LITERARY EMOTIONS AND THE NEUROSES

I

The emotions that literature deals with bear a close analogy to symptoms in the neuroses or nervous diseases. Every emotional conflict, every repressed love is an incipient neurosis, and often the sufferings described in books are full-fledged cases of neuroses. The author may unintentionally draw characters suffering griefs which the physician can recognise as analogous to the cases he has observed in practice. The writer may show how the character cures himself of his neuroses by being made aware of the unconscious forces struggling within him, or how the sufferer effects a recovery by sublimation, or how he succumbs to his disease.

Some authors like Rousseau in his Confessions, or Strindberg in his Confessions of a Fool, give us detailed accounts of their neuroses, though they may not always exactly fathom the causes. Poets have in their collections of lyrics told us of the sufferings that they have personally gone through, and the trained scientist can see to what neuroses the symptoms described are related. Other authors have in the guise of fictitious characters described the neuroses they have been suffering. Byron in his Manfred, Hauptmann in his Heinrich in the Sunken Bell, Shakespeare in Hamlet, Goethe in Faust, have told us of love repressions that were their own, and these characters can be studied by critics as neurotic patients are analysed by physicians.

The author may draw himself in the guise of a character who is utterly insane, as Cervantes did in Don Quixote. One feels here that the author was his own knight; in fact, he too had a sneaking fondness for books of chivalry, and the familiarity that his hero shows with them is good evidence that Cervantes was a careful student of that kind of literature. He too had been bruised by windmills; he too found that the real did not coincide with his ideals. It is most likely that Don Quixote developed his mental illness by his abstinence from love, by living in fancy with the high dames he read about, and by cherishing an affection unreciprocated for the peasant girl he called in his madness Dulcinea del Toboso. At least these factors cannot be ignored in the insanity he developed from reading books of chivalry. It is not improbable that Cervantes drew on a real woman for Dulcinea; he too had wasted affection on some woman, ignorant and coarse, whom he took for a lady of high degree. We do know that in the year he married, in 1584, at the age of thirty-seven, he had an illegitimate daughter by a certain woman. There is also a tradition that he had a few years previously a daughter by a noble lady in Portugal, and though this story is discredited, it must have had some basis in reality. However, Cervantes, though not, like his knight, suffering a mental ailment, must have had a neurosis on which he drew for the material of this novel; it was no doubt caused by his worship of a Dulcinea del Toboso.

Writers like D'Annunzio and Dostoievsky have given us complete cases of neuroticism; they described themselves in their books. Since the line between the normal and the abnormal psychic condition is hard to draw, and we all daily or at different crises in our lives overstep the limits, the works of literary men as a rule deal with those cases where the morbid and normal merge. Freud said that no author has avoided all contact with psychiatry. And he is assuredly right. Dickens's eccentric characters, Balzac's heroes and villains in the grip of great passions, neurotics like Bunyan, A'Kempis and Pascal, whose repressed love no doubt made them religious maniacs; Iago, Richard the Third, Macbeth, Hamlet, Anthony and Timon of Shakespeare, the leading characters of Ibsen, the unhappy Heine, De Musset, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Leopardi, Carducci, Burns, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Poe and Hearn can all be studied like patients suffering from neuroses. In fact all characters in fiction who suffer are related to neurotics, for sex and love is usually the cause of their troubles, for as Freud says, "In a normal sex life no neurosis is possible." The author occasionally deals with severe cases of neuroses, and the psychiatrists with mild ones, and their provinces are often the same. The writer details his case with art, and lays stress on the emotional phase and deduces ideas, while the psychiatrist gives us bare scientific analyses. "The author," says Freud, "cannot yield to the psychiatrist nor the psychiatrist to the author, and the poetic treatment of a theme from psychiatry may result correctly without damage to beauty." (Delusion and Dream.)

Cases of neurosis often especially lend themselves to literary treatment. Think of the women sufferers in literature like Madame Bovary, Hester Prynne, Anna Karenina, Hedda Gabler, Magda; you can always trace their troubles to love repressions. Fictitious characters who have not had a natural outlet for their love and have been abstinent, or have had a love disappointment or have suffered from aberrations of the infantile love life, present phases of neuroses.

Freud has studied Jensen's novel Gradiva, and shows how the leading character has troubles analogous to the psychoneuroses, and cures himself unconsciously by the methods of psychoanalysis.

Literature records many fully developed cases of neuroses. A story like the Fall of the House of Usher presents a complete case of a neurosis. Characters in literature who commit suicide, like Werther and Hedda Gabler, are victims of neurosis; sex is usually at the bottom of their difficulties. Every sufferer then in literature is a partly or fully developed case of neurosis; at least an emotional disturbance due to sex causes, akin to the neurosis, is always present. This fact is sufficient for the laymen to know without their making a deep inquiry into the nature of these neuroses and attempting to classify them. Here the work of the physician begins and a penetrating insight into the species of neuroses described in literature can be made only by the psychoanalyst.

