The Anxiety of Influence in the Creation of Theory*

The Anxiety of Influence is a theory of poetry and its originator is Harold Bloom (1973), a poet and professor of literary criticism at Yale University. It is not incidental to this paper that Bloom considers Freud to be the “Poet of the Sublime” (1978, p. 369), and refers to Freud as one of his “non-literary fathers” (1982, p. xiii). Bloom makes many references to the psychoanalytic paradigm throughout the construction of his theory. In fact, the anxiety of influence refers to oedipal primacy: the unconscious worry of each poet-son that he owes his own begetting to his father — that he is not the originator of his own works; that he has, so to speak, come too late onto the scene. Since every son, or daughter, for that matter, must inevitably arrive after the parent, a tragedy built into the creative process is, in Nietzsche's words, the tragedy of “belatedness” (Bloom, 1975, p. 83). We have all come too late. Bloom tells us that even Nietzsche, that great originator, had a “hatred of the perniciousness of his own belatedness” (p. 83).

Now psychoanalysis, in its main thrust, and in Freud's words, has not been concerned with issues of “priority and originality” (Bloom, 1978, p. 363); Bloom is correct in pointing this out. The roots of psychoanalysis are embedded in the matrix of libido theory, in which drives are object-seeking. We have therefore paid a great deal of attention