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.