An author also identifies himself with his characters and draws unconsciously on himself when he creates them. I have discovered a personal note in an epic like the Iliad, usually considered impersonal. I have deduced that the master passion of the author of the Achilles-Patroclus story was friendship, and that he sang a private sorrow in Achilles' grief for Patroclus. I have been aided in this by a dream of Achilles.
Authors also often draw their villains from their unconscious. They indulge in exaggeration, disguise and various other devices. Balzac's worst villain, the intellectual, unmoral Vautrin, is the Dr. Hyde of Balzac himself let loose in a fictitious character. And we know Byron was even accused of having committed the crimes of his villains. This, however, does not mean that the creator of vicious types himself may not be the purest person in his personal life. We must not conclude that actual events of a fictitious work have happened to the author himself. And this brings me to the real danger of a critical study of this kind.
I have maintained a double guard over myself so as not to transcend the danger line. I have sought not to interpret as a portrait of the author's own life, his delineation of a character, when no reason warrants such a conclusion. It is absurd to conclude that isolated incidents in a novel happened in the writer's own life. It is only when a writer harps on one plot—one motive—continually—and in several works, that one's suspicions are aroused that he is really writing about himself. It is only when there is a genuine ring to the cry of distress, that the reader suspects that the work is more than a mere literary exercise. The early readers of Heine, De Musset and Leopardi, saw that the poets were singing about real sorrows. No one ever doubted that Goethe, Ibsen and Tolstoi used fictitious characters as vehicles for their own ideas, and that Wilhelm Meister, Brand and Levine were really the authors themselves.
No doubt, many literary men will be among the first to object to a theory of literary criticism which tends to reveal their personalities more closely to the public. They may claim that they are painfully careful to keep their own views and personalities from the public eyes. I do not think that anything derogatory to authors as a whole will result from psychoanalytic criticism. They should be the first to welcome this method. In fact the older writers gain by the process of psychoanalytic study. We become more liberal and admire them all the more. I can only speak from my own studies and say that my admiration for the personal character of men like Byron and Poe, the moral standing of whom has never been very high with the public, has increased since my studies of psychoanalysis, and my appreciation of their work has deepened.
The reader's indulgent attention is invited to the pages where the effect upon literature of the sexual infantile life of the author is treated. This involves a résumé of one of Freud's most important and most abused discoveries, that the child has a love life of its own, the development of which has most significant bearing upon his entire life. More particular indulgence is pleaded for the pages dealing with sex symbolism in literature. The critic who will find the author of this volume obsessed with sex will be more charitably inclined if he first masters Freud's works or a good study and summary of them like Dr. Hitschman's Freud's Theories of the Neuroses, Dr. Brill's Psychanalysis, Pfister's The Psychoanalytic Method or Jones' Papers on Psychoanalysis.
In conclusion, I quote a passage from William James to show the significance of the unconscious in modern psychology.
"I cannot but think," says William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), (P. 233), "that the most important step forward that has occurred in psychology since I have been a student of that science is the discovery, first made in 1886, that in certain objects at least, there is not only the consciousness of the ordinary field, with its usual centre and margin, but an addition thereto in the shape of a set of memories, thoughts and feelings which are extra-marginal and outside of the primary consciousness altogether, but yet must be classed as conscious facts of some sort, able to reveal their presence by unmistakable signs. I call this the most important step forward because, unlike the advances which psychology has made, this discovery has revealed to us an entirely unsuspected peculiarity in the constitution of human nature."