The literary genius then has a keen insight into the psychology of the repression of the emotions and can beautifully express this repression and make valuable intellectual deductions therefrom. He can vary this work for many years, and move people who think. CHAPTER IX LITERARY EMOTIONS AND THE NEUROSES I The emotions that literature deals with bear a close analogy to symptoms in the neuroses or nervous diseases. Every emotional conflict, every repressed love is an incipient neurosis, and often the sufferings described in books are full-fledged cases of neuroses. The author may unintentionally draw characters suffering griefs which the physician can recognise as analogous to the cases he has observed in practice. The writer may show how the character cures himself of his neuroses by being made aware of the unconscious forces struggling within him, or how the sufferer effects a recovery by sublimation, or how he succumbs to his disease. Some authors like Rousseau in his _Confessions_, or Strindberg in his _Confessions of a Fool_, give us detailed accounts of their neuroses, though they may not always exactly fathom the causes. Poets have in their collections of lyrics told us of the sufferings that they have personally gone through, and the trained scientist can see to what neuroses the symptoms described are related. Other authors have in the guise of fictitious characters described the neuroses they have been suffering. Byron in his _Manfred_, Hauptmann in his Heinrich in the _Sunken Bell_, Shakespeare in _Hamlet_, Goethe in _Faust_, have told us of love repressions that were their own, and these characters can be studied by critics as neurotic patients are analysed by physicians.