Literature and Psychology

There are certainly different ways of interpreting literary works, whether from positivistic or hermeneutic, semiotic, or psychological points of view—they all have their legitimacy, their own partial interpretative truth and value. Literary works are fictitious texts; they are not to be confounded with reality as such; they are, in a certain sense, out of time and space. However, they can show interesting correlations with elements of physical and psychical reality, albeit in a very complex manner. They create a “reality” of their own with characters who can have their own “lives,” being more or less products of pure fantasy, or showing features of real persons, such as their creator him- or herself (like in autobiographical novels). The marvelous realm of fiction with its diverse characters and its colorful, dynamic worlds have always been an attraction for readers seeking in it a mirror of their own world and destiny. Even if those characters are creations of faraway times and cultures, they have always offered readers models of identification. Identification with a fictitious story and its invented characters is, on the one hand, an aesthetic experience, on the other hand a psychological process, although one should add that both aspects of reading are interrelated, as the former is not independent of the latter. Reading, as today’s psychology teaches, is not merely a passive process of deciphering the “hidden” codes cleverly placed in the text by the author; on the contrary: it is an active process of reconstructing the meaning and message of the text by means of cognition, creative imagination, knowledge of the world, empathy, intuition, and so on.1Cf. Ursula Christmann and Norbert Groeben, “Psychologie des Lesens,” in Handbuch Lesen, ed. Bodo Franzmann et al. (Munich: Saur, 1999), 145.

Reading literary texts undoubtedly has psychological implications, as does their production and (individual) reception. The relation between psychology and literature is extremely complex and looks back on a long history. It is well-known, for instance, that Sigmund Freud himself published psychoanalytical essays on literary works like the short stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann or the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, finding in them literary “testimonies” to his own psychoanalytical concepts, that is, they were psychological literature avant la lettre.2Freud’s famous essay utilizes E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story Der Sandmann from a psychoanalytic point of view. See John K. Noyes, “The Voice of History: Sigmund Freud / E. T. A. Hoffmann / G. H. Schubert,” Journal of Literary Studies 6, nos. 1–2 (1990): 36–61. But also Jung, so important to Hesse and to understanding and interpreting several of his works, is known for his study of James Joyce3See Carl Gustav Jung, “Ulysses: ein Monolog,” Europäische Revue 8 (1932): 548–68. and his work on the relation between psychology and literature in general. The examples of psychological analyses of literary works could be continued with Erich Fromm’s reflections on Kafka or the numerous recent studies on “literary psychology” (German Literaturpsychologie) of today.4For Kafka see Aoileann Ní Éigeartaigh, “‘How Can One Take Delight in the World Unless One Flees to It for Refuge?’: The Fear of Freedom in Erich Fromm and Franz Kafka,” The Polish Journal of Aesthetics 53, no. 2 (2019): 15–31. For issues of literary psychology see Joachim Pfeiffer, “Literaturpsychologie/Psychoanalytische Literaturwissenschaft,” in Methodengeschichte der Germanistik, ed. Jost Schneider (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 355–84.

The latter kind of study, exploring the relationship between literature and psychology, distinguishes between: a) the psychology of the author; b) the psychology of the works as manifested in the psychology of the (main) characters;5See again Ní Éigeartaigh, “‘How Can One Take Delight.” and c) the psychology of reading (reception)6See again Christmann and Groeben, “Psychologie des Lesens.”—all three aspects being, of course, also applicable to Hermann Hesse and his literary texts and characters.

