The London Mercury

Psycho-Analysis and the Novel

By J. D. BERESFORD

I

If the opinion of the reviewer represents in any degree the opinion of the public, psycho-analysis is becoming at once the craze and the curse of the modern novelist. The chief persons of the story, we gather, are no longer units, recognisable illustrations of acceptable and well-defined types of character, but tend to split horribly into their component parts, revealing the workings of their unconscious minds with a spiritual immodesty worthy of the immortal Sally Beauchamp. Our heroes suffer from “Œdipus complexes” with a unanimity that must appear altogether perverse to a generation reared on the works of Charles Dickens, who consistently regarded all mothers as criminal, negligible, or insane. Our heroines are become either displayed specimens of morbid pathology or increasingly middle-aged. Finally, and as a culminating horror, we occasionally come across a novel written with such a single regard for the subjective emotions that the objective personality appears only now and then as an uncompleted cast momentarily lifted, for examination, from the matrix.

Moreover, these symptoms and their like—I still adapt and condense the current opinions of the outraged reviewer—exhibit an inclination to multiply. We picture the admirer of the world’s most successful novelist (Harold Bell Wright) as arching his back and spitting furiously at the first indication of a Freudian thesis. And, to conclude the indictment, it is plain that unless the novel-writing disciples of the Vienna and Zurich schools of psychology can promptly be bled to death—they have, thank God, quite miserable circulations!—their influence may permeate and vitiate that sane and admirable method which has given us an Ethel M. Dell, a Temple Thurston, or a Zane Grey.

This indictment represents, no doubt, an extremist attitude, the opinion of that multitude which must have its heroines pure and its morality undiluted; but it cannot be neglected solely on that account. And when we recognise, as we must, that authentic critics have also shown a bias in the same direction, we have established a case that demands both a literary and a scientific consideration.

Our analysis, however, must begin with certain exclusions. If we are to test the influence of psycho-analysis on the novel as an art-form we must take into account not only the effect, but also the manner of the incidence. For it is manifest that of all theories of the nature of man ever put forward by a reputable scientist, that of Sigmund Freud is the most attractive and adaptable for the purposes of fiction. It was a theory of sex, the all but universal theme of the novel; it emphasised various peculiarities of thought, feeling, and action that no observant, and, a fortiori, no introspective novelist could thereafter overlook; it gave a new mystery to the human mind; adumbrated the suggestion of a freer morality by dwelling upon the physical and spiritual necessity for the liberation of impulse; and, last temptation of the enervated seeker for new themes, provided material for comparatively unworked complications of motive.

Now, these appeals have inevitably influenced the writing of just those experimenters and opportunists whose novels I wish to exclude from our analysis. Their productions can only be indicative of a passing fashion; their value, at best, such as the future historian may find in the record of the epidemic symptoms they have documented. But since novels of this type have a particular significance, both in relation to our present purpose and to all literary criticism of this form of expression, we must in the first place arrive at a clear understanding of the quality that differentiates them from those other works which, whatever their failings, have another representative value.

Taking, then, an extreme and therefore ideal example, I submit that the essential difference is that between pure observation and pure feeling, or variously between an intellectual as opposed to an emotional response to experience. In the case of the experimenters we are considering, such a subject as psycho-analysis is studied from the surface, the facts and general teachings are memorised and then applied, more or less arbitrarily, to the invented or observed characters who figure in the story. Such a method when brilliantly used may produce an impression of truth, may even in rare cases lead to discovery, but in its essence it is mechanical, a mere collection and presentation of material that has not been assimilated, and hence very slightly transmuted by the writer.

The opposed example is that in which the study of, say, psycho-analysis comes to the understanding of the writer as a formula that interprets for him a mode of experience. He has, let us assume, been aware of and puzzled by a habit of thought or feeling which is suddenly and beautifully illuminated for him by the application of this new formula. Nor, in the truly representative instance, does the process halt at the first discovery, but continues to open resolutions of old difficulties hardly recognised as such until they fall within the scope of the new criterion. The danger that besets the young disciple in the first ecstasies of such an adventure is that he will inevitably be tempted to apply his touchstone too generally, to imagine that his formula will explain all life.

