The Novel as Catharsis

The cure of neuroses is generally considered to have started with Freud, with the innovation of the analytical chamber and the analyst. Because of the terrible pain associated with his traumas, it is of tantamount importance to the sufferer to keep them buried, out of his waking thoughts, disguised in his drearns, buried deep in his unconscious, whence they motivate all his acts to his own partial or complete frustration and undoing. The process of freely associating into a sympathizer's ear or into a blank wall would not accomplish the double purpose of airing and exorcising his searing memories, and changing his present strange defensive behavior, because the sufferer shows a fiendish skill in veering away in his rambling talk and in his thoughts from the traumas and their effects and safeguards. An imperturbable trained second person, the analyst, who does not respond to proximity to the danger zones like a fly on the rim of the electric plate, must be present to force the patient to face the implications of what he is saying, keep him on the logical course of recollection, and of resultant self-destructive behavior.

Previous to Freud, it is widely believed, there were neurotics, but they were doomed to a lifetime of unhappiness and maladjustment. They had always to remain impaled on the horns of their dilemma, a-straddle on a fence between their disparate needs, unable to proceed in one direction or the other.

Is this true? Of most neurotics we may be sure it was true, just as it is of most of them today. The great majority of the mentally ill cannot admit their condition, and submit to treatment, because of shame, and a fierce clinging to their defenses. Were no mental sufferers, and are none now, who had not and have not access to the analytical chamber, healed of their malaise ?

I think there were, and are—a class of creative subjective writers. To the extent that this type of author works from an emotional need, and not for the market, he is “analyzing” himself