THE INFANTILE LOVE LIFE OF THE AUTHOR AND ITS SUBLIMATIONS
I
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 own. As he puts it, it is
absurd to imagine that sex enters suddenly at the age of puberty just
as the devils in the New Testament were supposed to enter the swine.
Freud regards the child's sucking of its thumb as a manifestation of
infantile sexuality. In his _Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex_
he studies the sexual life of the child. This theory which met with
much opposition is beginning to be accepted. The studies of Moll,
Havelock Ellis, and Helgemuth confirm Freud's views.
The value of the theory is in this: It shows that the nature of our
later emotional and especially our love life is far more dependent upon
the nature, aberrations, inhibitions, sublimations, developments and
transformations of our infantile sex life than we ever in our wildest
dreams imagined it to be. Here in childhood are laid the seeds of our
future emotional life. Early repression or seduction or bad training
influences our later lives. These facts are recognised by many trained
parents who refuse to over-fondle their children or to do anything
that may awaken a sexual activity too prematurely.
Freud's idea is of value to the literary critic for it shows that the
characteristics of an author's work may be traced back to his infantile
sex life. As a rule we know little about the lives of literary men
when they were children, but we can often judge what the infantile sex
life must have been from the traits appearing in the writers' literary
performances.
Inversion or homosexuality can be traced to the child's love life. As
infants we are bi-sexual in our pre-dispositions. Children display
sentimental friendships for members of their own sex, as we all know.
Even in later life in each sex there are remnants of the other stunted
sex, breasts on the man and hairy faces on women. Freud has given us
a very interesting but by no means full explanation of the origin of
inversion. The abnormal development is favoured by the disappearance
of a strong father in early childhood, and by the overattachment to
the mother at the same or earlier time. The love for the mother is
soon repressed and the boy identifies himself with her and loves other
boys like himself. He returns to that self-love which is a second
stage after auto-eroticism in the infant, and is known as narcissism.
He wishes to love those boys as his mother has loved him. He may like
women but he transfers the excitation evoked by them to a male object,
for they remind him of his mother and he flees from them in order to
be faithful to her. He repeats through life the mechanism by which he
became an invert.
The fact then is that homosexualism is an abnormal development from the
infant's love life. It is in the germ in all normal people, especially
in those capable of intense friendships. It is naturally abhorrent to
us when it vents itself in any abnormal relations.
The sublimated homosexualism which we find in literature is that which
gives way to outbursts of friendly devotion, and intense and passionate
grief at the loss of a friend; it is at the root of the idea that a
man should lay his life down for his friend. Then there is the real
inversion which the world rightly stamps as immoral.
A few examples of literature where the homosexualism of the author's
unconscious is present are Shakespeare's _Sonnets_, Tennyson's _In
Memoriam_ and Whitman's _Calamus_. These works show what capacities
their authors had for friendship. It is the habit of some intellectual
homosexuals to try to interpret these works as indicative of
homosexual practices, as an excuse and consolation to them in their
own unfortunate condition. Whitman wrote to John Addington Symonds in
response to an enquiry about the _Calamus_ poems that he would prefer
never to have written them if they gave any one the inference that he
either practised or tolerated homosexualism.
Two poets of recent years who, we know, practised homosexualism, each
of whom also served jail terms, were Paul Verlaine and Oscar Wilde.
There were critics who saw that certain passages in Wilde's novel
_The Picture of Dorian Gray_, published about five years before he
went to jail, pointed to the homosexual proclivities of the author.
His curious interpretation of Shakespeare's sonnets also shows these.
It is possible that some of the love poems written by Verlaine and
which are supposed to be addressed to women were really written to
Arthur Rimbaud, the poet he loved. This is a practice indulged in by
homosexual poets to avoid suspicion.
The classic stories of ideal friendship are those of David and
Jonathan, and Damon and Pythias; the most widely known essays in
ancient literature discussing homosexual love as a legitimate pursuit
are in the dialogues on love by Plutarch and by Plato. Theocritus and
the _Greek Anthology_ authors refer to homosexual love.