In such a case as this the manner of incidence, to which I referred, differs markedly from the first example. Here we get a sense of interpenetration and subsequent assimilation, in the former case rather of obliquity and reflection; the true difference being that one writer finds in psycho-analysis an aid to the understanding of human thought and action, the other merely a useful piece to add to his repertoire. And, finally in this connection, one has true value as evidence of the validity of the theory; the other has not.

Having thus cleared the ground by eliminating more particularly those literary experiments in applied psychology that have had such an irritant action on the nerves of the reviewer, I propose to test the applicability of psycho-analysis to fiction by a brief examination of certain aspects of the work of a writer who had not heard of Freud and never attempted to anticipate his method. Dostoevsky, in fact, from our point of view, may be regarded primarily as a patient rather than as a doctor.

Of his life up to the age of seven years we lack that information which would provide us with the last triumphant detail of proof. It is exceedingly improbable that that detail will ever be forthcoming. But it is a fairly safe inference from the later evidence that at some time in the course of those earlier years he suffered either some shock of terror or stress of misery that initiated the trauma which was later confirmed and emphasised by his experience on the scaffold. This inference is inherently probable, and since it might conceivably be confirmed by research and could not conceivably be disproved, we may assume it as a premise, although it is not absolutely essential pathologically.

For the remainder of his life we see him beyond all shadow of doubt suffering from a neurosis that, even if it were not the cause, was the accompaniment and not the result of his epilepsy. The form taken by this neurosis has been provisionally termed an “inferiority complex.” In its milder and practically harmless forms it is perhaps the commonest instance of a morbid inhibition, despite the fact that—pace Dr. Freud—it depends more on the power principle of Adler than on the pleasure-pain principle so tediously insisted upon by the Vienna school. The symptoms in aggravated cases exhibit on the one side an exaggerated humility, and on the other an intolerant use of any adventitious opportunity for the use of power. Two instances of everyday experience taken from a text-book of psycho-analysis are: The driver of a heavy van brutally threatening the temporarily inferior pedestrian by the threat of running him down; and the ordinarily meek woman who takes a delight in exerting temporary superiority of position, it may be in such a trivial act as keeping anyone waiting by a pretence of inattention.

Dostoevsky, however, has himself analysed the condition so perfectly that his study might well find a place in a medical library as the ideal type of this particular neurosis. The supposed autobiographer (his name does not appear) in Notes from Underground22 is, perhaps, too intelligently aware of his own condition, but it is evident that Dostoevsky’s purpose could only be fully served by the form of a personal confession. It is, indeed, a confession that holds no reserves. In the earlier part of the story we see the assumed writer of the notes suffering agonies from the consciousness of his humiliation. This is followed by two attempts to assert himself, both futile. We then see him in a contest with his servant, Apollon, whose condition is a reflex of his own. And, finally, we get the representative instance of a brutal use of temporary superiority of position in his dealings with the unfortunate little prostitute, Liza. Moreover, the title is conclusive. The “underground” is clearly indicated as that of the mind, and if the story had been written within the last ten years the author would have been accused by the reviewers of having steeped himself in the writings of the psycho-analysts. The opening sentences, indeed, would probably have been a little too much for the sensitive, since the sketch begins: “I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me.”

This one story would be almost sufficient testimony as to Dostoevsky’s own condition, the essential part of it coming, as it does, not from observation, but from the “underground” of the writer’s own mind. But if we need further evidence it can be found in almost any of Dostoevsky’s novels: the valet in The Brothers Karamazov is a fine example; Prince Myshkin in The Idiot develops the theme in its less self-conscious aspect; there is more than one example in The Possessed. But the truth is that, once started on this scent, the student of Dostoevsky cannot fail to conclude that the type dominates both the characterisation and the atmosphere of all his works.

Yet if our diagnosis rested solely on this evidence the inference would be open to attack by the layman on the grounds that Dostoevsky wrote of the Russian as he knew him; and has not Russia as a country exhibited precisely the symptoms of the neurosis we have been describing? Centuries of suppression and humiliation have been at work to foster and confirm the complex which we now see in its typical expression, although passing, as did that of the French in the last years of the eighteenth century, towards its natural sublimation.

But our evidence goes beyond the examination of Dostoevsky’s imaginative writings—in which, by the way, he was continually able, within certain limitations, to sublimate his own complex. Indeed, it was not by his novels but by a study of his letters that I, personally, was led in the first instance to attempt the diagnosis. In the letters we must look chiefly for autobiographical indications rather than for the emergence of the unconscious wisdom that enriches the novels, but would be checked by the realisation of addressing a particular individual.

