[In the following essay, Coles, a psychiatrist, cautions against applying rigorous psychoanalytic methods to diaries.]

Freud's discoveries did not only come as a consequence of his work as a psychiatrist whose very sick and very troubled and very confusing patients eventually inspired books such as Studies on Hysteria and the great Interpretation of Dreams. Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and any number of other 19th-century figures, he was a determined correspondent, particularly in the years that preceded his great break-through—his realization that dreams harken back to childhood experiences and can be quite rationally analysed, that repressed sexual conflict has a critical role in the life of the mind, that doctors receive from patients feelings once meant for (and likely as not, kept from) parents. In fact, we now know a lot of what was going through his mind as he made his psychoanalytic formulations. He had all along been writing to a close friend and fellow doctor, Wilhelm Fliess, who lived in Berlin. Again and again he shared his thoughts and feelings with Dr. Fliess, to the point that some analysts today become embarrassed—all that fervor, passion, despair. Scientists ought to have more restrained and orderly minds as they go about their business!

Clearly Freud needed a correspondent, needed someone to read his ideas and respond to them. He also needed to learn from himself, to write out his guesses and convictions and thus give them a form of permanence, an existence that can be welcomed or challenged by others. For that matter, in both The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life he took pains to indicate his interest in explaining what goes on in minds like his own and those of people who have no symptoms. He could find a dream of his, a letter of his, as revelatory as the bizarre "associations" of a thoroughly disturbed patient. Put differently, he saw all of us, finally, more alike than not.

As for the artist or writer—men like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Dostoyevsky—Freud made no claim to an understanding of their genius, their particularly inspired ability to instruct and arouse our minds and hearts. He did take an interest in the lives of great men, and was willing on more than one occasion to make a highly speculative generalization about a person he would never, could never, see and hear and question. Diaries, notebooks, letters had been left—or novels—and Freud looked at them as psychoanalytically interesting—but only that. He never intended that his way of putting things, his viewpoint, his chosen phrases be used to "explain" (or explain away) an artist's work, or sully and defame his name.

Of course, a major part of Freud's life was given over to a search, an effort to plumb the depths, to go deep, to uncover the hidden, to turn the obvious around so that the secret, the forbidden, the denied would come to light. Only later did he have time to see how powerfully we are influenced (yes, in our unconscious, too) by the world we live in, by customs, habits and conventions, by the time-bound, class-bound nature of our lives. It is foolish to call him "wrong" for emphasizing so long and so hard the psychopathology of everyday life. Discoverers struggle against whatever darkness they face, something later generations tend to forget. In 1900 everyday life had all sorts of surfaces, many of them troubling indeed. But nothing "superficial" could quite satisfy Freud, or command his attention and his reverence. He had to ignore the obvious psychological importance of rituals or beliefs in order to explore the unobvious, in order to be the "conquistador" he later called himself. Freud pushed aside contemporary knowledge and made his own, only to hear it charged (and in a way, to find out himself) that there were indeed other worlds—the market-place, the public arena, with its books, cultivated styles, tastes and all too powerful symbols—than the one he had conquered, all of which did not embarrass, humiliate or even surprise him. It is some of his doctrinaire, religious-minded followers who can make him seem dated. They cling to his every word, his every theoretical statement, however tentative, speculative or purely clarifying its purpose. They want to stop the clock of history, to make dogma out of one man's brilliant effort to resolve and clarify the intellectual problems of his day. One can only say that we all have it in us to do that, to convert abstractions into real and enduring things, to attribute an unassailable substance or permanence to ideas, to fight for a chosen leader until the end of time.

