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.