THE INFANTILE LOVE LIFE OF THE AUTHOR AND ITS SUBLIMATIONS

I

Those who are familiar with the theories of Freud are aware that one of his most important discoveries is that the child before the age of puberty has a sex or love life of its own. As he puts it, it is absurd to imagine that sex enters suddenly at the age of puberty just as the devils in the New Testament were supposed to enter the swine. Freud regards the child's sucking of its thumb as a manifestation of infantile sexuality. In his Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex he studies the sexual life of the child. This theory which met with much opposition is beginning to be accepted. The studies of Moll, Havelock Ellis, and Helgemuth confirm Freud's views.

The value of the theory is in this: It shows that the nature of our later emotional and especially our love life is far more dependent upon the nature, aberrations, inhibitions, sublimations, developments and transformations of our infantile sex life than we ever in our wildest dreams imagined it to be. Here in childhood are laid the seeds of our future emotional life. Early repression or seduction or bad training influences our later lives. These facts are recognised by many trained parents who refuse to over-fondle their children or to do anything that may awaken a sexual activity too prematurely.

Freud's idea is of value to the literary critic for it shows that the characteristics of an author's work may be traced back to his infantile sex life. As a rule we know little about the lives of literary men when they were children, but we can often judge what the infantile sex life must have been from the traits appearing in the writers' literary performances.

Inversion or homosexuality can be traced to the child's love life. As infants we are bi-sexual in our pre-dispositions. Children display sentimental friendships for members of their own sex, as we all know. Even in later life in each sex there are remnants of the other stunted sex, breasts on the man and hairy faces on women. Freud has given us a very interesting but by no means full explanation of the origin of inversion. The abnormal development is favoured by the disappearance of a strong father in early childhood, and by the overattachment to the mother at the same or earlier time. The love for the mother is soon repressed and the boy identifies himself with her and loves other boys like himself. He returns to that self-love which is a second stage after auto-eroticism in the infant, and is known as narcissism. He wishes to love those boys as his mother has loved him. He may like women but he transfers the excitation evoked by them to a male object, for they remind him of his mother and he flees from them in order to be faithful to her. He repeats through life the mechanism by which he became an invert.

The fact then is that homosexualism is an abnormal development from the infant's love life. It is in the germ in all normal people, especially in those capable of intense friendships. It is naturally abhorrent to us when it vents itself in any abnormal relations.

The sublimated homosexualism which we find in literature is that which gives way to outbursts of friendly devotion, and intense and passionate grief at the loss of a friend; it is at the root of the idea that a man should lay his life down for his friend. Then there is the real inversion which the world rightly stamps as immoral.

A few examples of literature where the homosexualism of the author's unconscious is present are Shakespeare's Sonnets, Tennyson's In Memoriam and Whitman's Calamus. These works show what capacities their authors had for friendship. It is the habit of some intellectual homosexuals to try to interpret these works as indicative of homosexual practices, as an excuse and consolation to them in their own unfortunate condition. Whitman wrote to John Addington Symonds in response to an enquiry about the Calamus poems that he would prefer never to have written them if they gave any one the inference that he either practised or tolerated homosexualism.

Two poets of recent years who, we know, practised homosexualism, each of whom also served jail terms, were Paul Verlaine and Oscar Wilde. There were critics who saw that certain passages in Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, published about five years before he went to jail, pointed to the homosexual proclivities of the author. His curious interpretation of Shakespeare's sonnets also shows these. It is possible that some of the love poems written by Verlaine and which are supposed to be addressed to women were really written to Arthur Rimbaud, the poet he loved. This is a practice indulged in by homosexual poets to avoid suspicion.

The classic stories of ideal friendship are those of David and Jonathan, and Damon and Pythias; the most widely known essays in ancient literature discussing homosexual love as a legitimate pursuit are in the dialogues on love by Plutarch and by Plato. Theocritus and the Greek Anthology authors refer to homosexual love.

The only interest the subject has for the psychoanalytic critic of literature is in tracing the connection between the works of authors where homosexual remnants in the form of extreme friendships are present and their infantile sex life.

Freud's monograph on Leonardo da Vinci is the best study we have of a homosexual artist.

