories. Needless to say, I do not believe in the transmigration of the individual soul as some of the Greeks and early Christians did. But the Buddhistic conception of metempsychosis with its doctrine of the Karma, the scientific theory of heredity, and the conception of psychoanalysis are all dominated by a similar idea; this is, that the manners of feeling and thinking of our progenitors are exercised by us. We carry their souls, not the individual, but the collective ones; we are the products of their sins and virtues; we have all the idiosyncrasies, mental make up, emotional tendencies, that they had; we have stamped on us our race, our nation, our religion. We cannot remember isolated events of past ages, but the effects of happenings then are registered in our nervous system. No one has done more than Hearn to show this, and he is, both because of his life and work, one of the fittest subjects for psychoanalytic study. The only possible rival he has is Edgar Allan Poe.

If any one wishes to see an adroit application of the method of reading between the lines in a poem, let him read Lafcadio Hearn's interpretation of Browning's poem A Light Woman in the Appreciations of Poetry. Hearn had probably never heard of Freud, but in his lecture to his class, he showed that the unconscious of the author and the character could be discovered by probing carefully into the literary work. Hearn tells in prose Browning's story of the young man who claimed that he stole his friend's mistress to save him, and on tiring of her pretended he had never loved her. Hearn shrewdly observes:

"Does any man in this world ever tell the exact truth about himself? Probably not. No man understands himself so well as to be able to tell the exact truth about himself. It is possible that this man believes himself to be speaking truthfully, but he certainly is telling a lie, a half truth only. We have his exact words, but the exact language of the speaker in any one of Browning's monologues does not tell the truth, it only suggests the truth. We must find out the real character of the person, and the real facts of the case, from our own experience of human nature."

Psychoanalysis was applied to literature long before Freud. When biographers recounted all the influences of an author's life upon his works, or probed deeply into the real meaning of his views, they gave us psychoanalytic criticism. Great literary critics like Sainte-Beuve, Taine and George Brandes traced the tendencies of authors' works to emotional crises in their lives. Critics who study the various ways in which authors have come to draw themselves or people they knew in their books, are psychoanalytic. When biographers and critics dilate especially on the relations existing between the writer and his mother, and trace the effects on the work of the author, they employ the psychoanalytic method. Any profound insight into human nature is psychoanalytic, and I find such insight in Swift, Johnson, Hazlitt and Lamb.

It is, however, Freud who first gave complete application of that method to literature. He first touched on it in his masterpiece The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, when he saw the significance of the marriage of Œdipus to his mother in Sophocles's play Œdipus. He showed that it was a reminiscence of actual incestuous love that was practised far back in the ages of barbarism, and that the play shows horror as a reaction to such attachment to the mother. The first treatment of an Æsthetic theme from the new point of psychoanalysis was made by Freud in his book on Wit and the Unconscious in 1905. The first sole application of psychoanalysis to a work of literature was undertaken by him in connection with Jensen's novel Gradiva in 1907, where he shows the similarity between the emotions of the hero and the psychoneuroses. (The novel and Freud's essay have been both translated into English.)[B] Freud also studied Leonardo da Vinci and showed the influences of the artist's infantile love life upon his later career and work. Psychoanalytic methods have been applied to music, mythology, religion, philosophy, philology and morals, and indeed to almost every sphere of mental activity. Many monographs have been published by Freud's disciples, taking up the relations between an author and his work. Sadger studied the poets Lenau, Kleist, and F. K. Meyer and showed the power of infantile influence. On this side of the ocean little work has been done in this direction, but that little has been excellent. Professor Ernest Jones's study of the Œdipus Complex in Hamlet (American Journal of Psychology, January, 1910), Dr. Isidor Coriat's account of the hysteria of Lady Macbeth and Professor F. C. Prescott's scholarly essay on the relation between poetry and dreams (Journal of Abnormal Psychology, April, June, 1912), are excellent pioneer works in psychoanalytical literary criticism.[C]

IV

Freud is a genius whose performances astonish one as do those of a wizard. His revolutions in psychology are no less important than those of Darwin in biology. After his discoveries, literary interpretation cannot remain the same. The points of difference between him and his disciples Jung and Adler need not be touched on here. My own sympathies are with Freud.