Nevertheless, there are some cases that even the layman may recognise as soon as he has familiarised himself with the Freudian views of the neuroses. In English the best technical books on the subject are the translation of Hitschman's Freud's Theories of Neuroses, Brill's Psychoanalysis and Brink's Morbid Fears and Compulsions. Some of Freud's own essays have been translated by Dr. Brill in Selected Papers on Hysteria.

Freud divides the neuroses into two classes, the true or actual neuroses, and the psychoneuroses.

The true neuroses are neurasthenia and anxiety neurosis, which formerly was included under neurasthenia, but which Freud set off as a separate class. He calls these true neuroses because there are present abnormal disturbances of the sexual function, not necessarily due to heredity. Neurasthenia is due to excessive physical abuse, and the anxiety neurosis results from abstinence or unsatisfactory gratification. All agencies which prevent the psychic utilisation of the physical excitement lead to anxiety neurosis. Literature gives us cases of true neuroses, but they are not as frequent as the other class, the psychoneuroses.

The psychoneuroses are due to repressions but date back to infancy; the influence of heredity is important; unconscious factors are at work. The child's relation to his parents and his infantile sex life have great influence on his future. The crisis comes when a love repression in later life breaks out. The psychoneuroses are hysteria, compulsion neurosis, and mixed cases, especially anxiety hysteria.

In hysteria the patient suffers from reminiscences, and his recent experiences are unconsciously attached to infantile sexual impressions. Instead of solving his love difficulties he builds fantasies. Certain mental impressions remain fixed. The early painful effects struggle to consciousness, but instead are transformed into uncommon inhibitions, by a process known as conversion.

In compulsion or obsessional neuroses we also have unconscious sexual factors at work since infancy, but the effect of the painful idea affixes itself to other ideas, producing obsessions. These are transformed reproaches which have escaped the repression. Morbid fears, doubts and temptations are the result.

The most common form of neuroses in life, and hence most described in literature, is anxiety hysteria. They partake of the nature of hysteria and the true neurosis, anxiety. "In these cases," says Dr. Hitschman, "the anxiety arises not only from somatic (physical) causes, but from a part of the ungratified libido which embraces unconscious complexes and through the repression of these gives rise to neurotic anxiety." The excitation is psychic as well as physical.

Literature abounds then chiefly in the psychoneuroses and especially anxiety neurosis.

All literature where the author is recalling old griefs on which he still broods, looking upon them as if they had happened yesterday, are related to hysteria. Incessant complaints about early love disappointments, recalling all the incidents, constant memories of the mother and of childhood days, and obstinate clinging to ideas and pictures that were uppermost in early life, are related to hysteria. Byron and Heine, harking back all the time to their early love woes, were really sufferers from hysteria. Lady Macbeth, as Dr. Coriat has shown, was a victim of hysteria.

We see obsessions at work in characters like Ibsen's Brand who aims at all or nothing.

We find most troubles described in literature related to anxiety hysteria, from the childish griefs of David Copperfield, Maggie Tulliver and Jane Eyre, to the sad love experiences of the characters of Thomas Hardy.

Literature is largely a record of the anxieties and hysterias of humanity.

II

Byron is a good example of hysteria in literature. He loved Mary Chaworth, and for nineteen years, from 1805, the date of her marriage, to his death in 1824, she figured in nearly all his shorter love poems. She was Astarte in Manfred. She is Lady Adeline in Don Juan, she is, no doubt, "Thyrza"; she figured as the heroines of his eastern tales.

In the poem, "The Dream," he refers to the irony of fate that married each of them unhappily, and he describes his grief because he never wed her. When the poem was published her husband was annoyed and cut down some trees to which reference was made in the poem,—"the diadem of trees" arranged in a circle.

There are nearly fifty lyrics in which she appears beyond doubt, not mentioning the bigger poems where she often is present.

The last lines that Byron wrote in 1824, "I watched thee when the foe was at my side," refer to her:

The word "wrongly" shows that Mary was married.

She is referred to by him in his last letters.

The "Last Words to Greece," published posthumously, refer to Mary, and contain the same sentiment of his famous poem, "Oh talk to me not of a name great in story," written in 1821, and also posthumously published. He cares more about Mary's love than for the honours he would attain as hero in the Grecian War. He exclaims he is a fool of passion, and that the maddening fascination of Mary can depress him low if she frowns.

The celebrated poem to the Po River, sent May 8, 1820, to Murray, was inspired by "private feelings and passions"; he wrote Murray that it must not be published. The river Po in the poem really refers to the river Trent, in England, with memories of which Mary was bound to him.

