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The Advantages and Limitations of the Approach—The Objective and Subjective Writers.
Psychoanalysis has made it increasingly apparent to an ever widening circle of observers that the production of the artist is almost entirely subjective. The painter's canvas is no more than that large area upon which he sets out his own inner problems. The poet's lyrical woe is but an echo of his own personal woe. The average novel is but a vast autobiography. By what the artist creates, therefore, we are gradually brought to know what the artist is.
It may be readily objected, of course, that the drawing of psychoanalytical inferences from the writings of a deceased author is an extremely arbitrary proceeding. Admittedly, it is arbitrary to the extent that our findings are not possible of direct or immediate verification. In a majority of cases, however, the findings verify themselves. We cannot put the author on the psychoanalytic couch, subject him to the psychoanalytic technique, and bring him to the point of confirming our findings by his own free associations; but in more than one sense, an artistic creation may be analyzed entirely in the manner of a neurosis, its various elements being viewed as symbolic expressions of certain emotional constellations, just as neurotic symptoms are. In the analysis of dreams we are accustomed to regard the various people in the dream as so many aspects of the dreamer's own personality; so too, the characters in a work of fiction are but