GENIUS AS A PRODUCT OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

I

In studying the psychology of authorship by means of psychoanalysis we learn something about the unconscious growth of an author's book; this phase of its process has not been universally admitted. We are often told certain incidents gave rise to the writing of a volume, but they were only the precipitating factors. The book had shaped itself unconsciously in the author's mind long before; it only gets itself projected in an endurable form. So though Stevenson tells us that the shape of a map of an island took his fancy and gave birth to Treasure Island, we know as a matter of fact that he had, as a boy, for many years been leading mentally the life of the treasure hunters. Stevenson himself relates how the brown faces of his characters peeped out upon him from unexpected quarters. The map just set him in action.

Let me sum up briefly the growth of a literary performance from a psychoanalytical standpoint. Let us assume that the author at some time of his life was placed amidst circumstances the reality of which jarred on him, offended his sense of beauty, wrecked his happiness and frustrated his most cherished desires. Deprived of a world that he wished to inhabit, he built one in his fantasies and day dreams, one that was the very opposite of that in which he was constrained to dwell. If he was toiling in barren labour he pictured himself at congenial work, or leisure; if he dwelt in squalor and was deprived of necessities, he mentally placed himself in beautiful surroundings, rolling in luxury, and in possession of property he prized most. If he had no one to love he formed an ideal for himself, with whom he lived. If the loved one did not return his love he depicted himself as wed to her.

That literature is influenced and created by the wishes of the character or author may be seen readily. A tale of Ernest Renan sheds light on this theory, and also serves as a valuable illustration how neurotics and insane people derive their illnesses from unfulfilled love desires, and how they build phantasies where those wants are satisfied. Pleasant pictures appear in day dreams, but these often assume such reality that the victim cannot tell the fanciful from the actual. In the first sketch in his autobiography, called The Flax Crusher, Renan relates a pathetic story of a daughter of a flax crusher who lost her mind because her love for a priest was unreturned. She unconsciously carried out her wishes in her actions and thoughts. She would take a log of wood and dress it up in rags and rock and kiss the artificial infant and put it in the cradle at night. She imagined that this was her child by the priest. Thus she stilled the maternal urge. She fancied that she was keeping house for him. She would hem and mark linen, often interlacing his and her own initials. She finally was led to commit theft from his home. This story was taken from real life. The artist who is frustrated in love acts as this girl; he imagines that his love is being fulfilled and that he is living with the loved one.

A classic example of fantasy building is Charles Lamb's Dream Children. Rejected by the sweetheart of his youth, Ann Simmons, he pictured himself married to her and surrounded by their children and talking to them and entertaining them. He projected a world as it might have been, and as he desired it for himself; he wakes up from his day dream—the children were merely those of his imagination.

Day dreams then are the beginning of literary creation. In them we create a world for ourselves, and we make actual people fit into that world. After such continual living in a fictitious realm a writer seeks to express himself, and if he is an artist, to give it endurable form. If the dreamer dwells too long in one imaginative abode he may lose the faculty of distinguishing the real from the ideal. He may become subject to hallucinations and become utterly unbalanced as did Renan's flax crusher's daughter.

The literary man generally saves himself from neurosis by putting his dream into artistic shape; though writing of their dreams and troubles has not prevented artists from going mad, nor continuing to brood over the troubles that had already inspired their works. But the point of difference is clearly established between the neurotic and the artist. One dreams on till he is rescued from going mad by a physician's help, if possible; the other partly cures himself by self-expression, and at the same time gives the world a piece of art or literature, which consoles many, because they too have either had or witnessed similar troubles, or consider themselves possible victims to such sorrows.

Very few English writers understood the mechanism of day dreams better than Dr. Johnson, as the chapter in Rasselas on "The Dangerous Prevalence of Imagination" shows.

One of the best illustrations of the psychoanalytic theory of authorship detailed by the writer himself occurs in a once-famous English novel, Kingsley's Alton Locke, published in 1850. Alton Locke tells us how he came to write poetry. The chapter entitled "First Love" recounts the process, and we learn how because he led a life of drudgery, he created a far more pleasant one in his imagination and then unconsciously sought to make a record of this life.

II

Psychoanalysis is always interested in learning exactly how literary masterpieces are born. Just as it seeks to know through dreams what are some of the hidden secrets in the unconscious, so it tries to discover what unconscious life made the writer project his vision.