There is no doubt about the fact that most of the early love poems of Byron relate to Mary. Critics have, however, failed to note her influence after the "The Dream," written in the summer of 1816, a half a year after his wife left him. But the reader of the later cantos of Childe Harold and Don Juan does not have to search too closely between the lines to detect Mary's presence.

I think we may dispense with the theory that Byron was a poseur and that his passion was unreal and rhetorical. Those lugubrious moods were unfortunately sincere. He suffered from hysteria, and this was connected with the lack of affection in infancy between him and his mother. He is the hero and Mary is the heroine of all his work. She made a neurotic out of him, and she is the cause of his moods when he wrote "I have not loved the world, nor the world me" in Childe Harold, or "From my youth upwards my spirit walked not with the souls of men," in Manfred. This seems strange to us who recognise that faithful love is often a pose, and that in real life men do not, as a rule, brood about lost sweethearts when these are married to others, and that they straightway marry themselves and smile over their past loves, in whom in many cases they could not again find interest.

Byron's wife inspired only two poems,—the bitter "Lines on Hearing Lady Byron Was Ill," and "Fare Thee Well"; she was also a model for two women in Don Juan, who are not amiably treated. His mistress, the Countess Guiccioli, may have been in part a model in Cain for Adah, along with Mary Chaworth, and she also inspired Sardanapalus.

For a long time the Thyrza poems of 1812 puzzled critics. They were held to be addressed to no one in general; there was a claim by some that they were addressed to a man, a friend he loved. But there can be no doubt that Mary furnished the chief inspiration. In Childe Harold, Canto II-9, he refers to Mary in the line "love and life together fled," and in a Thyrza poem he uses the words, "When love and life alike were new." Mary Chaworth was really responsible for Byronism.

Whether she ever committed adultery with him and had a child by him, as is claimed by the author of Byron, the Last Phase, one cannot say.

In his four early volumes of poetry, published before he was twenty-one, there are many poems inspired by Mary, and four poems, written in 1805, addressed to Caroline, who was undoubtedly Mary, are of especial excellence. The poems of his youth written to her included the "Fragment," written after her marriage, in 1805, and "Remembrance," written the year after. Both of these poems were published after Byron's death. A pathetic poem, In the Hours of Idleness (1807), is "To a Lady"; "Oh, had my fate been linked with thine." "When We Two Parted" was written the following year, and referred to Mary. In 1808 Byron wrote a series of sad love poems to Mary, and they were published in the next year, in 1809, in Hobhouse's Imitations and Translations. They include "Remind Me Not, Remind Me Not," "To a Lady," "When Man Expelled from Eden's Bowers," "Stanzas to a Lady on Leaving England," "Well! Thou Art Happy," "And Wilt Thou Weep When I Am Low," and "There Was a Time I Need Not Name." The six great poems written to Thyrza and published in 1812, with Childe Harold, were "To Thyrza" ("Without a stone to mark the spot"), "Away, Away, Ye Notes of Woe," "One Struggle More and I Am Free," "Euthanasia," "And Thou Art Dead and Young and Fair," and "If Sometimes in the Haunts of Men." Mary was as if dead to him, and he wrote of her accordingly. About the time of the Thyrza poems, 1811 and 1812, he wrote other poems to her like the "Epistle to a Friend" "I have seen my bride another's bride" and "On Parting New." In 1813 appeared the two sonnets, "To Genevra" and "Remember Him Whom Passion's Power"; in 1814, "Thou Art Not False, But Thou Art Fickle," "Farewell! If Ever Fondest Prayer," "I Speak Not, I Trace Not, I Breathe Not Thy Name." In 1815 appeared "There's Not a Joy the World Can Give That It Takes Away," and 1816, "There Be None of Beauty's Daughters."

Byronism, then, was due chiefly to the poet's early quarrels with his mother, the separation from his wife, but above all his rejection by Mary Chaworth.

III

Freud has told us that the idea of repression is the main pillar on which the theory of psychoanalysis rests. There has been at some time in the patient's life a serious inhibition of some desire. There are different kinds of repression, the most serious of which have a sexual basis. But the denying oneself of the play of any emotions that seek an outlet, constitutes a repression.

Sex with Freud means love in its broadest sense. The most common repression is the inability to satisfy one's love, either because the person has not met any object upon whom to lavish his affection, or if such an individual is found there is no reciprocation, or if the love is given it is later withdrawn. All these factors act in a repressive manner upon a person. For it must be understood that not only the stinting of sexual satisfaction, but the interference with all those finer emotions associated with it, cause a repression in the subject. When the emotions have been satisfied for a long time, and then there is a sudden cessation through change of heart or infidelity or death of the beloved one, the repression is very serious. It is this kind of repression that has produced most of the literature of the world.

