There is always a large element in the population that hearkens back to its childhood days. Even our most intellectual people like to divert themselves with stories of piracy, battles, sunken treasures, tales of the sea, of adventure and mystery. The people who love romance go back in their reading to their boyhood days; they have in their unconscious, primitive emotions that, unable to find an outlet to-day very well, refuse to remain altogether repressed; they get satisfaction by seeing pictures of life in which the unconscious thus participates. The perennial interest of _Robinson Crusoe_ and _Treasure Island_, of Scott and Dumas, of the sea stories of Cooper and Captain Marryat, of the detective stories of Gaboriau and Doyle, is due to the fact that they make us young again. It is true we often outgrow some of these books and find them dull in later life, but they enchant many of us at all ages because our inherent instincts from savage and less cultivated people can only be kept repressed by being given a feigned instead of a real satisfaction. Old legends like those about Achilles, the Wandering Jew, the Flying Dutchman, Charlemagne, and King Arthur and his knights, never weary us; they continue to furnish artists and writers with artistic material. Psychoanalysis explains the love we feel for these romances. We have never quite grown out of either the barbarous or boyish state. We like the strange, the marvellous, the mysterious, for this was specially characteristic of man in an early stage and of the boy. We also find an affinity for the kind of life our ancestors led. We are interested in tales where men are hunting and fighting. Man's unconscious loves a fight, for he has always fought in the history of the race. He is fascinated by danger and the idea of overcoming obstacles. And he wants such scenes introduced in literature. Psychoanalysis also explains the affinity that we have for the supernatural in literature. Freud's disciples, like Rank and Abraham and Ricklin, have shown in _The Myth of the Birth of the Hero_, in _Dreams and Myths_, and in _Wishfulment and Fairy Tales_, respectively, that fairy tales are to be interpreted like dreams and represent the fulfilled wishes of early humanity. The child who likes fairy tales finds his own wishes satisfied in these tales dealing with the supernatural and improbable. Even when great poets make use of the supernatural in their work, the same principles of wish fulfilment are there. Faust is saved in Goethe's poem, Prometheus is released in Shelley's lyric drama and the Knight of the Cross is victorious over the dragon in Spenser's allegory. The poems give us the fulfilled wishes of the modern poets. True the modern poet introduces advanced ideas of his time and gives different interpretations to the old tales. But we still love the supernatural because we have our limitations with reality.