The only interest the subject has for the psychoanalytic critic of
literature is in tracing the connection between the works of authors
where homosexual remnants in the form of extreme friendships are
present and their infantile sex life.
Freud's monograph on Leonardo da Vinci is the best study we have of a
homosexual artist.
It appears then that the bisexual tendency which is in infancy in all
of us, in later life may lead, where it does not become absolutely
normal, to actual homosexuality, or to a sublimation of this early
inverse tendency; one of the manifestations of this sublimation being
literary products in which friendship is exalted.
II
There are other perverts whose vices in later life can be traced to the
infantile sex life. These are sadists, masochists, exhibitionists and
voyeurs. The child's sex life takes place through the pleasures which
it creates for itself in the erogenous zones, which are sensitive areas
in any part of the body. It gratifies itself mainly on its own body;
it is autoerotic. But the sexual life soon derives pleasure through
other persons as sexual objects. There are also components or partial
impulses, which are: for causing cruelty to others (sadistic), for
deriving pleasure from pain to itself (masochistic), for showing itself
shamelessly (exhibitionistic), and for peeping at others in nude state
(the voyeur's instinct). As a rule these impulses are sublimated very
early, but if they persist the perversions govern the individuals for
the rest of their lives. Where they are sublimated we have as a result
some of the most essential features of our modern cultural institutions.
The child who continued shameless for a few years may become very vain,
and as an author write indecent literature. The child who was cruel
may later in life love contests and competitions, and write books
where cruel scenes or virulent abuse of people abound. The infant
who derived pleasure from pain inflicted on it may be interested in
solving intricate problems that as a man annoy him with a demand for
solution, and he will torture himself in solving them. He also may be a
conformist and find pleasure in crucifying himself upon the rack of the
church and the state and the home; or become a martyr for an idea. As a
writer he would depict martyrs or indulge in self-commiseration.
Literature shows sublimations of these impulses and also gives
evidences of the authors' perverse tendencies where these impulses have
not been sublimated; they may contrive to exist or be buried in the
unconscious.
There are many literary men who have been perverse in their tendencies
in later life without knowing it. Often the man who merely thinks he
is fighting Puritanism in art when he shows a tendency to describe the
nude only, or to describe people in compromising positions, is both an
exhibitionist and voyeur. These impulses have been suppressed in him
by civilisation and he finds an outlet for his unconscious by his art.
Such literature is not so much immoral as indecent. A literary man may
become an exhibitionist in his work so as to give play to an impulse
he cannot otherwise gratify. A writer may write exhibitionistic books
for money or to attract attention or for fun, but his work shows that
psychologically he has never completely suppressed the exhibitionistic
or peeping tendencies of his childhood. Like the child he is without
shame. The feature of the cheap and lascivious literature that is
written merely to pander to certain tastes is just in these traits.
But the traits of the exhibitionist and voyeur are found more or less
in much of the good literature of the world. In the cases of works,
however, like the Arabian Nights, Rabelais, Chaucer, the novels of
Sterne, Fielding and many others where great genius, intellect and
honesty are displayed, the liberal minded critic is willing to smile
and pass over these exhibitionistic blemishes. In the cases of the
older works these are due to the general looseness in speech of the
times.
The application of psychoanalytic methods puts then in a new light much
of the so-called immoral literature. In much of the indecent comic
literature, like the Restoration dramatists, Balzac's _Droll Tales_,
Boccaccio's _Decameron_ and La Fontaine's Tales, the object is to
arouse laughter by making a person accidentally exhibit himself. The
author still finds an outlet for his repressed exhibitionism. There is
a distinction between this literature and the "immoral" literature of
a writer like Ibsen, who merely differs with the current morality and
questions it, and who therefore seems immoral to the conventional man.
