The Erotic Motive in Literature

The repression of the libido includes the damming and clogging up of all the emotional concomitants that go with sexual attraction and make up the feeling called love. Whenever...

Psychoanalysis will put in a new light the old literary controversies between realism and idealism, between classicism and romanticism. Idealistic writers are those who write of...

Freud discovered that dreams were the royal road to the unconscious, in that they portrayed our most daring and immoral wishes as actually fulfilled. It is not necessary that we...

"No man," says Dr. Johnson in his _Life of Cowley_, "needs to be so burdened with life as to squander it in voluntary dreams of fictitious occurrences. The man that sits down to...

This work is an endeavour to apply some of the methods of psychoanalysis to literature. It attempts to read closely between the lines of an author's works. It applies some princ...

Edgar Allan Poe proves an interesting study from the point of view of psychoanalysis. He has been analysed by pathologists and psychologists, but there remains much to be said a...

Those who are familiar with the theories of Freud are aware that one of his most important discoveries is that the child before the age of puberty has a sex or love life of its...

There is a large body of popular literature that may be called the literature of self-deception. The author makes statements that are false, but which he wants to be true. He is...

Freud opened up a new field of dream interpretation by his discovery of the significance of the remark of the chorus in Sophocles's _Œdipus_ about men dreaming of incestuous rel...

Shelley's great love poems were inspired by love repressions, and it will be my province to try to trace some of the finest poems in the English language to their sources.

In studying the psychology of authorship by means of psychoanalysis we learn something about the unconscious growth of an author's book; this phase of its process has not been u...

Psychology has in recent years investigated the unconscious day dreams which are now recognised as part of our imaginative life. No matter how religious or moral we may be, erot...

Renan drew himself in his _Life of Jesus_, as one may see by comparing it with his _Memoirs of My Youth_. He projected himself upon Jesus and wrote a life of Renan instead. He p...

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 neur...

The question now arises, What effect will a knowledge of the author's unconscious have in making us appreciate his work as literature? Does it matter at all if we know whether a...

It will be probably a shock to many people to be told that the cannibalistic instinct still is part of our unconscious. It appears in that pathological state known as lycanthrop...

In his four early volumes of poetry, published before he was twenty-one, there are many poems inspired by Mary, and four poems, written in 1805, addressed to Caroline, who was u...

... latent feeling or thought. By quietly writing the thing over and over again, I find that the emotion or idea often _develops itself_ in the process,--unconsciously. When the...

Stress has never been laid on the real unconscious origins of some of Keats's best poems. We know that his sad love affair with Fanny Brawne, who coquetted with him, inspired a...

"Shall I gulp wine? No, that is vulgarism." He is in hell, he realises, but he concludes with a wish to satisfy his physical love for Fanny. He wants to rest his soul on her daz...

Lafcadio Hearn anticipated many of Freud's conclusions. He understood the unity of life, in the past with that in the present, and his most persistent thought is the power and i...