Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/83

Rh works under the impulsion of an apparently external force; indeed, being unaware of the origin of his inspiration, it frequently happens that he ascribes it to an actual external agency, divine or otherwise. We now know that this origin is to be found in mental processes which have been forgotten by the subject, but which are still operative; in Freud's language, the creative output is a sublimated manifestation of various thwarted and "repressed" wishes, of which the subject is no longer conscious. The artist, therefore, gives expression to the creative impulse in a form which satisfies his internal need, but in terms which he cannot translate into easily comprehensible language; he must express it directly as it feels to him, and without taking into consideration his possible audience. An evident corollary of this is that the farther away the artist's meaning from the minds of those not in possession of any of his inspiration the more difficult and open to doubt is the interpretation of it; hence the flood of quite silly criticism that follows in the wake of such men as Schopenhauer and Nietzche.

It is to be expected that the knowledge so laboriously gained by the psycho-analytic method of investigation would prove of great value in the attempt to solve the psychological problems concerned with the obscurer motives of human action and desire. In fact one can see no other scientific mode of approach to such problems than through the patient unravelling of the deeper and hidden layers of the mind by means of the dissecting procedures employed in this method. The stimulating results already obtained by Muthmann, Rank, Riklin, Sadger, Abraham and others are only a foretoken of the applications that will be possible when this method has been employed over a larger field than has hitherto been the case.

The particular problem of Hamlet, with which this paper is concerned, is intimately related to some of the most frequently recurring problems that are presented in the course of psychoanalysis, and it has thus seemed possible to secure a new point of view from which an answer might be offered to questions that have baffled attempts made along less technical routes. Some of the most competent literary authorities have freely acknowledged the inadequacy of all the solutions of the