Writers like D'Annunzio and Dostoievsky have given us complete cases of neuroticism; they described themselves in their books. Since the line between the normal and the abnormal psychic condition is hard to draw, and we all daily or at different crises in our lives overstep the limits, the works of literary men as a rule deal with those cases where the morbid and normal merge. Freud said that no author has avoided all contact with psychiatry. And he is assuredly right. Dickens's eccentric characters, Balzac's heroes and villains in the grip of great passions, neurotics like Bunyan, A'Kempis and Pascal, whose repressed love no doubt made them religious maniacs; Iago, Richard the Third, Macbeth, Hamlet, Anthony and Timon of Shakespeare, the leading characters of Ibsen, the unhappy Heine, De Musset, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Leopardi, Carducci, Burns, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Poe and Hearn can all be studied like patients suffering from neuroses. In fact all characters in fiction who suffer are related to neurotics, for sex and love is usually the cause of their troubles, for as Freud says, "In a normal sex life no neurosis is possible." The author occasionally deals with severe cases of neuroses, and the psychiatrists with mild ones, and their provinces are often the same. The writer details his case with art, and lays stress on the emotional phase and deduces ideas, while the psychiatrist gives us bare scientific analyses. "The author," says Freud, "cannot yield to the psychiatrist nor the psychiatrist to the author, and the poetic treatment of a theme from psychiatry may result correctly without damage to beauty." (_Delusion and Dream_.) Cases of neurosis often especially lend themselves to literary treatment. Think of the women sufferers in literature like Madame Bovary, Hester Prynne, Anna Karenina, Hedda Gabler, Magda; you can always trace their troubles to love repressions. Fictitious characters who have not had a natural outlet for their love and have been abstinent, or have had a love disappointment or have suffered from aberrations of the infantile love life, present phases of neuroses. Freud has studied Jensen's novel _Gradiva_, and shows how the leading character has troubles analogous to the psychoneuroses, and cures himself unconsciously by the methods of psychoanalysis.