Very few English writers understood the mechanism of day dreams better than Dr. Johnson, as the chapter in _Rasselas_ on "The Dangerous Prevalence of Imagination" shows. One of the best illustrations of the psychoanalytic theory of authorship detailed by the writer himself occurs in a once-famous English novel, Kingsley's _Alton Locke_, published in 1850. Alton Locke tells us how he came to write poetry. The chapter entitled "First Love" recounts the process, and we learn how because he led a life of drudgery, he created a far more pleasant one in his imagination and then unconsciously sought to make a record of this life. II Psychoanalysis is always interested in learning exactly how literary masterpieces are born. Just as it seeks to know through dreams what are some of the hidden secrets in the unconscious, so it tries to discover what unconscious life made the writer project his vision. Two of the most famous love stories of the eighteenth century which had a personal background, and whose evolution have been told by the authors, themselves, were Rousseau's _Nouvelle Heloise_ (1760), and Goethe's _Sorrows of Werther_ (1774). They were the predecessors of the entire field of autobiographical love-lorn lugubrious literature that pervaded Europe in the early decades of the nineteenth century. George Brandes has shown how Chateaubriand, Madame de Stael, Senancour, Byron, George Sand and others owed much of their methods of recording their love troubles to these two novels. We to-day scarcely realise the great vogue that these tales at one time had. The authors have given us accounts of the birth of these novels. Both of these geniuses had been frustrated in their loves; as a result they created mental fantasies and lived in a more pleasant world of their own creation, and finally, bursting with desire for expression, produced their novels. The unconscious life buried in them came forth and was crystallised in art. Rousseau's _Confessions_ and Goethe's autobiography, _Poetry and Truth_, tell us how the novels came to light.