You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
On the basis of clinical evidence we can suppose that para-noiaes are endowed with a fixation at the stage of narcissim, and we can assert that the amount of regression characteristic of paranoia is indicated by the length of the step back from sublimated homosexuality to narcissism.
Hawthorne's “The Artist of the Beautiful” offers almost a clinical explanation of the paranoiac symptoms which characterize an individual's struggle to sublimate homosexual predispositions. The action of the story clearly projects the inability of Owen Warland (here the surname suggests the existence of a psychic conflict) to establish an object-cathexsis during a period of early manhood when the outer world (society) expects a normal consummation of such an attainment. As Hawthorne develops the implications of this inward tension, the hero is exposed to a series of ego-deflating experiences, each of which precipitates a libidinal regression to a point of fixation in early childhood. On each occasion, however, Warland eventually attains control over his pregenital impulses, for his instincts redirect the intransigent ego back into artistic activity. But, ironically, in this deflection of the ego from sexual gratification, he still does not progress beyond the Oedipal stage of psychosexual maturity; the bizarre work of art, which supposedly symbolizes his release from castration anxieties, is a displacement image; as in a dream, it is a distorted form of his unconscious homosexual desires.
In an extraordinary anticipation of Freudian analytical methods, Hawthorne digresses from the present action of the