Freud and Romanticism

Die Welt wird Traum,

der Traum wird Welt

In comtemplating the connection between literature and psychoanalysis, we tend to pay more attention to the loan of ideas, limited as it is, than to the more vague but also more interesting question of related general attitudes. It has traditionally been shown how Freud was influenced by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and, on the other hand, how D. H. Lawrence and Thomas Mann formulated psychoanalytical theses in their work. Furthermore, it is held that Freud was influenced by naturalism, especially by the writers Goncourt, Zola, Daudet and Ibsen. The ardent striving to describe psychological processes without any embellishment, even when they have to do with abnormal behaviour, and the tendency to show their relation to what we call normal spiritual life, make for significant parallellisms between naturalism and psychoanalysis. The perception that a neutral attitude, and the ability to maintain an intellectual distance to the phenomena described as the prerequisite for the requested objectivity, understanding and eventual help appears also to be an attitude common to both.

A more complicated but also more meaningful form of parallelism between psychoanalysis and artistic creation, than the occurrence of more-or-less isolated loans of ideas, is met when we see how the attitudes of the predecessors of both resemble those of each other on central points of contact. It is then more likely that the massive impact of circumstances on cooperation, of external and internal impulses, is more meaningful than just the influence of opinion. The course of events resembles the analytical process in which a network of inner and outer impulses gives rise to a change in attitude without any explanation of one specific factor