The Healer and The Healed

Psychoanalytic concepts have greatly contributed to the study of literature. The vice versa is also true. For example, psychopathological characters in literature create enormous interest in the study of psychoanalysis. Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, admits that the new method of analyzing the human mind which he has introduced had already been used by poets and philosophers in their works (Simmons 154). He alsostates that literary works, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the author; in that way they are manifestations of the author's own neuroses. He relates the creative act of writingto psychoanalytic theory, and thereby probed into the life and works of famous artists. He also enquires whether the writer's neuroses might be linked tohis psychic make-up, as manifested in his work. Freud's brilliant essay onDostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov is an early example in this category. Keeping Freud's essay as a model, streams of essays were written by analysts and psychiatrists that mostly focused on individual writers. Among the better-known practitioners were C. G. Jung, Marie Bonaparte, Phyllis Greenacre, Erich Fromm, Henry Rosenzweig, Henry Murray, Selma Freiberg, Ernest Kris, Ernest Jones, and Theodore Reik. Theirwritings contain many remarkable insights into the lives and works of their subjects, and they add substantially to that store of information and perception that lies behind all good critical writing.