Two of the most famous love stories of the eighteenth century which had a personal background, and whose evolution have been told by the authors, themselves, were Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloise (1760), and Goethe's Sorrows of Werther (1774). They were the predecessors of the entire field of autobiographical love-lorn lugubrious literature that pervaded Europe in the early decades of the nineteenth century. George Brandes has shown how Chateaubriand, Madame de Stael, Senancour, Byron, George Sand and others owed much of their methods of recording their love troubles to these two novels. We to-day scarcely realise the great vogue that these tales at one time had.

The authors have given us accounts of the birth of these novels. Both of these geniuses had been frustrated in their loves; as a result they created mental fantasies and lived in a more pleasant world of their own creation, and finally, bursting with desire for expression, produced their novels. The unconscious life buried in them came forth and was crystallised in art. Rousseau's Confessions and Goethe's autobiography, Poetry and Truth, tell us how the novels came to light.

In the ninth book of the Confessions, Rousseau informs us that when he reached the age of forty-five, he realised that he had really never enjoyed true love. As a result he began living in a fantastic world where his craving was satisfied. He realised his wishes in his day dreams. "The impossibility of attaining real beings," he says, "threw me into the regions of chimera, and seeing nothing in existence worthy of my delirium, I sought food for it in the ideal world, which my imagination quickly peopled with beings after my own heart." He tells us how he valued love and friendship, and that he created two female friends according to his taste, that he gave one of them a lover, who was also the platonic friend of the other lady; that in this friend and lover he drew his own portrait. He imagined that there were to be no rivalries or pain. These fictions, he continues, gained in consistence. He then had an inclination to put on paper this situation of fancy. "Recollecting everything I had felt during my youth, this, in some measure, gave me an object to that desire of loving which I had never been able to satisfy, and by which I felt myself consumed." Here we have the secret. He sought in art what he had not in reality. At first he wrote incoherent letters, just as his feelings prompted him, and he thus completed the two first parts of the novel (which is in the form of letters) without a conscious effort to make a connected work.

At this time Rousseau, who was a married man, fell in love with the wife of D'Holbach, Sophia D'Houdetot. He loved her madly. He says, "It was not until after her departure that, wishing to think of Julia (his heroine), I was struck with surprise at being unable to think of anything but Madame D'Holbach." He now identified the real with the ideal; he found the woman of his dreams. But now his troubles began. Union with his beloved Countess was impossible. New emotions rose within him, as material for his novel. The work really wrote itself. He originally formed an ideal because he was not loved by any one who fulfilled that conception. When he discovered such a person and she was beyond his attainment, he imagined himself as her lover. All the misery he recorded had its counterpart in his personal experience. Without the unconscious reveries which he indulged in as a result of his needs and tribulations, the novel would not have been written.

After the story was published, women worshipped the author. It was recognised that he was the hero of the book, and it was generally believed that the characters were not fictitious. The novel gives us an account of the real Rousseau at least as fully as the Confessions themselves, where facts are not always truthfully reported.

Goethe has recorded just as minutely the origin of his Sorrows of Werther. He traces the book back to his love for Charlotte Buff, the betrothed of a friend of his. He resolved to give free play to the idiosyncrasies of his inner nature. He describes how he had day dreams and how he held mental dialogues with different people. He then was led to record these fancies on paper. The substances of his novel "were first talked over with several individuals in such imaginary dialogues, and only later in the process of composition itself were made to appear as if directed to one single friend and sympathiser." He became weary of life, and had suicidal thoughts. He then heard of the suicide of his friend Jerusalem, who had been in love with a married woman. Goethe saw that he was really in the same position as his friend; his loved one belonged to another. "On the instant," Goethe goes on, "the plan of Werther was formed, and the whole drew together, and became a solid mass. I was naturally led to breathe into the work I had in hand all the warmth which makes no distinction between the imaginary and the actual." He wrote the book in four weeks. "I had written the little volume, almost unconsciously like a somnambulist." As a result he freed himself from his suffering. The artist stepped in and cured the man. Goethe illustrates the theory that artistic creation acts as a self-cure of a developing neurosis. "By this composition," Goethe wrote, "more than by any other, I had freed myself from that stormy element in which ... I had been so violently tossed to and fro. I felt as if I had made a general confession and was once more free and happy, and justified in beginning a new life."

The public thought that the book was solely the history of young Jerusalem's tragic love affair, and did not altogether understand that the cry was Goethe's own. His mental dialogues and the longings of his inner spirit found expression in this novel. His sufferings were undecipherable by the public, he tells us, because he worked in obscurity. He also gave the attributes of several women to Lotte, and hence several ladies claimed to have been the original models.

