Many of the views here presented will be strange and novel to those unacquainted with or hostile to Freud's theories, or to those who wish to ignore the fact of the existence of primitive emotions in man. The ideas advanced here will displease the puritanical opponents of scientific research. But it should be borne in mind that a study of the unconscious must necessarily deal with much that is obnoxious in human nature.[A] A study of this unpleasant element leads to the attainment of a more natural and moral life. But we should also remember that the unconscious, besides containing the seeds of crime and immorality, also is the soil of all those finer emotions that the church and the state cherish. Conscience, self-sacrifice, moral sense, love, are unconscious sentiments.
I should have liked to treat of the literature of metempsychosis. In this literature where people are depicted as remembering past existences, as in Kipling's tale, The Finest Story in the World, George Sand's Consuelo, and Jack London's The Star Rover, there may be possible avenues to race memories. Needless to say, I do not believe in the transmigration of the individual soul as some of the Greeks and early Christians did. But the Buddhistic conception of metempsychosis with its doctrine of the Karma, the scientific theory of heredity, and the conception of psychoanalysis are all dominated by a similar idea; this is, that the manners of feeling and thinking of our progenitors are exercised by us. We carry their souls, not the individual, but the collective ones; we are the products of their sins and virtues; we have all the idiosyncrasies, mental make up, emotional tendencies, that they had; we have stamped on us our race, our nation, our religion. We cannot remember isolated events of past ages, but the effects of happenings then are registered in our nervous system. No one has done more than Hearn to show this, and he is, both because of his life and work, one of the fittest subjects for psychoanalytic study. The only possible rival he has is Edgar Allan Poe.
If any one wishes to see an adroit application of the method of reading between the lines in a poem, let him read Lafcadio Hearn's interpretation of Browning's poem A Light Woman in the Appreciations of Poetry. Hearn had probably never heard of Freud, but in his lecture to his class, he showed that the unconscious of the author and the character could be discovered by probing carefully into the literary work. Hearn tells in prose Browning's story of the young man who claimed that he stole his friend's mistress to save him, and on tiring of her pretended he had never loved her. Hearn shrewdly observes:
"Does any man in this world ever tell the exact truth about himself? Probably not. No man understands himself so well as to be able to tell the exact truth about himself. It is possible that this man believes himself to be speaking truthfully, but he certainly is telling a lie, a half truth only. We have his exact words, but the exact language of the speaker in any one of Browning's monologues does not tell the truth, it only suggests the truth. We must find out the real character of the person, and the real facts of the case, from our own experience of human nature."
Psychoanalysis was applied to literature long before Freud. When biographers recounted all the influences of an author's life upon his works, or probed deeply into the real meaning of his views, they gave us psychoanalytic criticism. Great literary critics like Sainte-Beuve, Taine and George Brandes traced the tendencies of authors' works to emotional crises in their lives. Critics who study the various ways in which authors have come to draw themselves or people they knew in their books, are psychoanalytic. When biographers and critics dilate especially on the relations existing between the writer and his mother, and trace the effects on the work of the author, they employ the psychoanalytic method. Any profound insight into human nature is psychoanalytic, and I find such insight in Swift, Johnson, Hazlitt and Lamb.
It is, however, Freud who first gave complete application of that method to literature. He first touched on it in his masterpiece The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, when he saw the significance of the marriage of Œdipus to his mother in Sophocles's play Œdipus. He showed that it was a reminiscence of actual incestuous love that was practised far back in the ages of barbarism, and that the play shows horror as a reaction to such attachment to the mother. The first treatment of an æsthetic theme from the new point of psychoanalysis was made by Freud in his book on Wit and the Unconscious in 1905. The first sole application of psychoanalysis to a work of literature was undertaken by him in connection with Jensen's novel Gradiva in 1907, where he shows the similarity between the emotions of the hero and the psychoneuroses. (The novel and Freud's essay have been both translated into English.)[B] Freud also studied Leonardo da Vinci and showed the influences of the artist's infantile love life upon his later career and work. Psychoanalytic methods have been applied to music, mythology, religion, philosophy, philology and morals, and indeed to almost every sphere of mental activity. Many monographs have been published by Freud's disciples, taking up the relations between an author and his work. Sadger studied the poets Lenau, Kleist, and F. K. Meyer and showed the power of infantile influence. On this side of the ocean little work has been done in this direction, but that little has been excellent. Professor Ernest Jones's study of the Œdipus Complex in Hamlet (American Journal of Psychology, January, 1910), Dr. Isidor Coriat's account of the hysteria of Lady Macbeth and Professor F. C. Prescott's scholarly essay on the relation between poetry and dreams (Journal of Abnormal Psychology, April, June, 1912), are excellent pioneer works in psychoanalytical literary criticism.[C]
IV
Freud is a genius whose performances astonish one as do those of a wizard. His revolutions in psychology are no less important than those of Darwin in biology. After his discoveries, literary interpretation cannot remain the same. The points of difference between him and his disciples Jung and Adler need not be touched on here. My own sympathies are with Freud.
The new method will help to explain the nature and origin of literary genius, though it is not pretended it will create it. Psychoanalysis will show us the direction that literary genius takes and will explain why it proceeds in a particular path. It will give the reasons why one author writes books of a particular colour or tendency, why he entertains certain ideas. It explains why certain plots and characters are indulged in by particular authors. It claims to tell why Schopenhauer became a pessimist, why Wagner dealt with themes like the woman between two men. In fact studies of these artists, employing Freud's methods, have already been published. Graf and Rank each wrote about Wagner, and Hitschman has given us a monograph on Schopenhauer. Similarly the critic of the future will explain the fundamental tone of the works of writers who differ vastly from each other. We will see more clearly why Byron gave vent to his note of melancholy, Keats to his passion for beauty, Browning to his spirit of optimism, Strindberg to his misogyny, Swift to his misanthropy, Ibsen to his moral revolt, Tolstoi to his religious reaction, Thackeray to his cynicism, and Wordsworth to his love for nature.
The author is more in his work than he suspects. To illustrate: There is a theory of projection, in psychoanalysis, which explains to us that hysterical people lean with great eagerness for moral support or consolation on some actual person they love or admire. Often he is the clergyman or physician, at other times he is a friend or relative. The same thing occurs in literature. The writer who has certain theories clings for support to some characters in history or fiction. He projects his personality on theirs. If he writes a biography he chooses a type most like himself and is really writing his own life. Renan's Life of Jesus is really a life of Renan and he makes Jesus have many qualities he himself had. I have compared Renan's autobiography to his Life of Jesus and shown the resemblance between Renan and the Jesus of his creation.