On a Clinical Approach to the Psychoanalysis of Writers*

In presenting a paper before psychoanalytic circles, it is traditional to commence by making excuses. I do not intend, however, to declare that I lacked sufficient time to work up my material, which I have been gathering for more than ten years. Nor can I plead clemency by presenting this as a preliminary report, since I arrived at these conclusions many years ago, have made use of them in therapy ever since, and have had the opportunity of testing their validity in more than fifteen clinical analyses. Hence I fear I shall have to face the music and accept your unconditional criticism. Despite this, I shall make use of the author's technique of offering excuses, but for another reason. My first formulations on the subject of the Psychology of Writers were presented in a book devoted in part to Stendhal and Grabbe,1 which I wrote seven years ago. I recently completed a new book2 on this subject, thus shall I say that I have made an addition to my list of scientific crimes. I am now faced with the difficulty of presenting in one hour the contents of a thick book. Those of you who have written or attempted to write even an article can understand the heartache involved in having to shorten one's own statements. To every author, everything he says, and especially everything he writes, is sacred and significant.

In the last two decades, the interest of psychoanalysis in the psychology of the writer has fallen more and more into the background. During the first and second decades of the “psychoanalytic age,” as a well-known book reviewer3 recently termed our present century, great interest was expressed by psychoanalysts in this subject, following the example of Freud, in an attempt to identify