13 - Hermann Hesse and Psychoanalysis

Summary

Poets have been fascinated BY their dreams ever since poetry itself began. No one is more familiar with the impulses of the unconscious than artists, who could not endure being deluged by such impressions without transposing them to their conscious minds and giving them expressive forms and names. To align these sensations with their own drives, harmonize their inner and outer being, integrate what suits them and fend off what does not, artists use their creativity and invent weapons, as Hesse expressed it, “gegen die Infamitäten des Lebens” (against the infamies of life). In their waking states, therefore, they achieve something very similar to the way dreams function during sleep. While writing, they continue the dream’s process of elucidation, and, with the aid of fantasy, the dream’s more disciplined sister, they form alternative worlds that are superior in their compelling verisimilitude to the turbulent imagery of dreams. And, paradoxically, the more subtly, unsparingly, and precisely they succeed in depicting what is apparently most private and subjective for them, the more objective, universal, and transcendent it becomes, so that others too recognize themselves in these representations and perceive their lives in the world more clearly.

Only few writers of the twentieth century were as prototypical in their ability to depict their own being in this way as Hermann Hesse, who thereby overcame the boundaries separating generations and cultures. Congratulating Hesse on his seventy-fifth birthday, Thomas Mann wrote: “Auf Wiedersehen, lieber alter Weggenosse, durchs Tal der Tränen, worin uns beiden der Trost der Träume gegeben war, des Spieles und der Form” (Farewell, my dear old companion through this vale of tears, where we both were granted the solace of dreams, of play, and of form).

The solace of dreams? Like Thomas Mann, Hesse was dependent on dreaming his way out of a daily existence that he found hard to bear. Both struggled to meet the expectations of their parents and their schools. Their inability to fulfill them was the decisive trauma that Thomas Mann and Hesse had in common. The reason they both failed at the Gymnasium was the very opposite of what their school reports stated. They were not lacking in talent and good will, but rather had too much of both, which prevented them from fitting into their parents’ plans for their futures and from submitting readily to the educational methods then current.