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Literary criticism is at present faced with a dilemma: both the personality of the writer, and his artistic product are not explainable without the application of psychoanalytic concepts. This fact, however, is still taboo. (1) The result is that new subterfuges must be sought for and found. The latest of these fashions involves the supposed discovery that a specific writer is at bottom a frustrated actor. The formula has been recently applied to both Dickens and Poe. Further discoveries are in store.
This misconception is based on complete misunderstanding of both the psychology of the writer and the psychology of the actor.
What is the “material” with which the writer works? Reduced to the simplest common denominator, one can state that an “idea” occurs “from nowhere” (unconscious) which is subjected to prolonged elaboration in the forming of the plot. This done, the writer starts to write. This sequence of events has a genetic basis in which “imagination” corresponds to voyeurism, the act of writing down to an exhibitionistic defense. In the inner lawbook of the writer, exhibitionism is the “lesser crime.” (2) Hence a voyeuristic-exhibitionistic chain reaction is set in motion.
The actor elaborates on the identical material in a completely different way. (3) In the analysis of a dozen actors, I found with astonishing regularity recollections of terrifying peeping experiences, so full of terror that the real experience had been short-changed into a game or play. By making the real into the unreal, fear was alleviated. Later in life, in the sublimation of acting, passively experienced infantile voyeuristic terror was short-changed into an active exhibitionistic defense via the “unconscious repetition