It appears then that the bisexual tendency which is in infancy in all of us, in later life may lead, where it does not become absolutely normal, to actual homosexuality, or to a sublimation of this early inverse tendency; one of the manifestations of this sublimation being literary products in which friendship is exalted.

II

There are other perverts whose vices in later life can be traced to the infantile sex life. These are sadists, masochists, exhibitionists and voyeurs. The child's sex life takes place through the pleasures which it creates for itself in the erogenous zones, which are sensitive areas in any part of the body. It gratifies itself mainly on its own body; it is autoerotic. But the sexual life soon derives pleasure through other persons as sexual objects. There are also components or partial impulses, which are: for causing cruelty to others (sadistic), for deriving pleasure from pain to itself (masochistic), for showing itself shamelessly (exhibitionistic), and for peeping at others in nude state (the voyeur's instinct). As a rule these impulses are sublimated very early, but if they persist the perversions govern the individuals for the rest of their lives. Where they are sublimated we have as a result some of the most essential features of our modern cultural institutions.

The child who continued shameless for a few years may become very vain, and as an author write indecent literature. The child who was cruel may later in life love contests and competitions, and write books where cruel scenes or virulent abuse of people abound. The infant who derived pleasure from pain inflicted on it may be interested in solving intricate problems that as a man annoy him with a demand for solution, and he will torture himself in solving them. He also may be a conformist and find pleasure in crucifying himself upon the rack of the church and the state and the home; or become a martyr for an idea. As a writer he would depict martyrs or indulge in self-commiseration.

Literature shows sublimations of these impulses and also gives evidences of the authors' perverse tendencies where these impulses have not been sublimated; they may contrive to exist or be buried in the unconscious.

There are many literary men who have been perverse in their tendencies in later life without knowing it. Often the man who merely thinks he is fighting Puritanism in art when he shows a tendency to describe the nude only, or to describe people in compromising positions, is both an exhibitionist and voyeur. These impulses have been suppressed in him by civilisation and he finds an outlet for his unconscious by his art. Such literature is not so much immoral as indecent. A literary man may become an exhibitionist in his work so as to give play to an impulse he cannot otherwise gratify. A writer may write exhibitionistic books for money or to attract attention or for fun, but his work shows that psychologically he has never completely suppressed the exhibitionistic or peeping tendencies of his childhood. Like the child he is without shame. The feature of the cheap and lascivious literature that is written merely to pander to certain tastes is just in these traits.

But the traits of the exhibitionist and voyeur are found more or less in much of the good literature of the world. In the cases of works, however, like the Arabian Nights, Rabelais, Chaucer, the novels of Sterne, Fielding and many others where great genius, intellect and honesty are displayed, the liberal minded critic is willing to smile and pass over these exhibitionistic blemishes. In the cases of the older works these are due to the general looseness in speech of the times.

The application of psychoanalytic methods puts then in a new light much of the so-called immoral literature. In much of the indecent comic literature, like the Restoration dramatists, Balzac's Droll Tales, Boccaccio's Decameron and La Fontaine's Tales, the object is to arouse laughter by making a person accidentally exhibit himself. The author still finds an outlet for his repressed exhibitionism. There is a distinction between this literature and the "immoral" literature of a writer like Ibsen, who merely differs with the current morality and questions it, and who therefore seems immoral to the conventional man.

Again there is a distinction between exhibitionism in literature and real immoral literature, where an author tries, for example, to defend sexual crimes like rape or seduction.

Exhibitionism then as we find it in literary men points to infantile practices that were never completely suppressed and are finding an outlet. It is true, other motives may enter into the work. There may be a disgust on the part of the writer at his fellowmen's hypocritical and prudish standards of modesty and shame, and he may write to counteract these. But the exhibitionism of writers like Apuleius, Petronius, Gautier or Zola does not interfere, nay, sometimes enhances the artistic value of their works.

Another form of sublimation of exhibitionistic traits leads to works in which the author is always boasting or showing off, directly or indirectly. Sometimes the sublimation process is not complete and we have examples of the exhibitionistic traits alongside of the egotism. The reader will at once think of Montaigne's Essays and Rousseau's Confessions, two of the greatest works in the world's literature. Among ancients two of the vainest men were Cicero and CÆsar, whose writings show that exhibitionistic traits of their infancy were strong.

