THE ŒDIPUS COMPLEX AND THE BROTHER AND SISTER COMPLEX

I

Freud opened up a new field of dream interpretation by his discovery of the significance of the remark of the chorus in Sophocles's Œdipus about men dreaming of incestuous relations with their own mothers. He saw this dream referred to the barbarous times in which such incest actually occurred, and to the infantile affection of the child for the mother. He saw that the counterpart of this dream was in the mythical material dramatised by Sophocles of a man murdering his father and marrying his mother. The dream means that one wants his mother's love. Herodotus reports a dream of Hippias who dreamt of incest with his mother. Plato's Republic, Bk. IX, says that in our dream our animal nature practises incest with the mother. Dio Cassius reports CÆsar had such a dream.

The influence of the writer's attitude towards his father or mother appears in his literary work. Stendhal has left us a record of the intense child love he had for his mother; he hated his father. One can see the results of these conditions in his life, work and beliefs. He became an atheist, since people who throw off the influence of their fathers often cast aside also their belief in a universal father. This also explains largely the atheism of Shelley, whose relations with his father were not cordial. The essay on the necessity of atheism was the cause of Shelley's expulsion from Oxford University.

An extreme attachment to the mother is the nucleus of future neurosis. If the mother is intensely loved by her infant son or boy, and then she dies, he will still be looking for a mother substitute, as it were. Freud's deduction about the mysterious smile of the Mona da Lisa is very plausible; it was in all likelihood the unconscious reproduction by the artist of his mother's smile which he rediscovered in another woman.

The best example of the Œdipus Complex in English literature is to be found, I think, in the poem by Cowper, On the Receipt of My Mother's Picture. Very few more touching tributes to a mother have been written. Cowper's mother died when he was six years old. The poem was written in 1790, when he was past 58 years. The poet never married and found a mother substitute in Mary Unwin, who ministered to his comfort; to her he wrote a famous sonnet and also the well known lyric.

Cowper wrote the poem celebrating his love for his mother "not without tears." On actually receiving the picture he kissed it and hung it where it was the last object he saw at night and the first that met his eyes in the morning. In the poem he becomes a child again. The intervening fifty-two years drop out of his life; he is back with his mother and he narrates his infantile impressions. The psychoanalyst who is aware that this child's affection for his mother is its first love affair, will observe that Cowper in his poem is giving us reminiscences of a childish fantasy that shaped the course of his whole life. His insanity and fits of depression, his sentimental and platonic attachments to old ladies, his religious mania, are apparent, in the germ, in this poem.

The poet recalls the affection and tenderness lavished upon him by his mother; he relates how he felt at her death, and was deceived by the maids who told him that she would return. He again sees her in her nightly visits to him in his chamber to see him laid away safe to sleep. He mentions the biscuits she gave him, dwells on her constant flow of love and on the way she stroked his head and smiled. He thus re-lives those days. One should remember these are the reflections of a man fifty-eight years old. In his troubles he still looks back to her for support. He contrasts his position then with his situation now. He is suffering from depression and the memory of many griefs. His dead mother is like a bark safe in port.

It of course displeases people to have any association made between the noblest sentiment, mother love, and so repulsive a feature as incest. When Freud interpreted the marriage of Œdipus to his mother both from a historical and psychological point of view, and called attention to the dream in the play where the Chorus mentions the most obnoxious dream that sometimes visits us mortals, that of incestuous relationship with the mother, he opened up a new field not only in psychology but in medicine. Psychoanalytic treatment has cured many people whose neurosis arose from the early attachment to the mother from which they were finally freed. Cowper was a victim of the Œdipus Complex; it was buried in his unconscious and in this poem of his he shows that the seeds that were sown fifty-two years ago were still bearing fruit. Literature can hardly furnish so good an example of the influence of the Œdipus Complex through so great a distance of time.

In this poem Cowper put his hand unknowingly on the cause of all his troubles, but he never realised it. Had the poem been written in his twenties instead of his late fifties, the subliminal process of freeing himself by art from his Œdipus Complex might have made his life more pleasant. The fact that the poem was written so late shows that the unhealthy attachment clung to him all his life; it ruined him mentally and gave us his strange personality.

Freud has shown us that psychoneuroses, like hysteria and obsessions, have their origin in an infantile overattachment to the parent of the opposite sex, which remains unconscious but nevertheless is an active and disturbing element. It is perfectly natural that this condition should exist in infancy, but it disappears in the normal person. If it does not, one's entire life will be influenced by his inability to overcome the too intense love for mother or infantile hatred for the father. If a man has had an unfortunate repression in childhood such as the early death of a mother he loved intensely, his destiny in life will be affected. This fact has been understood by people from time immemorial. If an abnormal situation develops like a hatred in childhood for the mother, the child's life will be in the future shaped differently from that of most people. People especially are influenced in the way they react to the world and to love affairs by the frustration or repression of their earliest love. If they become writers their literary work is charged with a certain tone, depending on the nature of the author's relation with his parents.