Thus we see how two great love stories were created almost unconsciously by the authors. Day dreams and actual love; the longing for reality, for lack of which imaginary situations were created; and the putting down in the form of letters and dialogues the ideas and emotions that burst forth, all led to the shaping of the literary product.

III

Psychoanalysis sheds some light on the nature of genius, and especially literary genius. But it does not define it within hard and fast lines.

Literary works are largely the result of repressions that the author has suffered; he has been led as the result of them to cry out his sorrow or to depict ideal situations where such grief as his does not exist. He must write so that people who have had similar repressions, or who can imagine them, will find a personal appeal in the works they read. But the situations described must also, besides evoking an emotional appeal, stir the readers intellectually, so that they sympathise where the writer counted on sympathy. When the author writes only of his joys, the unconscious is also at work.

The writer also must be a master of his art, so that fundamental rules of composition and outrages on common sense he does not violate.

Especially when the author has discovered new features of his unconscious life, or has been led to present original and profound ideas as a result of such discoveries; particularly when he moves the reader with intensity and evokes a passionate response, does the writer begin to merit the name of genius. When we say that a genius is a man who discovers a new truth or depicts beauty, we really mean that he is a man who, having experienced a repression, has been led to make certain conclusions from that event, that society has not wished to admit; he is a great artist when he gives an effective description of that repression; he is a great thinker when he sees certain ways by which that repression may be avoided, and he is a humanitarian when he informs the world how to attain a form of happiness that had been denied him.

We thus do away with the very pernicious doctrine that genius is a form of degeneracy or insanity. Geniuses are often sufferers from neurosis, or describe characters suffering from them; they are not degenerates, as Lombroso and Nordau would have us believe. A neurotic person and a degenerate one are not necessarily the same. The term "degenerate" is not the proper name for men like Ibsen or Tolstoi, no matter how repugnant their ideas might be to people. Nor does it follow that because some poets like Villon, Verlaine and Wilde had spent time in jail for crimes, their poems are to be stamped as degenerate products. While it is apparent that some of the author's insanity appears in works by Swift, Rousseau, Maupassant, Nietzsche and Strindberg, their masterpieces are noble works of art.

The faculty of literary genius is not possessed by a few; many people possess some of its qualities. Intelligent or sincere lovers have often written love letters that never got into print which were stamped with the qualities of genius. Highly gifted people in private life often utter thoughts which if collected and published would constitute works that show genius. There have been many people who have uttered sentiments as wise as those found in Boswell's Life of Johnson, or Eckermann's Conversations of Goethe, but the ideas were not reduced to writing, either by the speaker or a friend. Goethe once said that every genius has in his lifetime been acquainted with men who were obscure and unproductive, but who possessed greater intellects, more originality than those geniuses themselves.

There is no dividing line between the genius and the talented or even average person, any more than there is a marked boundary between the normal and the abnormal.

The genius, however, always has something of the pioneer in him; even after his work is no longer new, he retains the title of genius, though there are people who can write better works than he.

The world has agreed on some geniuses. Most people are ready to admit that a few men of letters like Shakespeare, MoliÈre, Cervantes, Goethe and Balzac were geniuses of the first order. But when we are concerned with literary men who have done good work, it is not easy to say whether they were geniuses, though we are ready enough to admit that they had the qualities that make up genius.

The genius must be able to do more than write of the repressions which he has actually experienced; he must be a master of technique and means of expression. He must be able to describe with force and imagination, those repressions he has witnessed others suffer. The more use he makes of his unconscious, the nearer he gets to truth, and it has often been the lot of genius to depict those very emotions which society wants to be kept in the unconscious; and the more he draws on his unconscious, the less use he has for actual experience.

Yet the ability to present works of human interest that appeal to the public does not alone constitute genius; otherwise many of the thrillers of the movies would be works of genius. Nor does the writing of sad tales or giving ideal pictures make genius. There must be an important idea, or the presentation of the emotion in a particularly compelling manner. Then there is something cumulative about genius; we expect from it a repetition of literary feats that is beyond the power of most writers; we are not contented with an isolated literary effort. Still, there are poets who are regarded as geniuses though they have produced but one or a few pieces of importance.

The literary genius then has a keen insight into the psychology of the repression of the emotions and can beautifully express this repression and make valuable intellectual deductions therefrom. He can vary this work for many years, and move people who think.