Again there is a distinction between exhibitionism in literature and
real immoral literature, where an author tries, for example, to defend
sexual crimes like rape or seduction.
Exhibitionism then as we find it in literary men points to infantile
practices that were never completely suppressed and are finding an
outlet. It is true, other motives may enter into the work. There may be
a disgust on the part of the writer at his fellowmen's hypocritical and
prudish standards of modesty and shame, and he may write to counteract
these. But the exhibitionism of writers like Apuleius, Petronius,
Gautier or Zola does not interfere, nay, sometimes enhances the
artistic value of their works.
Another form of sublimation of exhibitionistic traits leads to works
in which the author is always boasting or showing off, directly or
indirectly. Sometimes the sublimation process is not complete and we
have examples of the exhibitionistic traits alongside of the egotism.
The reader will at once think of Montaigne's _Essays_ and Rousseau's
_Confessions_, two of the greatest works in the world's literature.
Among ancients two of the vainest men were Cicero and Cæsar, whose
writings show that exhibitionistic traits of their infancy were strong.
We here may consider the effects of infantile sexual investigation.
Freud says its activity labours with the desire for looking, though
it cannot be added to the elementary components of the impulses. Many
readers may refuse to follow Freud here, where he concludes that
the great desire for knowledge in later life may be traced to this
infantile sexual curiosity. But that there must be some connection
cannot be doubted. A child who has never displayed any curiosity as to
where it came from must be one in whom the desire for knowledge has
not been and probably never will be strongly developed. The child is
the father of the student man. Freud asserts in his study of Leonardo
da Vinci that there are three sublimations in later life of this
curiosity, the most important and rarest being where a pure scientific
investigation replaces the sexual activity and is not occupied with
sexual themes. Thus he explains the scientific work of Leonardo and his
chaste life.
III
Let us now take up the other two partial impulses, sadism and
masochism, noted by Freud, and see their effect on the literary work of
a man in later life.
"The repression of the sadistic impulse," says Dr. Brink, "produces
not its annihilation but merely its transfer from consciousness to
unconsciousness. And there, withheld from the neutralising influence
of conscious reasoning, the impulse and the phantasies derived from
it are not only preserved without deterioration but may even grow in
vigour and intensity. Thus, despite the fact that in many instances the
individual's conscious life is apparently singularly irreproachable,
nevertheless this life is lived coincidently with an undercurrent of
impulses of anger, hate, hostility and revenge and their corresponding
phantasies" (_Morbid Fears_, page 291).
This would account for the tales of horror we find in Poe, Kipling
and Jack London. To-day we do not always assault or kill our enemies.
Literary men do so by depicting scenes in literature where this is
done. Jack London describes fist fights in which he is always defeating
his enemies. It is said that in real life he boasted of his abilities
as a fighter.
Pfister, in his _Psychoanalytic Method_, formulates a law from an
earlier work of his, as follows: "The repressed hate of certain
individuals forms phantasies out of suitable contents of experiences,
either actual or imaginary, according to the laws of the dream-work,
by which procedure it creates for itself imaginary gratification.
This gratification of complex comes about through the mechanism of a
disguised wish, directed towards the injury of the hated person, being
represented in the content of the waking dream as realised."
This explains the literature of hatred and how authors come to put
their enemies in books and poems. Such works are traceable to the sex
sadistic instincts of childhood. We find sadism in books reeking with
curses. Ovid's _Ibis_, directed against the person who was to blame for
his exile, is a good example; it is one of the most bitter invectives
in literature. We also understand now the significance of the imaginary
punishments inflicted by an author upon his enemies. The severe
chastisement inflicted by Dante in his _Inferno_ upon his enemies
represents the poet's wishes carried out in his imagination to gratify
him for his inability to fulfil his repressed hatred.
Literature abounds in hostile and satirical portrayals of the author's
enemies. In ancient Greece we have many examples, the best known
probably being the caricature of Socrates by Aristophanes, in the
_Clouds_.
