Freud and literature

The Psychoanalytical theory of Freud has had a great effect upon literature. Yet the relationship is reciprocal, and
the effect of Freud upon literature has been no greater than the effect of literature upon Freud. When on the
occasion of the celebration of his seventieth birthday, Freud was greeted as the discoverer of the unconscious, he
corrected the speaker and disclaimed the title. The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious,
he said. What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.

There are some philosophers before Freud who clearly anticipate many of Freuds ideas. These are Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche. In fact, the particular literary influence on Freud is not the question here. The question here is to get
the Spirit of the time [Zeitgeist]. And the time is the Romanticist literature of earlier 19th century. The literature of
this period is full of Psychological insights and passionately devoted to a research into the self.

While showing the connection between Freud and this Romanticist tradition, it is difficult to decide where to begin
with. But it might be apt to start, as far back as 1762, with Diderots Rameaus Nephew. Many literary critics and
philosophers praised this brilliant little work for its peculiar importance. Goethe, Marx, Hegel, Shaw, and Freud
himself read it with great pleasure and full agreement.

There are two characters in Rameaus Nephew Diderot himself and a nephew of the famous composer Rameau.
The junior Rameau is a despised, outcast, shameless fellow who breaks down all the normal social values. He is a
protagonist of the piece. As for Diderot, he is reasonable, decent, and dull. He is the deuteragonist of the piece.
However, it is quite clear that author doesnt dislike his Rameau and does not mean us to dislike him. Rameau is
presented as lustful and greedy, arrogant and wrong, like a child. And Diderot seems to be giving the fellow a kind
of superiority over himself. Rameau represents the elements which lie beneath the reasonable decorum of social
life. These elements are dangerous but wholly necessary. Here Rameau represents Freuds id and Diderot Freuds
ego.

Nevertheless it is of course true that Freuds influence on literature has been very great. If we look for a writer who
shows the maximum Freudian influence, Proust would come to mind as readily as anyone else. The very title of his
novel in French suggests an enterprise of psychoanalysis the investigation of sleep, of sexual deviation, the ways
of free association. The other writer who was influenced by Freud is T.S. Eliot who in his The Waste Land presents
the psychoanalytic interpretation of a dream. The names of the creative writers who have been more or less
Freudian in tone or assumption would of course be large in number. Only a relatively small number, however, have
made serious use of Freudian ideas. Kafka has explored the Freudian conception of guilt and punishment, of the
dreams, and of the fear of the father. Thomas Mann has been influenced by Freudian anthropology finding a special
charm in the theories of myths and magical practices. James Joyce has his interest in the numerous states of
receding consciousness.