The Erotic Motive in Literature by Albert Mordell

Author:Albert Mordell [Mordell, Albert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781720877936
Google: jtmKuAEACAAJ
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2018-06-08T04:37:57+00:00

III

Freud has told us that the idea of repression is the main pillar on which the theory of psychoanalysis rests. There has been at some time in the patient’s life a serious inhibition of some desire. There are different kinds of repression, the most serious of which have a sexual basis. But the denying oneself of the play of any emotions that seek an outlet, constitutes a repression.

Sex with Freud means love in its broadest sense. The most common repression is the inability to satisfy one’s love, either because the person has not met any object upon whom to lavish his affection, or if such an individual is found there is no reciprocation, or if the love is given it is later withdrawn. All these factors act in a repressive manner upon a person. For it must be understood that not only the stinting of sexual satisfaction, but the interference with all those finer emotions associated with it, cause a repression in the subject. When the emotions have been satisfied for a long time, and then there is a sudden cessation through change of heart or infidelity or death of the beloved one, the repression is very serious. It is this kind of repression that has produced most of the literature of the world.

But repression includes the stinting or uprooting of any emotion. Great grief as the result of the death of any one we love of either sex, whether friend or relative, is a repression. The death of a loved one puts the sufferer in a worse position than the man who has been stinted in a great love passion. And the great elegies in literature have been cries of poets for the death of fellow writers. Lycidas, Adonais, In Memoriam and Thyrsis are examples. The authors here suffered repressions in the loss of brother poets.

The grief which seems to be the greatest of all, that following on the death of a beloved child, is an instance of the most intense repression on the part of a parent. Here there is nothing really sexual, but the death of a child and the consequent agony to the parents is a far greater repression than any purely sexual one. Hugo’s famous elegies on the death of his daughter which appear in the Contemplations are among the greatest poems of this kind. In America we have had a few poems by Lowell, and a famous elegy by Emerson, The Threnody, in which the loss of children is mourned.

If there were no repression, there would be little literature.

The varieties of repressions are as numerous as the emotions to which we are subject. For the inability to satisfy any emotion is a repression; the deprivation of an emotion long gratified, the conquering of a habit or the struggle for activity of a partially extinct emotion, are repressions. The feeling of loneliness or homesickness, which has given rise to much good literature, shows repressed emotion. The wish to wreak revenge or to punish evil or

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.