complex. Bachelard argues that from prehistoric times, fire has had a connotation of sexuality and intimacy. Fire, before the time of matches, was made by rubbing until the rubbing produces warmth, sparks, and flame. Citing eighteenth century authors and mythological lore collected by Bachelard’s English contemporary, James Frazer, Bachelard points out that fire has continued to carry an implication of sexual pleasure. Applying this insight to the interpretation of literature, Bachelard suggests that the poetry of the German Romantic Novalis (pen name of Friedrich Leopold, Freiherr von Hardenberg) makes extensive use of erotic fire and that the poetry of Novalis could be seen as a return to the primitive inner heat.

The sexual nature of fire is one of its most important psychological characteristics, and Bachelard devotes his fourth chapter to sexualized fire. In the imagination, fire propagates and generates itself. In prescientific thinking, men differ from women because the former have a greater bodily heat that enables them to inseminate and propagate. Bachelard reminds his readers that fire had a sexual characteristic in alchemy.

Throughout his book, Bachelard shifts between using fire images for literary interpretation, as in his Novalis complex, and explaining away fire imagery as a primitive barrier to true scientific knowledge. In the fifth chapter, he seems to remind himself that his original purpose was to analyze old unconscious views that interfere with the progress of abstract and mathematical knowledge. He examines intuitions about fire as epistemological obstacles. Fire provides examples of two such obstacles. One of these he calls the “substantialistic obstacle.” The other he terms the “animistic obstacle.” People have a tendency to think about fire as a substance and a tendency to think about fire as a living thing. Both of these ways of thinking about fire and other phenomena impede scientific progress. He cites older scientific writings that portrayed fire as a substantial reality rather than as a process. He gives examples of writings and myths that presented fire as something that feeds itself. Bachelard maintains that in these examples, fire is personalized, and he asserts that the scientist must avoid personalizing knowledge.

After returning to his goal of purging scientific knowledge of the unconscious influence of prescientific imagery, Bachelard once again shifts back to a more appreciative approach to that imagery. In the sixth chapter, Bachelard stops attempting to psychoanalyze objective knowledge. In discussing what he terms the “Hoffman complex,” Bachelard suggests that alcohol is the creator of language. Alcohol is a rich subject for the imagination of the elements because it is “fire water.” It combines both of these primary images. The Hoffman complex is a reference to the works of the German Romantic writer Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffman, who wrote dreamlike fantasies inspired by alcohol. Bachelard suggests that dreaming, like the fire-water of alcohol, is not to be avoided but used carefully.

Finally, Bachelard considers idealized fire. Fire is seen as something that purifies everything. He once again cites the poet Novalis, who spoke of love being transformed into a flame and of the transformed flame burning up everything earthly and impure. Fire consumes matter, and by consuming matter, it transforms it into light.

Bachelard concludes by suggesting that his book can serve as a basis for a chemistry or physics of reverie, or daydreaming. He no longer tries to explain away prescientific imagery and takes the position that analyzing this imagery can provide understanding of poetic activity and of thinking. He insists that fire is an intense and painful human experience and that the complexes attached to fire are painful. These complexes, such as the firelike sublimation of sexuality, can give rise to neurosis, but they can also lead to the writing of poetry.

The Psychoanalysis of Fire is an important book in Bachelard’s own philosophical development because it marks his turn from the rationalistic philosophy of science to the analysis of literature. In this work, he begins to argue that poetic images and daydreaming have their own value and are to be appreciated and understood in their own terms. It is also the first of his books on the four elements, in which he works out his view that the ways in which people see the physical world are representations of their psychological world. At the same time, the book demonstrates how scientific thinking and poetic thinking are related to one another because the two are ways in which the mind engages in a continual dialogue with the objects of the world.

As an extension of Jungian psychology, The Psychoanalysis of Fire demonstrates one of the ways in which human beings may project their own psyches on the world around them. Bachelard’s insights in this book have often been compared to those of Freud and Jung. His view that the primitive mind, the mind uninhibited by the rationalism of science, reverts to the traditional elements of fire, earth, air, and water has been seen as an intriguing argument by many practitioners of psychoanalysis. Bachelard’s complexes, or constellations of ideas and emotions associated with the element of fire, provided new ways of thinking about both psychology and mythology.

Although Bachelard began writing this book with the intention of making a contribution to the philosophy of science, it became best known to literary critics and achieved its greatest influence in literary criticism. The approach he began to develop in this, his first work on the psychoanalytic significance of the four elements, has been applied by literary analysts to the writings of such diverse authors as Albert Camus and Ray Bradbury.