CHAPTER IX
LITERARY EMOTIONS AND THE NEUROSES
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.