But repression includes the stinting or uprooting of any emotion. Great grief as the result of the death of any one we love of either sex, whether friend or relative, is a repression. The death of a loved one puts the sufferer in a worse position than the man who has been stinted in a great love passion. And the great elegies in literature have been cries of poets for the death of fellow writers. Lycidas, Adonais, In Memoriam and Thyrsis are examples. The authors here suffered repressions in the loss of brother poets.

The grief which seems to be the greatest of all, that following on the death of a beloved child, is an instance of the most intense repression on the part of a parent. Here there is nothing really sexual, but the death of a child and the consequent agony to the parents is a far greater repression than any purely sexual one. Hugo's famous elegies on the death of his daughter which appear in the Contemplations are among the greatest poems of this kind. In America we have had a few poems by Lowell, and a famous elegy by Emerson, The Threnody, in which the loss of children is mourned.

If there were no repression, there would be little literature.

The varieties of repressions are as numerous as the emotions to which we are subject. For the inability to satisfy any emotion is a repression; the deprivation of an emotion long gratified, the conquering of a habit or the struggle for activity of a partially extinct emotion, are repressions. The feeling of loneliness or homesickness, which has given rise to much good literature, shows repressed emotion. The wish to wreak revenge or to punish evil or to do away with injustice or to devote oneself to the following of an ambition or the pursuit of a certain kind of labour, are all symptoms of repressions.

IV

Psychoanalysis starts with the assumption that the entire past in a man's life, beginning with the first day of his birth, is always with him and is really never forgotten. That which has seemed to pass out of the haunts of memory, has become part of our unconscious, and is often revived in dreams. Nothing is really ever forgotten. De Quincey understood this and discourses on the subject in his Confessions of an Opium Eater and thus anticipates an important modern psychological discovery.

Longfellow said, "Let the dead past bury its dead." Ah, if it only could! Ghosts of sorrows and griefs that we thought laid away still revisit us even in our waking hours. They stalk before us and open up closed wounds and we learn that these are not yet healed. They awaken memories of agonies that again smite us; they make us hearken back to unkind words dealt us, to suffering inflicted, to injustice done. Shocks which time had made obtuse are revived; we reap the harvest of anxieties garnered in our hearts; and we discover that the old despair has not altogether vanished but still occasionally gnaws us.

The dead rules the living; forgotten incidents, soul-wrecking mistakes, chance misfortunes still dominate us. We recall the mortification of a decade or two ago and as its details are resurrected, we again live through the madness of past years. Prejudices are thus built up, unreasonable indeed. We become averse to a face that reminds us of a countenance belonging to a person who troubled us.

The old poverty still haunts us in our present prosperity; memories of unpleasant toil in the past may make us shrink in terror in our newly found leisure or congenial labour. Mark Twain describes how in his prosperity he would dream that he had to return to the hated lecture platform or that he was again a pilot on the Mississippi River. Past solitude may still send its roots down to the present and leave us lonely in society. He who has known a starved body or many unfulfilled desires, he who has been the victim of ridicule or persecution or never before been encouraged or sympathised with, remembers the past only too well, even when the world honours him with recognition.

Impressions are strongest in youth and hence molest us in old age. The finer our nerves, the less easy is it to forget. The mother who has lost a child cannot forget the misfortune even after other children are born.

It is life's grimmest tragedy that we carry within us ghosts of our old days—ghosts which take us by surprise with their vigour. They mock us at their will; we are tormented unawares; we travel about with them and cannot shake them off. They stand beside us when we love; they take the savour out of our food; they dangle at our footsteps when we go to the house of mirth; they trail us in ghastly pursuit long after we have emerged from the house of mourning. Hence when the poet sings and the philosopher speculates, when the storyteller gives us a tale, unconsciously those old ghosts are with him and get between the lines of his writings. An unseen spirit seems to move his pen and he tells more than he had desired and he gives voice to emotions that he had sought to suppress or regarded as long since buried in a sepulchre that was impenetrable. But the dead passions and tear stained griefs come gliding forth and pierce all barriers and dictate to him. They even wish to be remembered, to be made as enduring in art as in life. They never weary of uttering their sentiments; they pursue the human race to eternity. And when we read of the troubles of man whether in the Bible or the Iliad, they are familiar often to us because they are our own. The author cannot escape the past and he always opens up more channels of his heart than he has suspected. His work shows that his old sorrows rise up like the phoenix from its own ashes. His ghosts appear in his art; the fires that were thought smouldering are lighted and we as readers are caught in the flames and are purged in them.

Psychoanalysis tries to rid us of the evil influences of the past by making us aware of the unconscious disturbances.