A psychoanalyst can of course study the human character of poets but, as a result of his own sojourn in the region of the passions, he is not prepared to study poetic images in their exalting reality. C. J. Jung said this, in fact, very clearly: by persisting in the habits of judgment inherent in psychoanalysis, “interest is diverted from the work of art and loses itself in the inextricable chaos of psychological antecedents; the poet becomes a ‘clinical case,’ an example, to which is given a certain number in the psychopathia sexualis.