The first aspect takes into account biographical data (already of central importance in the positivistic school of the nineteenth century, but also for the psychonalytic school7See Sigmund Freud, “Dostoevsky and Parricide,” in The Future of an Illusion and Other Works (London: Hogarth, 1961), 175–96.) “extracted” from the author’s letters, diaries etc., as well as from testimonies of his contemporaries, mainly relatives or close friends.8Hans-Martin Kruckis, “Positivismus/Biographismus,” in Methodengeschichte der Germanistik, ed. Jost Schneider (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 573–96. One of Hesse’s friends in the 1920s, the poet Hugo Ball, even wrote the first biography of Hesse by the time of the publishing of Steppenwolf. See: Hugo Ball, Hermann Hesse: Sein Leben und sein Werk (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977). Hesse wrote tens of thousands of letters throughout his life, many (though not all) of which have been published, including his correspondence with Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, and Josef Bernhard Lang. Hesse’s biography is, in a psychological sense, extraordinarily revelatory, especially the perhaps most critical period of his life 1916–17, when he was a patient of Lang and Jung.

Secondly, these encounters not only had a positive influence on Hesse the person, but also on his literary works from that point onwards. Jung’s influence on Hesse, especially on his Demian (1917), but indirectly even on short stories like Klein and Wagner, has been the object of a great many studies ever since, so that today it can be safely assumed that several works of Hesse can be hardly understood without a knowledge of Jungian psychology.9Jung himself believed to have also influenced the genesis of Siddhartha and Steppenwolf. See Emanuel Maier, “The Psychology of C. G. Jung in the Works of Hermann Hesse. An Abridgement,” https://hesse.projects.gss.ucsb.edu/papers/maier.pdf, 2. The text of “Klein and Wagner” clearly shows the traces of Hesse’s reading of Arthur Schopenhauer, who is even quoted in the short story. The Schopenhauer quotation is identical to Jung’s quotation of the philosopher in a psychological study from 1909. See László V. Szabó, “Taedium vitae. Zu Hermann Hesses Schopenhauer-Rezeption,” in Hermann Hesse und die Moderne: Diskurse zwischen Ästhetik, Ethik und Politik, ed. Haberland Detlef and Géza Horváth (Vienna: Praesens, 2013), 130–43, and Günter Baumann, Hermann Hesses Erzählungen im Lichte der Psychologie C. G. Jungs (Rheinfelden: Schäuble, 1989). The psychological interpretations of Hesse’s works generally use Jungian terms like individuation, archetype, anima, the Self, and so on.10For Jung, individuation meant a psychological process of consciously approaching the Self (the deepest, central core of the psyche). The anima represents the hidden feminine aspects of a man’s personality, whereas archetypes are contents of the collective unconscious. For a guide to Jungian terminology see the “Glossary of Jungian Terms,” https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bbm:978-1-349-11468-9/1.pdf. At the same time, it should be admitted that psychological interpretation is not at all the only way to approach these texts or to understand Hesse. In fact, Jung himself stated clearly that the psychological approach to literary works is only one point of view among others, not intending, for instance, to judge their aesthetic value.11Carl Gustav Jung, “Psychology and Literature,” in Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 15, ed. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 84–106.

Thirdly, however, many of Hesse’s works, such as Demian or Steppenwolf, are psychological in a somewhat different sense: they invite their readers to adopt a psychological perspective, more specifically, a Jungian one. They are so to speak predestined for a Jungian analysis. There are, of course, readers and readers, and there are, accordingly, different—individual and collective—forms of reception of a book. A collective reception of Hesse’s works leads us to questions of a sociology or even cultural history of reading that we cannot unfold here. However, let us remember, for instance, what a great impact Hesse’s Steppenwolf had on the beat generation in the United States. Collective reading as a method of bibliotherapy can offer a collective psychological experience, during which participants can reveal the psychological content of the text by interpreting together, each participant contributing with his own insights to the process of interpretation. Of course, not every reader can be expected to dispose of an academic knowledge of Jung’s psychological terms when reading Hesse, or to first read Jung’s books before reading Hesse’s Demian or Steppenwolf, but this is exactly the point: Such works can replace in the best sense of the word theoretical knowledge on psychology by means of conveying it through the story, the characters, through symbols, metaphors and other poetic means. Hesse, who certainly learned a lot from Jung, adapting some of his concepts like the archetypes or the Self (Selbst), created a series of narrative texts that are particularly suitable to conveying psychological processes and insights that can lead to an increased psychological awareness in an attentive and perceptive reader.