The first of them that attracted my attention was the adulatory tone of the letters begging for patronage, written just before the release from Siberia. One regrets, in reading them, that genius could so bemean itself. The common excuse for the tone of them is that Dostoevsky was ill and over-tried by his recent experiences, but it is just in such circumstances as these that one looks for the expression of the dominant individuality. In any case I prefer the pathological explanation. Then we come to the consideration of his jealousy of Turgenev, and of the unfortunate meeting of the two men in Switzerland. All Dostoevsky’s resentment and his behaviour at the meeting in question are readily explicable by the theory of his neurosis, but the need for impartiality demands that we should ask if a perfectly normal explanation is forthcoming. Personally I have failed to find one that is consistent with an unprejudiced interpretation of Dostoevsky’s general character. Apart from his prepossession, he exhibits traits of gentleness, affection, and tolerance that do not appear to me consonant with his treatment of Turgenev. He did not seek to belittle his other contemporaries. But, in this instance, like the hero of Notes from Underground, he could not resist the unconscious desire to try and jostle his superior from the pavement.23

For our present purpose, however, it is not necessary to prove that Dostoevsky himself was the victim of a particular neurosis—although the argument is slightly strengthened if that hypothesis be admitted—since it is primarily only my intention to show that certain morbid conditions of mind, now clearly indicated and with obvious limitations explained by the psycho-analysts, may be artistically treated in the best fiction. Another instance of this, which may be briefly referred to, is that afforded by the writings of D. H. Lawrence, who in all his novels has demonstrated with the passionate conviction that is a witness to his genius the strange and occasionally dissociated workings of the unconscious mind. In this case we are confronted with just such a sex obsession as delights the faithful disciples of the Vienna school, but the particular type of complex is not of any importance in this connection.

II

The result of our preliminary examination may be summarised as the posing of two deductions: the first, that the deliberate, intellectual use in the pages of a novel of the teachings of psycho-analysis produces an effect upon the reader that may be variously irritating, unconvincing, and negligible, but is rarely, if ever, psychologically valuable; the second, that a writer of genius such as Dostoevsky has, in one sense, forestalled the conclusions of this branch of psychology and used them to the benefit of literature. At first sight these two deductions may appear to disclose an inherent contradiction, namely, that the theories of psycho-analysis can and cannot be used for the purposes of fiction; but this apparent contradiction is instantly resolved by a consideration of the manner of treatment. Briefly we may assume that, according to precedent, a true form of self-expression must bear the impress of spontaneity, and hence that a novelist’s learning is comparatively valueless to him until it has been so assimilated and transmuted as to become a personal experience and conviction.

This last proposition, however, opens the second phase of our thesis, presenting as it does the obvious deduction that such a theory as that of psycho-analysis properly comprehended and applied may become a powerful influence in the novel of the future. But to decide that we must consider, first, how far the theory is a new one, and, secondly, in what respects it illuminates the problems of normal psychology.

The answer to the first question can be stated quite briefly. The knowledge of the facts upon which Freud’s pathological method was founded are as old as folk-lore. Certain symbols that the modern practitioner recognises as having a peculiar significance in the dreams of his patient are the same symbols that were used not only in Greek and Norse mythologies, but also in the most primitive rites of the savage. What is new is primarily the pathological method by which the unconscious mind may be induced to reveal its dangerous secrets; but from the study of this method there is arising the outline of a new psychology for which we have no true precedent. Glimmerings and faint foreshadowings there may have been, but no sure recognition or understanding; and the answer to our second question involves some inquiry into what this new psychology implies.

Let me begin by saying that psycho-analysis throws very little light on the problem of the survival of the personality, and Dr. Jung, in his address to the Society for Psychical Research last April, refused to admit the probability of any authentic message having been received from departed spirits. We are able, therefore, to confine ourselves strictly to the study of humanity in its normal, that is to say, in its terrestrial, condition, and find our main point of convergence from older psychologies in the intensive observation of that element of our make-up which is now commonly spoken of as “the unconscious.”