Elizabethan literature, especially the drama, gives us portrayals of
fellow authors. Ben Jonson attacked the dramatists Marston and Decker
in _The Poetaster_ (1601), and they retaliated in _Satiromastix_. The
most familiar example in English literature of an abuse of enemies is
Pope's _Dunciad_. Then we have Byron's poem "The Sketch" directed at
the maid he considered responsible for his wife's desertion of him, and
Shelley's bitter diatribe "To the Lord Chancellor" against Lord Eldon,
whose decree deprived the poet of his two children. Richard Savage's
poem "The Bastard" against his alleged mother for neglecting him, her
illegitimate son, is not as well known as it used to be. An author who
was past master at the art of lampooning his enemies was Heine, and
his attacks on Count Platen in the _Pictures of Travel_ are among the
most bitter in literature. All these attacks follow one principle; the
author finds an outlet of his repressed hatred, and the desire for
vengeance not being always possible in a physical sense, in modern
times gives rise to phantasies of vindictiveness. The sadistic impulses
of childhood are the sources of such literary works.
Take the portrayal of Thersites in the second book of the _Iliad_. This
notorious character was surely some real person whom the author knew
and despised and on whom he wreaked vengeance by drawing him. He was
some man of Homer's own time, centuries after the Trojan War, and his
type is as common to-day as it was in the days of Homer. The poet no
doubt felt a grievance against some prattler and nonentity he knew, and
pilloried the man for posterity; the personal note appears throughout
the whole passage. Thersites is described as ill-favoured beyond all
men, bandy-legged, lame, round-shouldered, largely bald. He tries to
rebuke his betters, and Odysseus admonishes him severely, calling him
most base of the Greeks, telling him not to have the names of kings in
his mouth and threatening to strip and beat him. Thersites received a
welt on the back and sat down, crying. Then notice how Homer puts his
personal feelings still more into the mouth of the Greek who laughed
and said that Odysseus had done many great deeds but this is the best
he had done in that he had stayed this prating railer. Homer thus
punished some man he did not like. It is rather odd that those who
maintain the theory of the impersonality of the epic poem do not apply
a little knowledge of human nature in studying literature, as this is
often of more value than scholarship.
Lists may be compiled of nineteenth century novels, where the authors
drew as villains their enemies. Often these are fellow authors.
Dostoievsky put Turgenev into _The Possessed_ in an unamiable light,
under the character Karmazinoff. George Sand introduced lovers of hers
with whom she had parted in her novels, and Chopin and De Musset have
been drawn by her for us. Balzac righted his grievance against his
critic Jules Janin by putting him in the _Young Provincial in Paris_.
The motive of vengeance figures considerably in literature, though
at times a malevolent mischievous instinct drives the author on, as
when Dickens drew Leigh Hunt under the character of Harold Skimpole in
_Bleak House_. Sadistic instincts are of course primitive, and where in
ancient times a man might have put his enemy out of existence, to-day
he can kill him only in imagination. The man does not have to be a
personal enemy, but may be some character in real life who represents
an idea or follows a course of conduct that the author thinks
reprehensible. Demosthenes, Cicero, Milton, Swift and the author of the
Junius letters knew how to castigate their enemies. Hugo's attacks on
Napoleon in his _Chatiments_ and _Napoleon the Little_ are among the
most bitter in literature.
An excellent analysis of hatred is found in Hazlitt's _Pleasure
of Hating_, where he shows hatred is a real instinct and needs
satisfaction--it is a remnant of savage days. Hazlitt's attack on
Gifford presents many opportunities for the study of the psychology of
hatred.
There are other cases of sublimated sadism in practically all
literature where pain is described. The author displays a craving to
see people suffer even where he sympathises with them and he satisfies
that craving by drawing them in their agonies. Take Flaubert's keen
interest in describing the torture and sufferings physically inflicted
on Salammbo's lover Matho. There is hardly anything more sadistic in
literature than the conclusion of _Salammbo_.
