Narcissism and the Literary Libido. Marshall W. Alcorn Jr.
viewed psychoanalysts as scientists, committed to the reality principle and to heroic self-renunciation. He perceived artists, by contrast—and women—as neurotic and highly narcissistic, devoted to the pleasure principle, intuiting mysterious truths which they could not rationally understand. “Kindly nature has given the artist the ability to express his most secret mental impulses, which are hidden even from himself,” he stated in Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood in 1910 (SE 11107). The artist, in Freud’s judgment, creates beauty, but the psychoanalyst analyzes its meaning and “penetrates” it, with all the phallic implications thereof. As much as he admired artists, Freud did not want to give them credit for knowing what they are doing. Moreover, although he always referred to artists as male, he assumed that art itself was essentially female; and he was drawn to the “seductive” nature of art even as he resisted its embrace, lest he lose his masculine analytical power. He wanted to be called a scientist, not an artist.
From the beginning of his career, then, the marriage Freud envisioned between the artist and the analyst was distinctly unequal and patriarchal. For their part, most creative writers have remained wary of psychoanalysis. Franz Kafka, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence were fascinated by psychoanalytic theory and appropriated it, in varying degrees, in their stories, but they all remained skeptical of Freud’s therapeutic claims and declined to be analyzed.
Most artists do not want to be “cured,” fearing that their creativity will be imperiled, and they certainly do not want psychoanalysts to probe their work; they agree with Wordsworth that to dissect is to murder. Vladimir Nabokov’s sardonic reference to Freud as the “Viennese witch doctor” and his contemptuous dismissal of psychoanalysis as black magic are extreme examples of creative writers’ mistrust of psychoanalytic interpretations of literature. “[A]ll my books should be stamped Freudians Keep Out,” Nabokov writes in Bend Sinister (xii). Humbert Humbert speaks for his creator when he observes in Lolita that the difference between the rapist and therapist is but a matter of spacing (147).
Freud never lost faith that psychoanalysis could cast light upon a wide variety of academic subjects. In the short essay “On the Teaching of Psycho-Analysis in Universities” (1919), he maintained that his new science has a role not only in medical schools but also in the “solutions of problems” in art, philosophy, religion, literature, mythology, and history. “The fertilizing effects of psycho-analytic thought on these other disciplines,” Freud wrote enthusiastically, “would certainly contribute greatly towards forging a closer link, in the sense of a universitas literarum, between medical science and the branches of learning which lie within the sphere of philosophy and the arts” (SE 17173). Regrettably, he did not envision in the same essay a cross-fertilization, a desire, that is, for other disciplines to pollinate psychoanalysis.
Elsewhere, though, Freud was willing to acknowledge a more reciprocal relationship between the analyst and the creative writer. He opened his first published essay on literary criticism, “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva” (1907), with the egalitarian statement that “creative writers are valued allies and their evidence is to be highly prized, for they are apt to know a whole host of things between heaven and earth of which our philosophy has not yet let us dream” (SE 98), an allusion to his beloved Hamlet’s affirmation of the mystery of all things. Conceding that literary artists have been, from time immemorial, precursors to scientists, Freud concluded that the “creative writer cannot evade the psychiatrist nor the psychiatrist the creative writer, and the poetic treatment of a psychiatric theme can turn out to be correct without any sacrifice of its beauty” (SE 9:44).
It is in the spirit of this equal partnership between literature and psychoanalysis that New York University Press launches the present series. We intend to publish books that are genuinely interdisciplinary, theoretically sophisticated, and clinically informed. The literary critic’s insights into psychoanalysis are no less valuable than the psychoanalyst’s insights into literature. Gone are the days when psychoanalytic critics assumed that Freud had a master key to unlock the secrets of literature. Instead of reading literature to confirm psychoanalytic theory, many critics are now reading Freud to discover how his understanding of literature shaped the evolution of his theory. In short, the master-slave relationship traditionally implicit in the marriage between the literary critic and the psychoanalyst has given way to a healthier dialogic relationship, in which each learns from and contributes to the other’s discipline.
Indeed, the prevailing ideas of the late twentieth century are strikingly different from those of the late nineteenth century, when literature and psychoanalysis were first allied. In contrast to Freud, who assumed he was discovering absolute truth, we now believe that knowledge, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, is relative and dependent upon cultural contexts. Freud’s classical drive theory, with its mechanistic implications of cathectic energy, has given way to newer relational models such as object relations, self psychology, and interpersonal psychoanalysis, affirming the importance of human interaction. Many early psychoanalytic ideas, such as the death instinct and the phylogenetic transmission of memories, have fallen by the wayside, and Freud’s theorizing on female psychology has been recognized as a reflection of his cultural bias.
Significant developments have also taken place in psychoanalytic literary theory. An extraordinary variety and synthesis of competing approaches have emerged, including post-Freudian, Jungian, Lacanian, Horneyan, feminist, deconstructive, psycholinguistic, and reader response. Interest in psychoanalytic literary criticism is at an all-time high, not just in the handful of journals devoted to psychological criticism, but in dozens of mainstream journals that have traditionally avoided psychological approaches to literature. Scholars are working on identity theory, narcissism, gender theory, mourning and loss, and creativity. Additionally, they are investigating new areas, such as composition theory and pedagogy, and exploring the roles of resistance, transference, and counter transference in the classroom.
“In the end we depend / On the creatures we made,” Freud observed at the close of his life (Letters, 425), quoting from Goethe’s Faust; and in the end psychoanalytic literary criticism depends on the scholars who continue to shape it. All serious scholarship is an act of love and devotion, and for many of the authors in this series, including myself, psychoanalytic literary criticism has become a consuming passion, in some cases a lifelong one. Like other passions, there is an element of idealization here. For despite our criticisms of Freud, we stand in awe of his achievements; and even as we recognize the limitations of any single approach to literature, we find that psychoanalysis has profoundly illuminated the human condition and inspired countless artists. In the words of the fictional “Freud” in D. M. Thomas’s extraordinary novel The White Hotel (1981), “Long may poetry and psychoanalysis continue to highlight, from their different perspectives, the human face in all its nobility and sorrow” (143n.).
Jeffrey Berman
Professor of English
State University of New York at Albany
Works Cited
Freud, Sigmund. The Letters of Sigmund Freud. Ed. Ernst Freud. Trans. Tania and James Stern. New York: Basic Books, 1975.
———. The Origins of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, and Ernst Kris. Trans. Eric Mosbacher and James Strachey. New York:Basic Books, 1954; rpt. 1977.
———. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. 24 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Introduction to Bend Sinister. New York: McGraw Hill, 1974.
———. Lolita. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1959.
Thomas, D. M. The White Hotel. New York: Viking, 1981.
Acknowledgments
No argument is ever fully finished, and this book is no exception. There is still more to be said, more support to give to claims, more examples needed