A scholarly history designed to collate the main facts of man’s attitude towards and tentative realisations of his own duality would make uncommonly interesting reading; but outside religion and imaginative literature no real attempt was made to characterise the unconscious mind until Freud began to practise a pathology that relied upon the interpretation of dreams as an essential part of the method of diagnosis. In the past the oneirocritic was solely concerned with the significance of the dream in so far as it foretold the future; the Freudian analysis, before Jung restored the balance of factors, was equally single-minded in relating it to the past. And this change of attitude—so startling in its implications that it almost makes a break in the continuity of thought—tended very quickly to crystallise a host of speculations that had awaited a unifying hypothesis. For this method of interpreting the dream, supported as it was by verifiable results in the patient’s nervous, mental, and physical condition, could only signify that we are endowed with a double consciousness, and that under a suitable stimulus the deeper consciousness could be examined and, as I have said, characterised. We are, in short, confronted with the theorem of a dual personality24 in every human being, in which the second person has peculiar and essential functions, both in connection with our sanity and with our physical well-being. What precisely is the scope of these functions we are not yet in a position to say, but we can formulate with reasonable certainty various characteristic activities, tendencies and modes of expression, common to this second personality, that are of the greatest importance to modern psychology.

We must, for example, face the deduction that the unconscious can suffer from a queer and hitherto unrecognised form of ill-health. A sudden fright, for instance, more particularly in childhood, has apparently the effect of breaking the liaison in this one particular relation between the conscious and the unconscious minds. The shock itself, whatever it may be, is not remembered by the conscious mind, and this failure of contact between the unconscious and objective reality seems to produce a condition comparable to nervous worry. Speaking figuratively, one may say that the second personality becomes the victim of a growing obsession, and begins to concentrate its efforts more and more upon signalling its message of distress. And surely the strangest of all the strange facts that have recently been described concerning this amazing partnership of ours is that the second personality cannot communicate with the first except in the language of symbol. The means by which that vital message can be transmitted is, generally, in the first instance by a dream. But this dream does not picture the actual circumstances of the original shock, but seeks to describe it by a method that Dr. Maurice Nicoll has compared to that of the political cartoon. Night after night the message of distress is delivered with diligent ingenuity in a picture language the images of which are frequently taken from casual and unimportant experiences of the dreamer’s waking life, such experiences being presented in the form of an allegory which, rightly interpreted, has a bearing on the urgent cause of distress. When this mode of communication fails, more drastic steps are taken and the physical actions of the body may be influenced in the form of a mania. A youth or a young woman shocked by a sudden sexual experience or revelation to the point of conscious forgetfulness of the incident in question may develop a mania for the continued cleansing of the hands—again, be it noted, the message being conveyed by a symbol. Or the effect may be the development of a phobia that in extreme cases may cause the death of the patient.

Now, the points of immediate interest in this amazing process are, firstly, what may be called the anxiety of the unconscious to communicate its distress; and, secondly, the inability to convey its message by any means other than that of symbol. From the former observation it may perhaps be inferred, inter alia, that it is vital to the functions of the unconscious that it should have universal touch with the objective realities of its partner; from the second, that the existence of a trauma causing a breach between the two minds is of such a nature that direct communication becomes impossible along that particular circuit. For, although it is true that the majority of dreams emerge in this form, they also contain now and then plain statements that solve a perplexity; and it is difficult to understand why in cases of such vital urgency, an image of the conditions responsible for the original trauma should not be directly presented, unless there is some nervous dissociation—it may be an actual physical displacement or temporary rearrangement of cell tissue—producing a restricted amnesia in the conscious mind.

Proceeding now with the characterisation of the unconscious, we come to that aspect of it which has above all others tickled and excited the popular imagination. In this aspect the unconscious figures as the crouching beast of desire, the primitive immoral instigator of all the animal passions, a thing of wonderful abilities and capable of amazing physical dexterities, but before all else unethical and uncivilised. But sorry as I am to destroy so romantic and intriguing a creation, I must admit that Dr. Jung’s researches do not uphold this view of the unconscious as a universal type. It is, indeed, well established in the mythologies and appears as the serpent, a favourite symbol, in the second chapter of Genesis; but the individual may at once put away the fear, or the hope, that he himself is harbouring so fearful a beast. For, if we may argue from those abnormal instances that furnish the bolder illustrations of tendency, we have excellent grounds for following Jung in the assumption that the unconscious is the complement of the conscious. Is a man brutal, then he is suppressing the urgency to gentleness that wells up—an uncertain and impeded flow, no doubt—from the depths of his being; and we remember the callous murderer exhibiting a tender solicitude for some feeble animal. Is he a miser, he is occasionally tortured by promptings to an absurd generosity. Is he a loose-liver, he suffers from an unappeasable longing after chastity. The saint is tempted by his unconscious being to sin: the sinner to renounce the devil and all his works. In short, the character of the unconscious is as various as the character of man; although in this civilised world of ours, in which the dominant restrictions of society are in the direction of sex and decency, we are naturally inclined towards a generalisation that presents the unconscious as a creature of immodesty and lust....