We here may consider the effects of infantile sexual investigation. Freud says its activity labours with the desire for looking, though it cannot be added to the elementary components of the impulses. Many readers may refuse to follow Freud here, where he concludes that the great desire for knowledge in later life may be traced to this infantile sexual curiosity. But that there must be some connection cannot be doubted. A child who has never displayed any curiosity as to where it came from must be one in whom the desire for knowledge has not been and probably never will be strongly developed. The child is the father of the student man. Freud asserts in his study of Leonardo da Vinci that there are three sublimations in later life of this curiosity, the most important and rarest being where a pure scientific investigation replaces the sexual activity and is not occupied with sexual themes. Thus he explains the scientific work of Leonardo and his chaste life.

III

Let us now take up the other two partial impulses, sadism and masochism, noted by Freud, and see their effect on the literary work of a man in later life.

"The repression of the sadistic impulse," says Dr. Brink, "produces not its annihilation but merely its transfer from consciousness to unconsciousness. And there, withheld from the neutralising influence of conscious reasoning, the impulse and the phantasies derived from it are not only preserved without deterioration but may even grow in vigour and intensity. Thus, despite the fact that in many instances the individual's conscious life is apparently singularly irreproachable, nevertheless this life is lived coincidently with an undercurrent of impulses of anger, hate, hostility and revenge and their corresponding phantasies" (Morbid Fears, page 291).

This would account for the tales of horror we find in Poe, Kipling and Jack London. To-day we do not always assault or kill our enemies. Literary men do so by depicting scenes in literature where this is done. Jack London describes fist fights in which he is always defeating his enemies. It is said that in real life he boasted of his abilities as a fighter.

Pfister, in his Psychoanalytic Method, formulates a law from an earlier work of his, as follows: "The repressed hate of certain individuals forms phantasies out of suitable contents of experiences, either actual or imaginary, according to the laws of the dream-work, by which procedure it creates for itself imaginary gratification. This gratification of complex comes about through the mechanism of a disguised wish, directed towards the injury of the hated person, being represented in the content of the waking dream as realised."

This explains the literature of hatred and how authors come to put their enemies in books and poems. Such works are traceable to the sex sadistic instincts of childhood. We find sadism in books reeking with curses. Ovid's Ibis, directed against the person who was to blame for his exile, is a good example; it is one of the most bitter invectives in literature. We also understand now the significance of the imaginary punishments inflicted by an author upon his enemies. The severe chastisement inflicted by Dante in his Inferno upon his enemies represents the poet's wishes carried out in his imagination to gratify him for his inability to fulfil his repressed hatred.

Literature abounds in hostile and satirical portrayals of the author's enemies. In ancient Greece we have many examples, the best known probably being the caricature of Socrates by Aristophanes, in the Clouds.

Elizabethan literature, especially the drama, gives us portrayals of fellow authors. Ben Jonson attacked the dramatists Marston and Decker in The Poetaster (1601), and they retaliated in Satiromastix. The most familiar example in English literature of an abuse of enemies is Pope's Dunciad. Then we have Byron's poem "The Sketch" directed at the maid he considered responsible for his wife's desertion of him, and Shelley's bitter diatribe "To the Lord Chancellor" against Lord Eldon, whose decree deprived the poet of his two children. Richard Savage's poem "The Bastard" against his alleged mother for neglecting him, her illegitimate son, is not as well known as it used to be. An author who was past master at the art of lampooning his enemies was Heine, and his attacks on Count Platen in the Pictures of Travel are among the most bitter in literature. All these attacks follow one principle; the author finds an outlet of his repressed hatred, and the desire for vengeance not being always possible in a physical sense, in modern times gives rise to phantasies of vindictiveness. The sadistic impulses of childhood are the sources of such literary works.

Take the portrayal of Thersites in the second book of the Iliad. This notorious character was surely some real person whom the author knew and despised and on whom he wreaked vengeance by drawing him. He was some man of Homer's own time, centuries after the Trojan War, and his type is as common to-day as it was in the days of Homer. The poet no doubt felt a grievance against some prattler and nonentity he knew, and pilloried the man for posterity; the personal note appears throughout the whole passage. Thersites is described as ill-favoured beyond all men, bandy-legged, lame, round-shouldered, largely bald. He tries to rebuke his betters, and Odysseus admonishes him severely, calling him most base of the Greeks, telling him not to have the names of kings in his mouth and threatening to strip and beat him. Thersites received a welt on the back and sat down, crying. Then notice how Homer puts his personal feelings still more into the mouth of the Greek who laughed and said that Odysseus had done many great deeds but this is the best he had done in that he had stayed this prating railer. Homer thus punished some man he did not like. It is rather odd that those who maintain the theory of the impersonality of the epic poem do not apply a little knowledge of human nature in studying literature, as this is often of more value than scholarship.

