In his attempt to apply psychoanalysis to the career of Edgar Allan Poe for purposes of literary criticism [Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius], Joseph Wood Krutch exhibited a commendable degree of competence for a layman. He seems to have had at his command a fairly good, though incomplete, outline of psychoanalysis as it was constituted circa 1926 and a serviceable understanding of the nature of unconscious conflict as well as certain of its overt manifestations. The psychoanalytic concepts which he uses are interpreted, for the most part, with a fair degree of accuracy. What is especially noteworthy is that even technical terminology is correctly employed. By 1926 enough of the basic material of psychoanalysis had reached print—much of it in English translation—so that it was theoretically possible to go even further than he did, but although his knowledge of it was not very extensive he seems to have understood better than most people what he had read. He is nowhere guilty of the gross falsification of psychoanalytic doctrine which was so common then, and which even now gives trouble. His competence served him well—up to a point.

That point is reached when he tries to evaluate Poe's writings solely as manifestations of psychic conflict without regard for their aesthetic character. Up to then he is on perfectly solid ground. A poem is, as he indicates, as much a psychic product as a slip of the tongue or a hallucination, but it is of course something else besides, and Krutch's application of psychoanalysis does not tell us anything useful about what that something else may be. But perhaps this failure is not altogether his fault…. At the time when Krutch wrote his book there existed only tentative formulations in many parts of [psychoanalytic research]…. Nevertheless, despite the circumstances, this gap in Krutch's chain of reasoning is a major flaw which is not mitigated by the note of caution on which he ends the book: …

[The critic] must … endeavor to find the relationship which exists between psychology and aesthetics, but since the present state of knowledge is not such as to enable anyone satisfactorily to determine that relationship, we must proceed only with the greatest caution and content ourselves with saying that the fallacy of origins, that species of false logic by which a thing is identified with its ultimate source, is nowhere more dangerous than in the realm of art.

From a psychoanalytic, as well as a critical, point of view this statement is unexceptionable. The trouble is that Krutch does not faithfully follow his own advice. For over two hundred and thirty pages he develops a thesis which sometimes skirts the danger line and now and then passes over it. The effect of all this cannot be undone by a pious disclaimer at the end. Despite the consistency he shows elsewhere, Krutch here succumbs to the very fallacy that he warns against. (pp. 134-36)

[A searching questioner might] inquire how thoroughly Krutch had assimilated the principle [of psychic determinism] he asserts and whether his agreement with it was whole-hearted or merely cerebral. In his favor it must be said that, except for the present lapse, he consistently maintains it throughout the book.

He knew that unconscious feelings could embody themselves in a fantasy or a piece of writing which effectively disguised them until a qualified interpreter discovered their existence. He understood at least the surface aspects of the process of sublimation. He knew that it was possible for such feelings to begin in a childhood relationship and acquire depth and breadth by attaching themselves to later objects…. He saw the role that the marriage to Virginia played in Poe's defense against the acknowledgement of his impotence and the way in which it lent him a degree of nobility.

On the debit side we must record that some of his understanding was shallow by psychoanalytic standards. He insists that Poe was "a true dypsomaniac in the medical sense," but he offers no better explanation than that this was "the result of some obscure psychic cause." Excessive drinking is, of course, a problem on which a sizable quantity of psychoanalytic writing has been done, but Krutch is apparently unaware of it. (pp. 136-37)

A further example of superficiality is his offhand equating of the stories with dreams: "Dreamlike in their power to make fantastic unrealities seem real, they are dreams in essence…. His works [are] characterized at their best by the fantastic illogicality of dreams…." This kind of remark is tossed off as though one needed only to mention it to make it self-evident. Yet, as we shall see, Krutch did not have a thorough grasp of the nature of dreams, and he did not learn from psychoanalysis all that it knew at that time about the difference between dreams and artistic productions…. Krutch is aware that the conscious part of the mind is used by Poe, but he restricts its greatest influence to the rationalization shown in the criticism and the philosophy rather than to the construction of the tales and poems, where a psychoanalyst would give it far greater weight than it is accorded here.

These examples illustrate the limitations of Krutch's comprehension of psychoanalysis in his book. He has a gross understanding of some of the basic principles and can apply them adequately to readily ascertainable surface phenomena, but he cannot go very far below these. While he sees the general significance of the psychoanalytic approach to human problems and is clearly convinced of its validity, he does not know specifically and in detail how complex it really is. He has evidently learned a few of its important formulations, but he tends to use them rather mechanically. His sin is that he tries to find instances of preconceived patterns in the material instead of examining it without prejudice to see what pattern, if any, will emerge.

The greater part of his book is not literary criticism at all but may more properly be called psychography. It is an attempt—which is successful as far as it goes—to demonstrate that Poe suffered from a severe neurotic disturbance. (pp. 137-38)

Where Krutch's book becomes more interesting from a literary standpoint is in his demonstration that an intimate relationship existed between Poe's life and his works. Its connection with psychoanalysis lies in the recognition that the outer events have relatively little psychic significance in themselves…. It is Krutch's feeling that inner life is reflected in literary works most clearly in Poe of all writers, but while we might question the superlative, certainly we may grant that the contrived fantasies are probably very close to what their originals must have been.

Krutch sees two major forms of expression in Poe and shows that they complement one another. First, of course, is the repeated theme (with variations) of the death of a beautiful woman, and second, the repeated insistence upon the powers of pure intellect. Each has its place in the working of Poe's imagination, and this in turn is stimulated mightily by the unconscious struggle going on within.