The new method will help to explain the nature and origin of literary genius, though it is not pretended it will create it. Psychoanalysis will show us the direction that literary genius takes and will explain why it proceeds in a particular path. It will give the reasons why one author writes books of a particular colour or tendency, why he entertains certain ideas. It explains why certain plots and characters are indulged in by particular authors. It claims to tell why Schopenhauer became a pessimist, why Wagner dealt with themes like the woman between two men. In fact studies of these artists, employing Freud's methods, have already been published. Graf and Rank each wrote about Wagner, and Hitschman has given us a monograph on Schopenhauer. Similarly the critic of the future will explain the fundamental tone of the works of writers who differ vastly from each other. We will see more clearly why Byron gave vent to his note of melancholy, Keats to his passion for beauty, Browning to his spirit of optimism, Strindberg to his misogyny, Swift to his misanthropy, Ibsen to his moral revolt, Tolstoi to his religious reaction, Thackeray to his cynicism, and Wordsworth to his love for nature.

The author is more in his work than he suspects. To illustrate: There is a theory of projection, in psychoanalysis, which explains to us that hysterical people lean with great eagerness for moral support or consolation on some actual person they love or admire. Often he is the clergyman or physician, at other times he is a friend or relative. The same thing occurs in literature. The writer who has certain theories clings for support to some characters in history or fiction. He projects his personality on theirs. If he writes a biography he chooses a type most like himself and is really writing his own life. Renan's Life of Jesus is really a life of Renan and he makes Jesus have many qualities he himself had. I have compared Renan's autobiography to his Life of Jesus and shown the resemblance between Renan and the Jesus of his creation.

An author also identifies himself with his characters and draws unconsciously on himself when he creates them. I have discovered a personal note in an epic like the Iliad, usually considered impersonal. I have deduced that the master passion of the author of the Achilles-Patroclus story was friendship, and that he sang a private sorrow in Achilles' grief for Patroclus. I have been aided in this by a dream of Achilles.

Authors also often draw their villains from their unconscious. They indulge in exaggeration, disguise and various other devices. Balzac's worst villain, the intellectual, unmoral Vautrin, is the Dr. Hyde of Balzac himself let loose in a fictitious character. And we know Byron was even accused of having committed the crimes of his villains. This, however, does not mean that the creator of vicious types himself may not be the purest person in his personal life. We must not conclude that actual events of a fictitious work have happened to the author himself. And this brings me to the real danger of a critical study of this kind.

I have maintained a double guard over myself so as not to transcend the danger line. I have sought not to interpret as a portrait of the author's own life, his delineation of a character, when no reason warrants such a conclusion. It is absurd to conclude that isolated incidents in a novel happened in the writer's own life. It is only when a writer harps on one plot—one motive—continually—and in several works, that one's suspicions are aroused that he is really writing about himself. It is only when there is a genuine ring to the cry of distress, that the reader suspects that the work is more than a mere literary exercise. The early readers of Heine, De Musset and Leopardi, saw that the poets were singing about real sorrows. No one ever doubted that Goethe, Ibsen and Tolstoi used fictitious characters as vehicles for their own ideas, and that Wilhelm Meister, Brand and Levine were really the authors themselves.

No doubt, many literary men will be among the first to object to a theory of literary criticism which tends to reveal their personalities more closely to the public. They may claim that they are painfully careful to keep their own views and personalities from the public eyes. I do not think that anything derogatory to authors as a whole will result from psychoanalytic criticism. They should be the first to welcome this method. In fact the older writers gain by the process of psychoanalytic study. We become more liberal and admire them all the more. I can only speak from my own studies and say that my admiration for the personal character of men like Byron and Poe, the moral standing of whom has never been very high with the public, has increased since my studies of psychoanalysis, and my appreciation of their work has deepened.

The reader's indulgent attention is invited to the pages where the effect upon literature of the sexual infantile life of the author is treated. This involves a rÉsumÉ of one of Freud's most important and most abused discoveries, that the child has a love life of its own, the development of which has most significant bearing upon his entire life. More particular indulgence is pleaded for the pages dealing with sex symbolism in literature. The critic who will find the author of this volume obsessed with sex will be more charitably inclined if he first masters Freud's works or a good study and summary of them like Dr. Hitschman's Freud's Theories of the Neuroses, Dr. Brill's Psychanalysis, Pfister's The Psychoanalytic Method or Jones' Papers on Psychoanalysis.

In conclusion, I quote a passage from William James to show the significance of the unconscious in modern psychology.

"I cannot but think," says William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), (P. 233), "that the most important step forward that has occurred in psychology since I have been a student of that science is the discovery, first made in 1886, that in certain objects at least, there is not only the consciousness of the ordinary field, with its usual centre and margin, but an addition thereto in the shape of a set of memories, thoughts and feelings which are extra-marginal and outside of the primary consciousness altogether, but yet must be classed as conscious facts of some sort, able to reveal their presence by unmistakable signs. I call this the most important step forward because, unlike the advances which psychology has made, this discovery has revealed to us an entirely unsuspected peculiarity in the constitution of human nature."