I say all this here because I cannot avoid thinking what certain psychoanalysts might have done a few years back with Elizabeth Barrett Barrett's diary. There she was, at age twenty-five, very much isolated from the world, nervous, moody, excitable, fearfully attached to her father, and not in the best state of health by any means. For some reason in June of 1831 she started a diary, and for some reason in the spring of 1832 she abruptly stopped making further entries. No matter that she is not here to be questioned; the diary lets us know that the "facts" are obvious. She had a strong "super-ego," a conscience that curbed her, admonished her, lacerated her, and made her feel exceedingly timorous and shameful on occasion. Her "ego" was intact enough; she was, after all, a poet and in general a very intelligent, cultivated woman. She saw the world sensitively and in fact made sharp comments on the hypocrisy and foolishness of others. (Again, her conscience did not let others off its hook any more than she herself was spared.) But what of her "id"? What did she do with all her "libido," her unconscious sexual and aggressive "drives"?

Well, to answer the kind of psychoanalyst who would put the question that way, she held all that energy in check as any upper-class 19th century lady ought to have done. Obviously a vibrant, even tempestuous person, she largely kept to herself. Amid all sorts of daily activities and in the presence of a large family she was in spirit very much alone. In 1831 her mother was dead and her father quite hard-pressed—not by poverty, but by the incredible burdens of wealth. Hope End, a magnificent estate in sight of the Malvern Hills, required more money than Mr. Edward Barrett could summon, and in 1832 the house had to be surrendered. In the last months Mr. Barrett spent little time there; he was desperately trying to straighten out and come on top of his financial difficulties, and London was the scene of his struggle. Elizabeth, the oldest child, always very close to her parents, and particularly a favorite of her father's, was in a sense orphaned.

The diary shows her loneliness, but also her almost defiant effort to know someone more than superficially, more than properly or conventionally or routinely. The diary gives a fascinating account of the day-to-day activities that kept the English gentry going in the early 19th century. Henry James has shown once and for all how significant and revealing customs and traditions can be; what happens in the living-room or the drawing-room can be as "revealing" and "profound" as anything that takes place in the bedroom, that temple of revelation which right now obsesses psychiatrists, not to mention a nondescript collection of American novelists, movie producers, television directors and playwrights. Elizabeth Barrett took in her fair share of luncheons, teas and walks, and into all of them she managed to put herself, her wishes and fears—rather in the fashion and tradition of lovers, or of the philosophers and psychiatrists who are engaged in today's eventfully described conversations, called "dialogues."

Well, who was the "self," the "person" who emerges in this short-lived, breezy, fitfully serious, occasionally frantic and passionate diary? Once her class is declared, her intellectual achievements and artistic promise (at twenty-five) recognized, we are left with her "mind," which somehow felt the need of a diary late one spring day and somehow—after a summer, a fall and a winter—allowed the diary to die. Of course, from the very start Miss Barrett had her doubts or misgivings—today called "ambivalence": "I wonder if I shall burn this sheet of paper like most others I have begun in the same way." Interestingly enough her hesitation was precisely the kind that psychoanalysts know so very well: "To write a diary, I have thought of very often at far and near distances of time: but how could I write a diary without throwing upon paper my thoughts, all my thoughts—the thoughts of my heart as well as of my head?—and then how could I bear to look on them after they were written?" How's that for a prelude to Freud's psychoanalytic method, some three-quarters of a century early? The woman who wrote those words knew already that "everyday life" has its "psychopathology." That is, she knew how devious yet revealing the mind can be—so that any sustained commitment to writing is inevitably self-revealing, and thus painful.

What matters is not that we find in these pages of hers all sorts of dramatic and satisfying "complexes" or "problems" or "neurotic trends." Frankly (and it may have taken us too long to do so) a good number of psychiatrists have at last given up pouncing on this or that fragment of behavior and making of it an awesome, clinical and categorical generalization. Yes, Dostoyevsky may have secretly, unwittingly yearned to do away with his father; Leonardo da Vinci surely did have quite enough "latent homosexuality"; and in this case, Miss Barrett's considerable "involvement" with her "beloved Papa," her "dear, dear Papa," stands clear. Yet, the really important thing (so we have come to think) is not the presence of violence and one or another passion, but the use a particular mind makes of its various urges, conflicts, difficulties, or whatever. In other words, if I am to say that Elizabeth Barrett had an "Oedipus complex," or more exactly, an "Electra complex," I am under an obligation to go on, in fact to show what in heaven's name made me single out this particular person for that rather common and unremarkable condition. To assert, then, that Elizabeth Barrett loved her father and feared him, and may ("deep down" or "way underneath") have wished for his death is to offer a commonplace.