But it is unnecessary for the purposes of this article that I should elaborate any further the larger inferences of the psycho-analysts with regard to the personal traits, influences, and functions of this astonishing partner of ours. All that I wish to demonstrate is that such a partner almost certainly exists and has an immense influence upon our impulses, our thoughts, and our actions. And the critical question we have to face is whether the agency of the unconscious, recognised now both by the philosophers and the psychologists, can possibly be kept out of the novel. Personally, I believe that neither the distaste of the reviewer nor that more influential factor the distaste of the public will avail to bar the conclusions of psycho-analysis from the fiction of the future. We are coming inevitably to a new test in our judgments upon human action and thought, a test that has been proved to be valid by many thousands of well-authenticated experiments. I am willing to admit that through all the ages genius has anticipated laboratory and clinical methods, and that the basis of the psycho-analytical theory was firmly established in literature before Freud applied it as a pathological method. But once such a theory as this is established—a probability one can hardly escape—how can any serious novelist afford to neglect the illumination it throws upon the subtle problems of human impulse? Is it not already tending to become a touchstone of the author’s powers of observation and understanding, helping us to evaluate the intellectual productions of the writer, whether realist or romantic, who relies upon the evidence of his eyes and ears rather than upon his personal emotions and experience?

I am aware that such a postulate as this contradicts in some respects certain implications I have previously made. But it must be remembered that while the novelist’s best material undoubtedly comes from his personal contacts, almost infinitely extended by his powers of entering with an emotional sympathy into the experiences of other lives either presented or recounted, he cannot entirely neglect the precedents afforded by learning. Such precedents may only serve him as a test and a formula for correction, but should he overlook them altogether he will be liable to fall into the error of regarding his personal equation as a universal standard and generalise from the atypical.

And, finally, I would submit that we are at this moment passing through a new phase of evolution that must have a characteristic effect on the fiction of the future—if the form of the novel survives the change. We may study the first evidences of this strange partnership of ours in the lower animals. In the wild what we call the unconscious appears to be the single control. It represents the genius of instinct, swift, feral, and unethical. In animals, such as the dog and the horse, age-long companions of man, we can trace the incipient rivalry of what in ourselves we regard as the representative consciousness. The horse and the dog have already learnt the meaning of conscious inhibition. At our command they can deny the spontaneous impulses of their natural desire. In civilised man that ability has been cultivated until he is able to present to the world and himself so complete an entity that we and he regard it as his proper expression. But, meanwhile, we cannot now doubt that his hidden partner has evolved with him. The impulses of the unconscious are no longer simply feral and animal. We are, a trifle unwillingly, coming to the conclusion that it is this other shadowed self that is responsible for all that is best and most permanent in literature. It is being associated with genius on the one hand, and on the other with the highest dexterity in games of skill. And is it not possible that with our growing realisation of this co-operation the “education of the subconscious”—as Varisco, the Italian philosopher, calls it—will proceed ever more rapidly? And to what end, unless it be that in the strange process of our earthly evolution this artificial shell of the conscious will be gradually broken and absorbed to reveal the single and relatively perfect individual that has been so steadily developing underground?

Notes

22 The novels of Feodor Dostoevsky. Vol. X. White Nights and Other Stories. Constance Garnett’s translations. Heinemann.

23 Cf. op. cit., pp. 87, et seq.

24 In using the term “dual personality” I beg an essential question for the sake of a convenient image; but it must not be assumed that what I describe hereafter as a second personality is recognised as such by psychologists. It is possible that the unconscious bears some such relation to the conscious as desire bears to purpose, instinct to reason, or reflexive to deliberative action. But see also in this connection De l’Inconscient au Conscient, by Dr. Gustave Geley, Paris. 1919.