AESTHETICS AND PSYCHOLOGY OF THE ARTIST 97
interest is the view, based on rich and well selected material, that Vergil and Beatrice represent the return of the parent's imagines.
The present writer has pointed out that the childhood memories of Spitteler (32) show a striking agreement with the doctrines of Freud as regards the nature and importance of events in childhood.
The investigation of E. Lorenz into the "Geschichte des Berg- manns von Falun" (19) shows in a very clear way how a simple anecdote, provided it contains the germ, keeps producing ever new phantasies. As the poetical modifications advance, the unconscious complex by which the phantasy was awakened reveals itself more and more distinctly till it appears in clear words (Hofmannsthal's "last modification") just as dreams of one night vary the same un- conscious thought with progressive clearness.
In another essay (20) the same author shows that the CEdipus tragedy ends quite in accordance with the fulfilment of the un- conscious expectations — union with the mother earth. While the two above-mentioned essays only touched on the complex "the mother's womb", MacCurdy shows a novel by Lytton which is completely built on it, and throws light by analysis of that novel in the most interesting way on the connections between these phantasies and the "omnipotence of thought".
The idea running through all those essays, namely the return to primitive thinking by apparently original imagination, cannot easily be proved by a better example than the one found by Dr. Protze (24) in which a tree exercises all the functions that
- 'sava<Jes" are wont to attribute to their totem. Rank's book (26)
is based on the same idea, but carried out in a quite different, more complete and systematic way. Starting from a topic, still very attractive to modern literature, that of the "Doppelganger" (double) the author goes back to the superstitions relating to mirrors and shadows, from there to primitive beliefs in the soul connected with mirror images and shadows, and finds at last the psychological resolution of these phenomena in narcissism and in the repression conflict against its radiation leading to object-love. The book contains much material in literary history and ethnology and should become a model through its technical method, never satis- fied with mere aphorisms, but always trying to link up connections.
A number of essays deal with two great tragic figures of Shakespeare's, Hamlet and Macbeth. The Hamlet essays (15, 27) naturally start from the points in Freud's "Interpretation of Dreams",
