A Critical Fantasy or Fugue

All I am concerned with is a little flower, some horses, and two wounded boys, both of whom died. These symbolic elements are the projections of unconscious defenses against infantile fixations in Franz Kafka and William Shakespeare. My discussion will show that the highest function of art is not merely to conceal art, but also to conceal the artist—to protect and defend him from such inner self-knowledge as would impair or destroy his capacity to create. Between the conscious ego of the artist and his unconscious past there intervenes a protective layer of illusion, a land of mist and snow, through whose refractive mechanism we sense the pro-founder depths of the artist's inward identity. To Dr. Edmund Bergler we owe this modification of the older Freudian concept that the artist projected his depth complex immediately or his rationalization of this complex. We now believe the poem or story contains the depth only as it is disguised, transposed, or otherwise concealed by an unconscious defense against the nuclear complex within the unconscious itself.

I propose to illustrate this new hypothesis in a discussion of Shakespeare's “Venus and Adonis” and Kafka's “A Country Doctor.” Neither work is the greatest of the artist, but each suggests the principal function of art as a propitiation for unconscious guilt, an invitation for the reader to share this guilt, and the excellence of the unconscious defense against the original trauma, always to be considered oral in nature. Dr. Bergler suggests that the artist makes the mother unnecessary by creating a world of words in place of her milk, that he achieves an autarchic reality in this way for the undisputed possession he has been forced to surrender, and, in short, that any interference with this positive breast fixation results in artistic sterility. I am especially interested in the similarity of substitute complexes offered