By this discovery of Freud's literary criticism receives a new impetus. Most literary biographers unconsciously worked in accordance with this theory, for they always stated, where possible, the relations of the writer to his parents. Freud merely formulated and proved the truth of the theory.

Why were Schopenhauer and Byron such pessimists? Among the many causes that later in life contributed to impart the note of woe and despair to their work, was the fact that both men were in unusually unhappy relations with their mothers and their quarrels with them are matters of literary history. Why are men like Lafcadio Hearn and Edgar Allan Poe the unhappy Ishmaelites in literature, with their morbid and weird ideas? They both lost in infancy or early childhood mothers to whom they were greatly attached.

Facts like these have great significance. It is not claimed that other factors do not go into the making of the man, but his relations with his parents is the earliest cause in determining his mental, moral and emotional make up. A man who hates his father sees in many of his future enemies the image of his father. One who is overattached to his mother looks unconsciously for her counterpart, among women, in seeking his mate. He sees a reminder of his father in those people who interfere with his plans, ambitions and conduct. He sees the father in the rivals he has in love affairs, just as in infancy he found in his father his rival in the affections of his mother. This seemingly absurd and repellent view has been scientifically demonstrated by Freud and his disciples so that I refer objectors to it to their works.

The influence of step-mothers has always been noted in ancient times and the amount of material in folk lore dealing with the effects of step-mothers on the lives of children is large. We are all familiar with the Cinderella story. Literature is rich in examples of writers whose step-mothers coloured their lives for them. Strindberg's misogyny no doubt dates back to his early dislike for his step-mother.

All literary works show between the lines a writer's early attitude towards his parents. An interesting volume might be written on the relations of literary men to their mothers. We would find the mother unconsciously influencing literary masterpieces. We might find the misanthropy of MoliÈre's Le Misanthrope and the cynicism of Thackeray in Vanity Fair each due to the fact that both these men while boys lost their mothers, though later personal tragedies influenced them. Thackeray loved Mrs. Brookfield, a married woman, and MoliÈre was married to a coquette.

The fact that the mothers of Coleridge and Dickens had almost no influence upon them is seen in their work.

The relation of the only child to its parents must be mentioned here. The studies of both Freud and Brill in regard to the later neurotic condition of the only child applies to literary men who were only children. John Ruskin, although subjected to a strict education, was petted and spoiled nevertheless like the average only child. His precociousness made his parents admire and worship him. He was attached to his "papa" and "mamma" for the rest of their lives. He was not young when they died and he preserved the attitude of the child towards them. His mother lived to a great age. When he was separated from his wife he returned to his parents to live. His later tragedy, the unmanly love for Rose Le Touche, which forms a most humiliating affair in his life, shows he was a neurotic from childhood. He was in the later part of his life subject to periods of psychosis. In his actions he was eccentric; he would be invited to lecture on art and would give a talk on economics.

His passions were love of beauty in the early part of his life, and interest in economic reform in his middle and old age.

We must always remember he was an only child. In his autobiography Praeterita, he refers often to his "papa" and "mamma."

Alexander Pope, the poet, was also a spoiled child, though he had a half sister.

The seeds of Browning's optimistic philosophy were sown in the normal and quiet affection that existed between him and his mother. There was no mad attachment, no repression, no ill feeling, and hence he never became an abnormal or morbid poet. He had less neuroticism than any of the great English poets of the nineteenth century. His optimism was also fostered by his happy marriage to Elizabeth Barrett.

Freud's theories about the relations of the child to the parents are borne out whenever we consider the life of a poet.

II

The birth of a new child also has an influence on the psychic life of the child. There is also always something in the relation between brothers and sisters that affects their lives. Hence the subject of incest in literature is of paramount import, repulsive as the theme may be.[D] It has been most exhaustively studied in unconscious manifestations in fictitious characters by Otto Rank in his Incest Motiv (1912), which should be translated into English.

The only phase of the subject I wish to touch on here is the close relationship that prevails in some cases between brother and sister among authors. The brother and sister complex, as it may be called, shows its effects upon the literary work of the writer.

The extreme attachment of Renan to his sister Henrietta and of Wordsworth to his sister Dorothy had much to do with the nature of the literary work of these men. The attachment explained from the point of view of psychoanalysis amounts to this. The affection which each man has for his mother is transferred to the sister who is the nearest resemblance to the mother. This new fixation may remain too long and the man hence loves no other woman. The affection is usually at its height in youth before the man marries another, in case he does marry. Both Renan and Wordsworth married after they were thirty. The incest idea was unconsciously present but repressed by the natural disgust the men felt as a result of education and training. In all likelihood had each of these authors been separated from his sister in infancy and met her years later in youth, he might have fallen in love with her.

