The reader's indulgent attention is invited to the pages where the effect upon literature of the sexual infantile life of the author is treated. This involves a résumé of one of Freud's most important and most abused discoveries, that the child has a love life of its own, the development of which has most significant bearing upon his entire life. More particular indulgence is pleaded for the pages dealing with sex symbolism in literature. The critic who will find the author of this volume obsessed with sex will be more charitably inclined if he first masters Freud's works or a good study and summary of them like Dr. Hitschman's _Freud's Theories of the Neuroses_, Dr. Brill's _Psychanalysis_, Pfister's _The Psychoanalytic Method_ or Jones' _Papers on Psychoanalysis_. In conclusion, I quote a passage from William James to show the significance of the unconscious in modern psychology. "I cannot but think," says William James in his _Varieties of Religious Experience_ (1902), (P. 233), "that the most important step forward that has occurred in psychology since I have been a student of that science is the discovery, first made in 1886, that in certain objects at least, there is not only the consciousness of the ordinary field, with its usual centre and margin, but an addition thereto in the shape of a set of memories, thoughts and feelings which are extra-marginal and outside of the primary consciousness altogether, but yet must be classed as conscious facts of some sort, able to reveal their presence by unmistakable signs. I call this the most important step forward because, unlike the advances which psychology has made, this discovery has revealed to us an entirely unsuspected peculiarity in the constitution of human nature." FOOTNOTES: [A] The reader should also remember that such fearsome words as (1) "sex," (2) "incest," (3) "homosexualism," (4) "sadism," etc., include in psychoanalysis (1) love, (2) great affection between mother and son, father and daughter, brother and sister, (3) intense friendship, (4) cruelty, etc., respectively. [B] _Delusion and Dream_, Moffat, Yard & Co. [C] There are in English but few articles applying psychoanalytic methods to writers and thinkers. Some of them are: Alfred Kuttner's "The Artist" in _Seven Arts_, Feb., 1917; Wilfrid Lay's "'John Barleycorn' Under Psychoanalysis," "H. G. Wells and His Mental Hinterland" and "The Marriage Ideas of H. G. Wells" in _The Bookman_ (N. Y.), March, July and August, 1917, respectively; A. R. Chandler's "Tragic Effects in Sophocles" in "The Monist" (1913); W. J. Karpas's "Socrates in the Light of Modern Psychology" in _The Journal of Abnormal Psychology_, vol. 10, p. 185; and Phyllis Blanchard's "Psychoanalytic Study of Comte" in the _American Journal of Psychology_, April, 1918.