Literature is a personal voice the source of which can be traced to the unconscious.
But an author draws not only on the past in his own life, but on the past psychic history of the human family. Unconscious race memories are revived by him in his writing; his productions are influenced by most primitive ideas and emotions, though he may not be aware what they are. Yet they emerge from his pen; for the methods of thought and ways of feeling of our early ancestors still rule us. Nor is the idea of unconscious race memories idle speculation or fanciful theorising. Just as surely as we carry in ourselves the physical marks of our forefathers of which each individual has millions, so undoubtedly we must have inherited their mental and emotional characteristics. The manner and nature of the lives of those who preceded us have never been entirely eliminated from our unconscious. We have even the most bestial instincts in a rudimentary stage, and these are revived, to our surprise, not only in our dreams but in our waking thoughts and also occasionally in our conduct. We carry the whole world's past under our skins. And there is a sediment of that primitive life in many of our books, without the author being aware of the fact.
Thus a deterministic influence prevails in literature. A book is not an accident. The nature of its contents depends not only on hereditary influences, nor, as Taine thought, on climate, country and environment, alone, but on the nature of the repressions the author's emotions have experienced. The impulses that created it are largely unconscious, and the only conscious traces in it are those in the art of composition. Hence the ancient idea of poetic inspiration cannot be relegated to limbo, for it plays a decided part in determining the psychical features of the work. Inspiration finds its material in the unconscious. When the writer is inspired, he is eager to express ideas and feelings that have been formed by some event, though he cannot trace their origin, for he speaks out of the soul of a buried humanity.
There is no form or species of literature that may not be interpreted by psychoanalytic methods. Be the author ever so objective, no matter how much he has sought to make his personality intangible and elusive, there are means, with the aid of clues, of opening up the barred gates of his soul. Men like Flaubert and Merimée, who believed in the impersonal and objective theory of art and who strove deliberately to conceal their personalities, failed in doing so. Their presence is revealed in their stories; they could not hold themselves aloof. It is true we have been aided by external evidence in learning what methods they employed to render themselves impersonal; the real Merimée and Flaubert, however, were made to emerge by the help of their published personal letters. It matters not whether the author writes realistic or romantic fiction, autobiographical or historical tales, lyric or epic poems, dramas or essays, his unconscious is there, in some degree.
But in a field which is largely new, it is best to take those works or species of writing where the existence of the unconscious does not elude our efforts to detect it. Therefore, much will be said in this volume of works where there is no question that the author is talking from his own experiences, in his own person, or where he is using some character as a vehicle for his own point of view. Such works include lyric poetry which is usually the personal expression of the love emotions of the singer. Burns, Byron, Shelley, Keats and Swinburne have left us records of their love affairs in their great lyric poems. Most of these were inspired by frustration of love, and were the results of actual experiences. And though much is said in them, other facts may be deduced.
It is also a fact that nearly every great novelist has given us an intimate though disguised account of himself in at least one novel (note David Copperfield and Pendennis as examples), while other writers have drawn themselves in almost every character they portrayed, Goethe and Byron being two instances. An author gives us the best insight into himself when he speaks frankly in his own person. His records are then intensely interesting and informative about his unconscious. But even if the author identifies himself with a fictitious character he speaks hardly less firmly.
II
Very important is the consideration of some of the literature where authentic dreams or dreams having the appearance of authenticity have been recorded. The connection between poetry and dreams has often been noted. The poet projects an ideal and imaginary world just as the dreamer does. He builds utopias and paradises and celestial cities. He sees visions and constructs allegories. I have interpreted, according to the methods of Freud, some dream literature like Kipling's Brushwood Boy and Gautier's Arria Marcella. These tales prove most astoundingly the correctness of Freud's theories about dreams being the fulfilment in our sleep of unconscious wishes of our daily life.
A literary production, even if no dream is recorded therein, is still a dream; that of the author. It represents the fulfilment of his unconscious wishes, or registers a complaint because they are not fulfilled. Like the dream, it is formed of remnants of the past psychic life of the author, and is coloured by recent events and images. Freud in interpreting the dreams of his neurotic patients, learns the substance, the manifest content of the dream, as he calls it, and inquires about the events of the preceding days and he evokes all the associations which occur to the patients. He learns something of their lives and finally after a course of psychoanalytic treatment frequently cures them of their neuroses by making them aware of the unconscious repressions or fixations from which they suffer. These are removed and the resistances are broken down. As critics, we may interpret a book in the same way. A literary work stands in the same relation to the author as the dream to the patient. The writer has, however, cured himself of his emotional anxiety by giving vent to his feelings in his book. He has been his own doctor. The critic may see how this has been accomplished and point out the unconscious elements that the writer has brought forth in his book out of his own soul. The critic, not being able, like the physician and his patient, to question the author in person, must avail himself, in addition to the internal evidence of the literary product itself, of all the data that have been collected from the author's confessions and letters, from the accounts of friends, etc. After having studied these in connection with the writing in question, he learns the author's unconscious. Shelley's Epipsychidion, for instance, is an autobiographical poem, Shelley's dream of love, and can be fully followed only when the reader has acquainted himself with the history of Shelley's marriages and love affairs.
I have interpreted a dream of Stevenson recorded in his A Chapter on Dreams, and have found in it a full confirmation of the Freudian theory of dreams. Stevenson, recounting at length a dream of his own, tells us unwittingly more about the misunderstanding that existed between him and his father and the difficulties he encountered before he married (since the object of his affection was separated but not yet divorced from her first husband) than his biography does. When the essay and the biography are taken together, we see the testimony before us as to why Stevenson dreamed this dream.