Lists may be compiled of nineteenth century novels, where the authors drew as villains their enemies. Often these are fellow authors. Dostoievsky put Turgenev into The Possessed in an unamiable light, under the character Karmazinoff. George Sand introduced lovers of hers with whom she had parted in her novels, and Chopin and De Musset have been drawn by her for us. Balzac righted his grievance against his critic Jules Janin by putting him in the Young Provincial in Paris. The motive of vengeance figures considerably in literature, though at times a malevolent mischievous instinct drives the author on, as when Dickens drew Leigh Hunt under the character of Harold Skimpole in Bleak House. Sadistic instincts are of course primitive, and where in ancient times a man might have put his enemy out of existence, to-day he can kill him only in imagination. The man does not have to be a personal enemy, but may be some character in real life who represents an idea or follows a course of conduct that the author thinks reprehensible. Demosthenes, Cicero, Milton, Swift and the author of the Junius letters knew how to castigate their enemies. Hugo's attacks on Napoleon in his Chatiments and Napoleon the Little are among the most bitter in literature.

An excellent analysis of hatred is found in Hazlitt's Pleasure of Hating, where he shows hatred is a real instinct and needs satisfaction—it is a remnant of savage days. Hazlitt's attack on Gifford presents many opportunities for the study of the psychology of hatred.

There are other cases of sublimated sadism in practically all literature where pain is described. The author displays a craving to see people suffer even where he sympathises with them and he satisfies that craving by drawing them in their agonies. Take Flaubert's keen interest in describing the torture and sufferings physically inflicted on Salammbo's lover Matho. There is hardly anything more sadistic in literature than the conclusion of Salammbo.

Sadism is often sublimated into interest in contests. One of the most ancient examples we have of such sublimation is in Pindar's Odes, where contests in Greek games are described and the victors praised. We have sadism, in fact, in all tales of competition where some one is vanquished.

The sadistic trait is the source of the glee with which people watch some one in a moving picture being beaten or hurt. It is the cause of the pleasure and interest we find in reading of executions, battles and physical suffering. There is nothing strange in tracing all this to the delight we had as children in torturing animals. This is a partial sexual impulse and is sublimated in most of us in later life and finds expression in our literature.

It is held that masochism is usually found side by side with sadism. Literature is also rich in sublimated masochism. Many authors are apparently only happy in their woe. They find delight in torturing themselves and in recounting their sufferings. Many of them were not as unhappy as they persuaded us to believe. The whole school of woe that had its origin in Rousseau and that was prominent in the early decades of the nineteenth century was full of sublimated masochism. Hence it has been called insincere. Byron and Chateaubriand were regarded, though not justly, as affecting woes they never really felt. Some of the sonneteers who imitated the Italians before and even during the Elizabethan period wrote about woes they never felt. This is, however, not the usual thing, and the greatest Elizabethan sonneteers like Shakespeare, Spenser and Sidney described real troubles.

Another phase of sublimated masochism is the attempt to torture one's self to solve puzzles and problems, and vex one's self more for the sheer delight in unravelling difficult situations than for the pursuit of knowledge. Note how children like to solve puzzles in newspapers. Poe, who had the sadistic instinct in sublimation, also had the masochistic impulse. We are familiar with his interest in reading cryptograms and with his paper on the subject. We remember his essays on studying persons' characters from their autographs. His stories of ratiocination like the Gold Bug, the Murder in the Rue Morgue, the Purloined Letter are examples of sublimated masochism. His Dupin, the detective, is an example of a man who likes to annoy himself. Sherlock Holmes is the best known modern example. Indeed the interest in tales of mystery and detective stories shows the power of the masochistic instinct in human nature.

