Albert Albert Mordell - The Erotic Motive in Literature

This work is an endeavour to apply some of the methods of psychoanalysis to literature. It attempts to read closely between the lines of an authors works. It applies some principles in interpreting literature with a scrutiny hitherto scarcely deemed permissible. Only such suggestions have been set down whose application has been rendered fairly unimpeachable by science and experience. In studying literature thus, I aim to trace a writers books back to the outward and inner events of his life and to reveal his unconscious, or that part of his psychic life of which he is unaware. I try to show that unsuspected emotions of the writer have entered into his literary productions, that events he had apparently forgotten have guided his pen. In every book there is much of the authors unconscious which can be discovered by the critic and psychologist who apply a few and well tested and infallible principles. This unconscious is largely identical with the mental love fantasies in our present and past life. Since the terms unconscious and erotic are almost synonymous, any serious study of literature which is concerned with the unconscious must deal impartially with eroticism.