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Edel believes that literary biography and criticism need to examine the psychological truths in literary works. “The adaptation of psychological and psychoanalytic concepts to the study of mankind's ability to create and use myths and symbols … a study of what literature expresses of the human being who creates it,” he calls literary psychology.
Edel shows how, in the lives of Henry and William James, Thoreau, Auden, Kipling, T. S. Eliot, Hugh Walpole, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, James Joyce and others, the patterns of conflict and trauma, the fears, guilts, depressions and obsessions are repeated in disguised form in their writings. Vivid descriptions of these writers' personalities and characters are presented, derived from biography, journals, letters, autobiography and comments of contemporaries. All are tied together with psychoanalytic insights, weaving back and forth between fictional characters in poetry and novel and the real life experiences of their creators.
Edel explains how unconscious wishes serve as motivation for creation and how suppressed feelings in the unconscious emerge in the consciously creative forms of literature. He notes how the last stories written by Rex Stout, Edith Wharton and Arthur Conan Doyle carry implications of impending death. In each case the author died within a year of the writing.
Edel concludes that the artist uses his medium to “disguise, muffle or transform whatever deep-seated feelings press for release.” In this way the artist works through problems in his emotional life. He believes that art is created from tension and disequilibrium in the artist rather than from peace and tranquility.
Art according to Edel, has a certain relation to the more benign forms of megalomania. The difference between the productions of