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Bergler attempts to prove five points with clinical material derived from the analyses of inhibited and unsuccessful writers, as well as of other patients: 'Point 1. I came to the conclusion that the writer did not, in his work, express his unconscious wishes and fantasies, as had been previously assumed, but rather, under pressure of his unconscious guilt feelings, gave expression to his unconscious defense against these wishes and fantasies. Point 2. My
clinical experience taught me that the writer did not suffer from a "shameless urge to reveal himself", that is, an exhibitory impulse, such as has been asserted since Rank by every psychoanalytic biographer. On the contrary, I could prove that every writer is a voyeur, on the deepest levels of his being, who utilizes his exhibitionistic tendencies as a defense against those scoptophilic impulses. Point 3… I arrived at the conclusion that, in writers, the most decisive rôle is played by their orality… However, according to my conception, the writer's type of neurotic orality is not greediness and a wish to "get" in the repetition of the child-mother situation, but rather a spiteful desire for oral independence, whereby the artist identifies himself with the "giving" mother out of aggression toward her, and thus eliminates her. He achieves oral "pleasures" for himself through "beautiful" words and ideas. In its deepest sense, it is a desire to refute the "bad" preoedipal mother and the disappointments experienced through her, by establishing an "autarchy". Point 4. I found myself forced to conclude that many psychoanalytic biographies were constructed on a fallacy, and this, through analogy. Very few writers were actually analyzed, but a great analytic experience was gathered from analyses of other neurotics. Because in these clinical cases the Oedipus complex was found as a basis of these hysteric and compulsive neuroses and because in writings of unanalyzed writers the Oedipus complex could also be