Vautrin is Lucien de Rubempré's evil influence also, and Balzac saw how disastrously he himself might have ended his life had he heeded his unconscious, his Jacques Collin. Since literature is often depicting struggles and conflicts with our evil instincts, it deals directly with the material of the unconscious; for the unconscious that psychoanalysis is concerned with is that which springs from repressions forced upon us by society as well as by fate. In literature the unconscious appears under various symbols and disguises, just as it does in dreams. The devil, for example, is but our unconscious, symbolised. He represents our hidden primitive desires struggling to emerge; he is the eruption of our forbidden desires. His deeds are the accomplished wishes of our own unconscious. We are interested in the devil because he is ourselves in our dreams and unguarded moments. The fascination that the villain has for us is because our unconscious recognises in him a long-forgotten brother. True, our moral sense soon prevails, and we rejoice when the rascal is worsted, but he represents the author's unconscious as well as our own. Any one who has read of the thoughts and conduct of Raskolnikoff in _Crime and Punishment_, or of Julian Sorel in _Red and Black_, or of George Aurispa in _The Triumph of Death_, will see that much of the authors themselves, or rather their unconscious selves, is drawn in these criminals. Dostoievsky, Stendhal and D'Annunzio all said to themselves in writing: "I too might have ended like these characters. I did think their thoughts and a slight circumstance could have led me to the crimes they committed." The man who hates a vice most intensely is often just the man who has something of it in his own nature, against which he is fighting. The author sometimes punishes himself in his novel by making the character suffer for engaging in the course of life that the author himself followed. There is always a suspicion, when a writer raves most furiously against a crime or act, that he has committed that deed in his unconscious. III The reason La Rochefoucauld, author of the _Maxims_, is called a cynic is because he reveals the unconscious, at the bottom of which is self-love. He knows that there is great egotism, nay something akin to depravity, at the root of our emotions. He shows us much in our psychic life that many of us never suspected was there. When he brings it forth we grow indignant and yet say to ourselves, "How true!"