Sadism is often sublimated into interest in contests. One of the most
ancient examples we have of such sublimation is in Pindar's _Odes_,
where contests in Greek games are described and the victors praised.
We have sadism, in fact, in all tales of competition where some one is
vanquished.
The sadistic trait is the source of the glee with which people watch
some one in a moving picture being beaten or hurt. It is the cause of
the pleasure and interest we find in reading of executions, battles and
physical suffering. There is nothing strange in tracing all this to
the delight we had as children in torturing animals. This is a partial
sexual impulse and is sublimated in most of us in later life and finds
expression in our literature.
It is held that masochism is usually found side by side with sadism.
Literature is also rich in sublimated masochism. Many authors are
apparently only happy in their woe. They find delight in torturing
themselves and in recounting their sufferings. Many of them were not as
unhappy as they persuaded us to believe. The whole school of woe that
had its origin in Rousseau and that was prominent in the early decades
of the nineteenth century was full of sublimated masochism. Hence it
has been called insincere. Byron and Chateaubriand were regarded,
though not justly, as affecting woes they never really felt. Some of
the sonneteers who imitated the Italians before and even during the
Elizabethan period wrote about woes they never felt. This is, however,
not the usual thing, and the greatest Elizabethan sonneteers like
Shakespeare, Spenser and Sidney described real troubles.
Another phase of sublimated masochism is the attempt to torture one's
self to solve puzzles and problems, and vex one's self more for the
sheer delight in unravelling difficult situations than for the pursuit
of knowledge. Note how children like to solve puzzles in newspapers.
Poe, who had the sadistic instinct in sublimation, also had the
masochistic impulse. We are familiar with his interest in reading
cryptograms and with his paper on the subject. We remember his essays
on studying persons' characters from their autographs. His stories of
ratiocination like the _Gold Bug_, the _Murder in the Rue Morgue_, the
_Purloined Letter_ are examples of sublimated masochism. His Dupin, the
detective, is an example of a man who likes to annoy himself. Sherlock
Holmes is the best known modern example. Indeed the interest in tales
of mystery and detective stories shows the power of the masochistic
instinct in human nature.
Still another example of sublimated masochism is found in stories and
plays where the idea of self sacrifice and penance figures. Dante's
_Purgatorio_ is a good illustration of the author's masochistic
tendencies as the _Inferno_ is of his sadism. He who tortures himself
whether to follow the laws of society or to fight them is masochistic.
Hence the tales of martyrs and heroes and idealists all betray the
sublimated masochistic impulse. Both the rebel and the conformist,
because they embrace torture, one might say almost willingly (though
they really cannot help it), are masochistic. All literature
describing these types show that the author has a keen interest in
this satisfaction in one's suffering, and are the results, if Freud is
right, of the author's infantile delight to suffer, which became later
sublimated.
Rousseau describes the pleasure he received from beatings, and this
masochism is seen in his _Confessions_, where he tells us of his woes
with apparent enjoyment in them.
All this is significant. Freud says: "Children who are distinguished
for evincing special cruelty to animals and playmates may justly be
suspected of intensive and premature sexual activity in the erogenous
zones; and in a simultaneous prematurity of all sexual impulses, the
erogenous sexual activity surely seems to be primary. The absence of
the barrier of sympathy carries with it the danger that the connections
between cruelty and erogenous impulses formed in childhood cannot be
broken in later life." (_Three Contributions_--Page 54.)
There is then a connection between the sadism and masochism of early
infancy which is related to sex, and the sublimations in art of those
impulses. People who can hate fiercely or are vindictive or have a
tendency towards cruelty or who like to torture themselves are as a
rule of strong sex impulses.
