You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Psychoanalytic theory embraces many concepts appreciated by man since earliest recorded thought. For this reason it was to be expected that as Freud gradually developed his extraordinary structure of psychological interpretation there should have been gathered by him and his followers expressions of thought from the writings of the world's great minds which anticipated, corroborated and amplified Freud's theories. Then, following the lead of Freud, who in 1907 undertook the analysis of W. Jensen's “Gradiva”, and in 1910 of Leonardo de Vinci from one of the artist's childhood dreams, it is not surprising that the psychoanalytic method should have been applied to the interpretation of the lives and artistic productions of many persons. From among a great number of instances may be mentioned Ernest Jones' study of Hamlet, Marie Bonaparte's Edgar Allen Poe and Bychowski's of Proust.
Reported studies of American literature showing the intuitive acquaintance of an author with psychoanalytic concepts are strikingly few. A very recent review by De Voto, “Freud in American Literature”, mentions only Herman Melville as having produced “literature in which Freudians may feel completely at home”. Melville was one of the few contemporaries of Hawthorne with whom the latter had real empathy—or perhaps the active empathy was the other way around. De Voto also selected Henry James as a writer who proved that “the intuitions of genius have priority over the theories used to rationalize them!”.
For the clue of Hawthorne's awareness of concepts later to be developed by Freud, I am indebted to Dr. I. H. Coriat of Boston who referred me to a passage in “The Scarlet Letter”. Another precursor of Freud was Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (), a contemporary of Hawthorne (), but in every way his antithesis. They lived and worked during that notable epoch of American intellectual fruition, the middle third of the nineteenth century, when New England was briskly rebelling in its universities against