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.
Some years ago' Meyer Levin, the writer, stalked into a lair of psychoanalysts and fretfully howled, “Get off my back!” In an article entitled “A New Fear in Writers” and published in a professional psychoanalytic journal, 6 Mr. Levin made the charge that psychoanalysis was responsible for demoralizing the writer “by usurping his function as the revealer of human behavior and interpreter and counsellor in questions of human desire which had traditionally belonged to the story-teller.”
Speaking for the present-day creative writer, Levin felt that the emergence of the science of psychoanalysis had instilled a self-doubt that could scarcely have affected those who wrote before the present century. And further, if this very self-doubt drives the writer to seek the professional help of the offending analyst, then the writer is subjecting himself to a new indignity and dilemma. To concede that the analyst knows (for certain) more than the artist perceives is to admit defeat; to believe otherwise destroys his faith in the analyst which he must have in order to recover from the self-doubt. To salvage something from this humiliation, the writer tries, inversely, to make use of psychoanalytic “tools” by introducing psychological “tricks” into his writing. Oedipal situations, sex and dream symbols, contrived slips, compulsive patterns of behavior, stream-of-consciousness thoughts, and so forth, become common occurrences in modern fiction. The writer takes some comfort from the fact that the analyst so often finds it necessary to invoke the names of Dostoievsky, Shakespeare and Sophocles in consultation but wonders how even these great writers might have fared had they lived under the monstrous and emasculating shadow of psychoanalysis. In despair, Levin sums up the plight of the writer by stating that “while some modern writers