Still another example of sublimated masochism is found in stories and plays where the idea of self sacrifice and penance figures. Dante's Purgatorio is a good illustration of the author's masochistic tendencies as the Inferno is of his sadism. He who tortures himself whether to follow the laws of society or to fight them is masochistic. Hence the tales of martyrs and heroes and idealists all betray the sublimated masochistic impulse. Both the rebel and the conformist, because they embrace torture, one might say almost willingly (though they really cannot help it), are masochistic. All literature describing these types show that the author has a keen interest in this satisfaction in one's suffering, and are the results, if Freud is right, of the author's infantile delight to suffer, which became later sublimated.

Rousseau describes the pleasure he received from beatings, and this masochism is seen in his Confessions, where he tells us of his woes with apparent enjoyment in them.

All this is significant. Freud says: "Children who are distinguished for evincing special cruelty to animals and playmates may justly be suspected of intensive and premature sexual activity in the erogenous zones; and in a simultaneous prematurity of all sexual impulses, the erogenous sexual activity surely seems to be primary. The absence of the barrier of sympathy carries with it the danger that the connections between cruelty and erogenous impulses formed in childhood cannot be broken in later life." (Three Contributions—Page 54.)

There is then a connection between the sadism and masochism of early infancy which is related to sex, and the sublimations in art of those impulses. People who can hate fiercely or are vindictive or have a tendency towards cruelty or who like to torture themselves are as a rule of strong sex impulses.

IV

There are other phases of infantile sexual life that rule a person for life. One of these is that stage between the first period of the child's first sex life known as autoeroticism when it finds pleasure from its own body, and the period when it selects an object to love apart from itself. This stage is called narcissism because then the child loves itself. Many people never grow out of this; we are all more or less narcisstic. This narcissism is the basis of egoism in literature and is no doubt related to extreme individualism. Stirner, Nietzsche, and Stendhal, who rank intellectually among the greatest writers the world has had, are largely narcisstic.

Walt Whitman would form a good subject for study of the manner in which infantile narcisstic sex life is sublimated in later life into individualism.

The following are passages from the Song of Myself, showing that the narcisstic infantile life of Whitman was sublimated into good poetry and philosophy:

His early narcissism did not lead him into selfishness but taught him self-respect.

He says in the Song of Myself:

In From Blue Ontario's Shore, he writes:

The following lines from I Sing the Body Electric is another example:

Where Whitman shows sublimations of these infantile phases he deduces important and profound views of life to make us happier. He questions whether the giving up of some of the heritages we surrendered to cultural demands has not made us also part with some valuable emotions and whether we have not denied ourselves rights we ought to resume. He makes egoism respectable, and deduces individualism from it.

V

I also wish to mention that sexual aberration, in which an object unfit for the sexual aim is substituted for the normal one, and is known as fetichism. We need not go into the causes of it, but psychoanalysis has shown that smell plays a part. We often find poets celebrating the eyebrows, the gloves, and other objects connected with the women they love. Though a certain amount of fetichism is normal in love, literature gives us instances where it amounts to an aberrated passion in the author. There is much fetichism in Gautier's stories, where he dwells on the fetichistic characteristics of his heroes in whom he describes himself. Then those poems where the sparrows and dogs of the beloved are described as if the author were in love with them because of their associations, those tales where too much attention is given to the dress of the heroines, all have fetichistic traces.

A phase of sex life in the child that is significant for the future is the sublimation that occurs in the sexual latency period between the third and fifth year, when the sentiments of shame, loathing and morality appear. These are reaction formations to the perverse tendencies of infancy. They are brought about at the cost of the infantile sexuality itself. These sublimations take place in the beginning in this latency period, and if they do not occur there is an abnormal development and the result is the latter perversions of life. When we say a man has no moral sense, we mean not only that he does not know the difference between right and wrong but that he is not disgusted or shamed at sexual conduct that is held in abhorrence by most people. Hence those authors who have this indifference to perverse moral conduct in their work, never as children in the latency period developed shame or disgust. All this is again evidence of the influence of the sublimations in childhood upon later literary work and view points. Girls as a rule develop this sense of morality earlier than boys, and this no doubt accounts to some extent for the prudishness of most women writers. The development is greater and we therefore find no women Rabelais in literature.

It is no exaggeration then to say that the infantile sex life governs the psychology of the future writer and the nature and tendency of his work.