Krutch establishes effectively the appearance in the tales and poems of themes which are derived from the inner events of their author's life. His heroes and heroines are frequently of ancient and decaying families. They are identified only as noble, great willed and sensitive, and suffering from a mysterious malady more spiritual than physical. They are "strangely learned in some half specified and forbidden learning," they have sinned in some exquisite and horrible way and they undergo the penalty of death or of enduring the death of a loved one. They are morally lost; they hover on the brink of madness or are precipitated over the edge; they suffer (and enjoy?) the anticipated outcome of their esoteric behavior. They are perverted and evil—and they fascinate Poe. There can be little question that this kind of character represented Poe's fantasies of himself or that the constantly recurring plots and the repetitively gruesome settings were literary versions of the terrible conflict of whose origins and meaning he was never aware and which was at times palliated but never resolved. Krutch is right when he insists upon the compulsive nature of these forces. (pp. 139-40)

Krutch believes that Poe's writing was solely a product of the morbidity. The hypothesis upon which the book is constructed boils down to something like this: Poe suffered a great trauma in the death of his mother. This was exacerbated by subsequent experiences as the foster-son of the Allans. As a result he developed into a neurotic young man who quarreled with most men and idealized most women. (We are not told how this came about, only that it happened.) He became impotent from psychic causes (not specified). This caused mental instability so great that there was danger of insanity. In defending himself against the realization of the reason for the impotence on the one hand and the threatened loss of mental powers on the other, Poe translated his fantasies, only slightly disguised, into his morbidly imaginative tales and poems, and devised a philosophy of composition which explained to his satisfaction that what he was doing by inner compulsion in his art was actually demanded of him by aesthetics. In his tales of ratiocination and in his criticism of current books he both exalted the power of intellect—by implication, his own—and denied that of impulse. He married Virginia, with whom consummation of the marriage was impossible for reasons of her ill-health, and thus deluded himself that the outer form of normal sexual relationship was the actual substance. Her death made it impossible for him any longer to sustain this fiction (still unconsciously), and he embarked upon a series of disastrous affairs with other women, in each instance going to pieces as marriage, and therefore actual sexual relations, became imminent. For a long time he had fled to the solace of drink when the conflict became unbearable, and he continued this destructive practice which had caused him to lose jobs and friends. Finally, in the famous and not fully understood episode at Baltimore, it contributed to his death.

It will be noticed that there are many gaps in the story. Krutch has at his command the end results, Poe's works, and a good deal of biographical information from which he selects mainly material that bears upon origins. He reconstructs the broad outlines of Poe's struggle and shows in general where it came from psychically, but how it developed as it did or why it became just this and not something else is passed over. It seems to me that, despite some description of the process and despite the inclusion of material from which even more of it might have been deduced, as Marie Bonaparte has done, Krutch falls victim to that same genetic fallacy against which he warns in the closing pages of his book. Evolution and vicissitudes are every bit as important as origins in the description of a neurosis, but of these he gives us only incidental hints. (pp. 141-42)

Of greater importance than Krutch's deficiencies in psychoanalysis of character—after all, he did better than many of his contemporaries—is his conception of creativity. For this he should be censured because he fell into the trap of oversimplification once more and in a manner that his good sense as a critic should have protected him against. From his quite accurate observation that Poe did not write from a moral or social standpoint and that he was "interested in the soul's relation to itself but in nothing else," Krutch draws the startling conclusion that "nearly all the things which ordinarily give value to a piece of literature are absent from Poe's work." Here he surely mistakes a difference in degree for a difference in kind…. One of the great lessons of psychoanalysis—and one which Krutch seems to have missed—is that we are all so constituted that we share to a considerable extent the same strengths and weaknesses. No two of us are alike but each has at least a minute quantity of the characteristics of all the rest…. The sadism that is so marked in Poe, therefore, is present in each of us to a lesser degree. Neurosis is an imbalance of the factors that in a different combination produce what we call normality. Only the combination is unique; the rest is as common as our basic physical constitution.

An understanding of this principle would have saved Krutch from his final, and fatal, reduction of genius to neurosis: "We have, then, traced Poe's art to an abnormal condition of the nerves and his critical ideas to a rationalized defense of the limitations of his own taste." This estimate could have been avoided by the simple reflection that not all neurotics are geniuses or even unsuccessful artists, or, for that matter, that not all artists are neurotic. To say that "both his genesis and his significance are to be found by reference not to any tradition or environment but instead to the morbid type to which he belongs" is almost to restrict the enjoyment of Poe to sufferers from necrophilia. (pp. 142-43)

The best that he can offer is that Poe is somehow talented with words. "His gift … is the gift of expression." Furthermore, it is nothing else but that: "… his genius was no more than the power to express [his] character in perfect symbols." In some mysterious fashion, which Krutch does not describe, the internal disorder was transmuted into "the more controlled aberrations which gave birth to his art." Krutch's idea that madness is necessary for artistic creation differs in only one major respect from the findings of psychoanalysts like Kris, though it lacks almost completely the subtlety and detail of the latter. As we have seen in the development of psychoanalytic ego psychology, it is precisely such detachment from reality which detracts from the value of art, for it undermines its social nature. Krutch is somewhat inconsistent in his use of the concept of "madness" for in another place he seems to recognize that when Poe "lost his grip upon the fancies which had always haunted him [he] lost, too, the power to give them imaginative form," and was left to cope directly with his psychic disorder. He concludes that, even had Poe lived, he never could have re-established the emotional balance necessary for artistic production, and would have produced only more Eurekas. What Krutch saw in art was only its capacity to communicate emotional states. He did not—at least in the case of Poe—distinguish between aesthetic experience and psychic imbalance. Consequently, he insisted that Poe's genius was only the ability somehow to communicate his inner impulses to his readers by means of his elaborated fantasies. (pp. 143-44)