IV
There are other phases of infantile sexual life that rule a person
for life. One of these is that stage between the first period of the
child's first sex life known as autoeroticism when it finds pleasure
from its own body, and the period when it selects an object to love
apart from itself. This stage is called narcissism because then the
child loves itself. Many people never grow out of this; we are all
more or less narcisstic. This narcissism is the basis of egoism in
literature and is no doubt related to extreme individualism. Stirner,
Nietzsche, and Stendhal, who rank intellectually among the greatest
writers the world has had, are largely narcisstic.
Walt Whitman would form a good subject for study of the manner in
which infantile narcisstic sex life is sublimated in later life into
individualism.
The following are passages from the _Song of Myself_, showing that the
narcisstic infantile life of Whitman was sublimated into good poetry
and philosophy:
"While they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself.
Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty
and clean,
Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be
less familiar than the rest....
Having pried through the strata, analysed to a hair, counsel'd with
doctors and calculated close,
I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones....
Divine am I, inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am
touch'd from,
The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,
The head more than churches, bibles and all creeds.
If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of
my body, or any part of it,
Translucent mould of me it shall be you!...
I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious."
His early narcissism did not lead him into selfishness but taught him
self-respect.
He says in the _Song of Myself_:
"I am an acme of things accomplished and an encloser of things to
be ...
I chant the chant of dilation or pride;
We have had ducking and deprecating about enough...."
In _From Blue Ontario's Shore_, he writes:
"It is not the earth, it is not America who is so great,
It is I who am great or to be great, it is you up there or any one....
Underneath all, individuals,
I swear nothing is good to me now that ignores individuals,
The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one
single individual--namely to You....
I will confront these shows of the day and night,
I will know if I am to be less than they....
I will see if I have no meaning, while the houses and ships have
meaning."
The following lines from _I Sing the Body Electric_ is another example:
"O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and
women, nor the likes of the parts of you;
I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of
the soul and that they are the soul.
I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and
that they are my poems...."
Where Whitman shows sublimations of these infantile phases he deduces
important and profound views of life to make us happier. He questions
whether the giving up of some of the heritages we surrendered to
cultural demands has not made us also part with some valuable emotions
and whether we have not denied ourselves rights we ought to resume. He
makes egoism respectable, and deduces individualism from it.
V
I also wish to mention that sexual aberration, in which an object unfit
for the sexual aim is substituted for the normal one, and is known as
fetichism. We need not go into the causes of it, but psychoanalysis
has shown that smell plays a part. We often find poets celebrating
the eyebrows, the gloves, and other objects connected with the women
they love. Though a certain amount of fetichism is normal in love,
literature gives us instances where it amounts to an aberrated passion
in the author. There is much fetichism in Gautier's stories, where he
dwells on the fetichistic characteristics of his heroes in whom he
describes himself. Then those poems where the sparrows and dogs of the
beloved are described as if the author were in love with them because
of their associations, those tales where too much attention is given to
the dress of the heroines, all have fetichistic traces.
A phase of sex life in the child that is significant for the future
is the sublimation that occurs in the sexual latency period between
the third and fifth year, when the sentiments of shame, loathing
and morality appear. These are reaction formations to the perverse
tendencies of infancy. They are brought about at the cost of the
infantile sexuality itself. These sublimations take place in the
beginning in this latency period, and if they do not occur there is
an abnormal development and the result is the latter perversions of
life. When we say a man has no moral sense, we mean not only that he
does not know the difference between right and wrong but that he is not
disgusted or shamed at sexual conduct that is held in abhorrence by
most people. Hence those authors who have this indifference to perverse
moral conduct in their work, never as children in the latency period
developed shame or disgust. All this is again evidence of the influence
of the sublimations in childhood upon later literary work and view
points. Girls as a rule develop this sense of morality earlier than
boys, and this no doubt accounts to some extent for the prudishness of
most women writers. The development is greater and we therefore find no
women Rabelais in literature.
It is no exaggeration then to say that the infantile sex life governs
the psychology of the future writer and the nature and tendency of his
work.