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Once asked about his credo, Conrad Aiken replied: “How extraordinarily little I know about myself.”1 His answer implies curiosity not only about the complexities of his own being but also about the mystery of life as a whole. This curiosity is responsible for Aiken's extraordinary interest in Freudian psychology as an instrument capable of revealing the deeply hidden, mysterious, secret self. “Almost alone in his generation,” the psychiatrist Henry A. Murray has written, “Aiken proved equal to the peril. He allowed the Freudian dragon to swallow him, and then, after a sufficient sojourn in its maw, cut his way out to a new freedom. When he emerged he was stocked with the lore of psychoanalysis but neither subjugated nor impeded by it. Aiken and Freud were, in a profound sense, fellow-spirits.…”2
One of Freud's principal theories — that the creation of a work of art is a revelation of the artist's hidden self, a daydream release of hidden desires and repressed erotic complexes — has had its obvious effect on Aiken's poetry and prose. Aiken has also extrapolated from the work of Freud a theory of literary criticism. Because historical, biographical, and aesthetic criticism cannot explain the cause of art, the critic may need to employ the techniques of the psychologist, the anthropologist, or the biologist. Of the origins of art Aiken has said:
It has been urged that in the day-dream, or art, we do
Page 295not really seek to escape from ourselves, but, precisely, to find ourselves. But what part of ourselves is it that we find? Is it not exactly that part of us which has been wounded and would be made whole: that part of us which desires wings and has none, longs for immortality and knows that it must die, craves unlimited power and has instead “common sense” and the small bitter “actual”; that part of us, in short, which is imprisoned and would escape? … There can be little question about it, and it is precisely of the associations connected with these major psychic frustrat