More interesting is the part both Mr. Barrett and Hugh Stuart Boyd played in Miss Barrett's development as an observer and particularly a writer—the reason, after all, we find her thoughts, daily or otherwise, so valuable today. We know that in 1819 a father sent his thirteen-year-old daughter's poem to the printer. Fifty copies of The Battle of Marathon were made, and the father described it as a "great epic of eleven or twelve years old, in four books." They were very much companions, Mr. Barrett and Elizabeth. The world well knows what happened later, when Robert Browning came upon the scene, and the master of 50 Wimpole Street said no to him, no to the prospect that any of his children would marry. Meanwhile, Elizabeth spent years adoring, placating and appeasing her father before September 12, 1846, when she and another poet were married in the face of Mr. Barrett's angry refusal of sanction. I do not think it is stretching things to say she was encouraged by her father to have a mind that enjoyed wide freedom—so long as her body, her life as a woman, remained safely out of any suitor's reach. Under such circumstances she did not become a constricted, fearful, impossibly shy and suspicious woman. Protected enough from romances, she yet became a romantic, as a poet, letter-writer, and briefly, a diarist.

Page after page of the diary shows just how alive, how yearning, how sensitive and alert was this strangely distant and gifted young woman. She reads voraciously in the classics, but she is very much aware of contemporary English politics. She attends church, reads the paper, reads Greek, writes, awaits anxiously her daily mail, and through it all reveals herself a very shrewd observer of people—and of herself. Certainly the woman who wrote the following words would not find Sigmund Freud's discoveries either surprising or shocking: "I dreamt last night,—for night dreams are as well worth recording as day dreams—that I was re-writing the Warren-blacking lines,—and inserted in some part of them the following—'Fame o'er him flashed her meteor wing—/and he—he was a King.' What king I was writing of, is out of my head." And at another point she observes: "Arabel dreamt last night that he was dead, and that I was laughing! Foolish dream!—and more foolish I who could think of it in the storm!—" Her sense of irony may not have been "consciously" intended, but there can be no doubt that she would have been a very apt "analysand." When one of my patients calls a dream foolish, then goes on to point out its lingering presence in her thoughts, I know she only awaits another's permission to acknowledge the glimmers of her own mind's awareness.

If Elizabeth Barrett was pretty much able to sense a number of things going on in her psychological life, she probably did not—could not—stop and think about the strong and complicated "meaning" of her "relationship" with Hugh Stuart Boyd. Today, we can swoop down on a life such as hers and make our statements: she "transferred" her devotion from her father to Mr. Boyd, twenty-five years older, blind, highly educated and—rather like Mr. Barrett—able to be a literary companion. Much of this happened, moreover, when Elizabeth Barrett was quite without parents. Her mother died when she was twenty-two—three years before the diary began—and her father, as mentioned, spent increasing lengths of time away in London. She needed someone, even as she kept her distance from just anyone. Yes, there were brothers and sisters, and they come up again and again in the diary; but Elizabeth was the first-born child of devoted, possessive parents and apparently she was not about to consider the kind of strength and reassurance she had learned to expect from them as lost forever.

A major share of her diary is given over to Mr. Boyd, to her efforts to please him, to see him, to feel herself his good friend. I suppose it was all very "neurotic," the young lady sick with a variety of aches and pains, and her old, blind friend. There weren't even other friends. She is generally impatient with people, and with herself, too. She speaks of her boredom, her unwillingness to risk herself with people. Friendship is something very special—reserved it seems for Mr. Boyd almost alone. There are times when she can relax a little and glimpse the intensity of her feelings toward him, and there are even times when others seem able to twit her ever so gently on the matter: "Very soon after breakfast Eliza Cliffe came; but still sooner Bummy said to me laughingly, 'Are you going to see Mr. Boyd today?' And laughing was my answer—'Yes! If you will come too.' Then grave was her observation 'But you know you can go tomorrow.' 'Go tomorrow. Oh I think not.' (Oh I wish I could! was what my heart assided). 'Why certainly Mr. Boyd may not like your going quite so often.' How could I help saying 'If I thought Mr. Boyd did not like my going very often, I would not go at all.'"