The effects of this extreme brotherly and sisterly love have been studied but not yet exhaustively. No doubt much of the effeminacy of Renan, the gentleness, the moral tone, the kindliness, we find in his writings was due to this attachment to his sister. He dedicated his Life of Jesus to her. As I show elsewhere he drew himself in this book, and his love for his sister was a great factor in his making Jesus somewhat effeminate. He has also left a tribute to her in his My Sister Henrietta.

The influence of Wordsworth's sister upon him manifested itself in several ways, one of which is the utter respectability of his poetry, and another the almost total absence of any reference to love or sex. His sister was largely responsible for the trend of her brother's mind. She gave him eyes and ears, as he put it, helped him to observe nature and was herself a great force in the evolution of the new poetry. Her influence has been under- rather than over-estimated. Another reason for the absence of love poetry in Wordsworth may have been due to a guilty conscience, as he left an illegitimate daughter in France, he not being able to marry the mother for justifiable reasons. Professor Harper first published the story.

As one might have expected, neither Henrietta Renan nor Dorothy Wordsworth ever married, though the latter is said to have been in love with Coleridge.

Charles Lamb, the Gentle Elia, owes probably much of his quality of gentleness to his sister Mary, "Bridget Elia." She appears in his famous essays and they collaborated together in writing poems and tales. His kindness was no doubt enhanced by his pity for her unfortunate fits of insanity and by the fact that in one of these fits she had killed her mother.

The love felt for their sisters by Byron and Shelley made the subject of incest a common topic of discussion between them. They went so far as to question whether the law or feeling against marriage between brother and sister was not a convention based on ungrounded prejudice. Byron's love for his sister, Mrs. Augusta Leigh, did not create feminine qualities in him. She was to him a sort of refuge from the disappointment of other love affairs, a shelter when public opinion was against him. His poems to her rank among his best. He may have had unconscious incest thoughts in regard to her, and he may have drawn himself as married to her in Cain, where she may be Cain's sister Adah. But the accusation that Byron ever indulged in unlawful relationship with his sister is a groundless libel. We have no evidence for it and we have no right to make any assumptions because of misinterpretations put on his work. Between the thought and the deed there is a wide gap. Carlyle once said, the hand is on the trigger, but the man is not a murderer before the trigger is pulled. The story of the reputed incest with his sister was first published by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. The myth was revived again by "documentary" evidence furnished by Lord Lovelace, a descendant of Byron, and published in Astarte. A later woman biographer, Ethel C. Mayne, accepts the story. The entire tale is ably demolished by Richard Edggumbe in his Byron, the Last Phase, where he applies, without a knowledge of Freud's views, psychoanalytic methods to Byron. Brandes also defended Byron years ago.

Lord Lovelace published a love letter alleged to have been written to Augusta Leigh, Byron's sister, dated May 17, 1819, but this letter was really meant for Mary Chaworth, to whom he wrote: "I not long ago attached myself to a Venetian for no earthly reason (although a pretty woman) but because she was called ... and she often remarked (without knowing the reason) how fond I was of the name." The name which is crossed out is Mary. The mistress was the Venetian Mariana (the Italian for Mary Anne) Segati, the poet's mistress from November, 1816, to February, 1818. He was thus showing Mary Chaworth he still loved her. It is not likely he would try to impress Augusta with his love for a woman named Mary and again not probable that he would tell his sister of his liaison when he and his sister were supposed to love each other. The tone of this letter differs from that of others to his sister.

In 1820 Byron was writing in his Don Juan that he has a passion for the name Mary, that it still calls up the realm of fancy where he beholds what never was to be, and that he is not yet quite free from the spell. He loved Mary Chaworth all his life.

Byron's alleged criminal attachment to his sister was supposed to be the mystery in Manfred's life, revealed by these words in the second act, when wine is offered to him:

In a poem published a year later, The Duel, there is also a reference to blood—"And then there was the curse of blood." This line and the passage in Manfred merely refer to the fact that an ancestor of Byron, the fifth Lord, not a direct ancestor, killed Mr. Chaworth whose blood flowed in Mary's veins. Astarte then in Manfred is Mary Chaworth and not Augusta.

Shelley had a great affection for his sister Elizabeth and wanted his friend Hogg to marry her. She returned to her father and Shelley was broken hearted that she drifted away from his own influence. He thought she was not lost to him and wanted to take her with him to the west of Ireland in 1814. He continued to love her, and this influenced his work. In the first edition of the Revolt of Islam he made Laon and Cynthia, who were brother and sister, lovers. The publisher made the poet regretfully change certain passages, mostly single lines. In the early preface the poet concluded he could not see why an innocent act like love of brother and sister for each other should arouse the hatred of the multitude.

In Rosalind and Helen he describes Helen visiting a spot where a sister and brother had given themselves up to one another, and had a child, who was torn by people limb from limb. The mother was stabbed while the youth was saved by a priest, to be burned for God's grace. Their ghosts visited the spot.