I come now to psychoanalysis which is decidedly more attractive. Psychoanalysis bases its investigations and its definitions on the duplicity and hypocrisy inherent in individual and social life. It shows us a psychic world of several degrees; at the top and at the surface, the conscious universe: underneath, a sort of semi-darkness--the preconscious; still lower, the unconscious. Between these spheres the psychoanalyst pictures a moving, a passing, a continuous rising and descending of expression and repression, of desires and inhibitions. Between each compartment he places antechambers, thresholds, turnstiles, wickets, censors, a perfect clearing house, a central station for the receiving and sorting of the events of our mental life. There seems to exist a fore-established harmony between such a representation of conscious facts and Puritanism; a harmony which has not escaped the critics of psychoanalysis. According to a critic, “The comparative vogue (Why _comparative_? Should not one say _excessive_?) of Freudism in English-speaking countries is partly due to Protestant Puritanism. The narrow restrictions which Puritan ethics impose upon sexual satisfactions and the mystery in which they seek to envelop them would prove, in the eyes of the English and American psychiatrists, certain hypotheses of Freud and the supposed effect of Anglo-Saxon inhibitions upon the production of neurosis.”[11] Freud gives us through his doctrine of complexes, inhibitions, suppressions and repressions, a striking explanation of Puritanism as I tried to describe it in the first chapter. He makes us understand very well the causes of floating anxiety and soul-fear which psychically characterize the Puritan. Suppression and censorship are certainly the key to Hawthorne’s Puritan portraits which I shall present shortly. The important rôle and the analytical descriptions given to sexual obsession in such Dreiser novels as “The Genius” fit in perfectly with the Freudian therapeutics, and the methods of Freud’s divination resemble greatly the main phases of the novel as Sherwood Anderson conceives it: seclusion, insinuation, confession, day dreams, dream symbolism, secret symbolic language, all with a basis of pronounced sexual obsession. Fiction and psychoanalysis agree perfectly in all this. We must not forget the disquieting elements of Freudism, the manner in which it reintroduces into the idea of Self the elementary, primitive, crude and purely instinctive constituents. There are, on this point, curious affinities between the “call of the wild” as understood by Freud and by Jack London, for example. The Anglo-Saxon is, despite his Puritanism, nearer true nature than the Latin, we are told. He is more primitive, more elementary. The psychoanalyst would undoubtedly confirm these views and this new manner of completing the portrait of the Puritan. * * * * *