There are moments when she is not so detached. She fears his silences, wonders how he will be at the next visit, and in general adjusts her mood to what she judges the success or failure of their precious friendship. Very simply—but also not so simply—she loved him, and he her. Nor is their love to be considered some bit of extravagant psychopathology. They shared ideas; they gave one another all sorts of information; they inspired one another. If psychiatrists have not yet come to the point that they can appreciate the dignity and worth of such a relationship, then there is indeed more for us to learn than even we appreciate—and the most arrogant psychiatrist will usually preface his remarks with a declaration of humility and an avowal of relative ignorance.

In point of fact Mr. Boyd was to Miss Barrett what Dr. Fliess was to Dr. Freud: a mind whose company made the world seem more hopeful, responsive and encouraging. The Elizabeth Barrett who sought after Mr. Boyd so persistently was trying hard to be a poet, a writer, a classical scholar, and thus a person apart from others. The Sigmund Freud who relied almost passionately—I put in "almost" where it is not necessary, and even misleading, out of my own shyness—on the correspondence with Dr. Fliess and on the "congresses," the walks and talks they had from time to time, was very much like Miss Barrett, a "loner," a person desperately trying to live with a particularly intense and gifted mind that needed at least one "other" person to receive ideas and feelings. Perhaps every writer is secretly speaking to someone; and every painter wants one other person to watch what he puts on canvas. I have had "creative" patients tell me that they can almost feel themselves talking as they work—silently and alone. Now, I am not trying to make yet another attempt to "explain" the writer or painter "at work." I am simply trying to suggest that a number of very significant men and women in the history of literature, the arts, and the sciences too, have at critical moments in their lives turned to somebody, and done so in a way that reveals not only neurosis (I suppose any time we get involved with another human being that can happen) but an effort to find—well, use whatever word is congenial: reassurance, support, sanction, the grace that comes when two people speak, when one person listens to another.

In a sense then, Elizabeth Barrett's diary can be "summarized" psychologically in a sentence or two, or be seen as one more example of how utterly, persistently (and wonderfully) elusive are the sources of the human mind's energies. In 1831, when there was no telephone to give a person's thoughts quick but strictly passing expression, Miss Barrett made her various moods and ideas submit to the permanence of a diary. (There were also, of course, letters.) She talked to herself, shunned many others, and found in Mr. Boyd reason enough to feel lonely but not alone. She also revealed how very much a large, intimate and well-to-do family can mean to a supposedly reserved or distant young woman. Freud, after all, mainly saw those Victorians who had fallen apart—at a time when the Victorian Age itself was coming to an end. We do not know enough about the very considerable strengths that characterized the family-life of some of the prudish or "repressed" people who lived in the 19th century. It is true that they didn't know what we know about atoms and molecules or the workings of the unconscious—so that to us they seem to have lived terribly in the dark, groping where we understand, faltering where we can see and cure. Yet, Freud himself came out of that century—he was born before Mrs. Robert Browning died—as did Wordsworth, Balzac and Tolstoy. It is hard to believe that a few psycho-analytic formulations, a few electron microscopes or space-capsules, make our life all that more knowing, all that different in its essentially comic, frivolous and importantly tragic nature.

To me the Elizabeth Barrett [that appears in her diary] is best thought of as a defiant writer—self-centered and proud as anyone is who dares ask others to read, to listen, to pay heed. A social historian would find her diary a valuable introduction to a kind of living now almost gone. (Obviously there are remnants that persist, and not only in England.) And as for a psychiatrist, he has to take note of the tensions that crop up repeatedly in the young lady's written comments—but then go on to remind himself what she did with those tensions in the full course of her fifty-five years of life.