The Nature of Literary Psychology

I HAVE CHOSEN AS EPIGRAPH FOR THIS LECTURE the familiar lines, "Tell me where is Fancy bred,/Or in the heart or in the head?"—Shakespeare's precise and lightly phrased question in The Merchant of Venice1 which almost carries its own answer. A modern and less poetic answer would be that we produce our fancies in our unconscious, out of our body's history and out of our imagination, and the intellect or "head" goes to work to give them shape and reason. "Heart" in Shakespeare's time was about as good a way of expressing the unfathomable of the unconscious as any word we possess today. And since we deal with the unfathomable, we are reduced always to looking for its signs and signals, as Freud demonstrated long ago. These, as T. S. Eliot reformulated the problem for poetry, are the objective correlatives of what is hidden from us. Psychological evidence, it follows, is composed in part of dreams, imaginings, and observed human actions. It is our task in literary psychology to examine this kind of evidence and to study it, using all the scholarly and judicial methods known to us.

There is an interesting and useful discussion of "psychological