Autocrat of the Confessional

Oliver Wendell Holmes (Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table) wrote three novels which have been widely unread. They reflected the scientific interests of their author, a physician, teacher of anatomy at Harvard, dean of its Medical School. Recently a psychoanalyst made the suggestion that Holmes's novels were perhaps the most original and significant of all his works, establishing the wiry little Bostonian as the godfather of modern psychoanalysis. Holmes, he found, discovered the "unconscious" (sometimes called "subconscious") 25 years before Sigmund Freud.

The Holmes novels, Elsie Venner, The Guardian Angel and A Mortal Antipathy, seem morbid, sententious, very unlike his other writings. All three deal with characters on the borderline of insanity. Contemporary critics called them "medicated novels." This description is favorably endorsed by Clarence P. Oberndorf of Columbia University, past president of the American Psychoanalytic Association. In The Psychiatric Novels of Oliver Wendell Holmes (Columbia University Press; $3) he finds clear evidence that Holmes was 100 years ahead of his time.

"The more we examine the mechanism of thought," wrote Holmes, "the more we shall see that the automatic, unconscious action of the mind enters largely into all its processes." No modern psychiatrist has improved on Holmes's pithy analysis of insanity as self-defense: "It may be that the state we call insanity is not always an unalloyed evil. It may take the place of something worse--the wretchedness of a mind not yet dethroned, but subject to the perpetual interference of another mind governed by laws alien and hostile to its own. Insanity may perhaps be the only palliative left to Nature in this extremity."

Psychic Suicide. Elsie Venner is Holmes's most interesting and hardest case. Holmes's analysis of her "psychic suicide" is a model of modern psychiatric thinking. His account of her symptoms (a stiff, frozen demeanor, withdrawal into herself, occasional wild behavior) was a precise description of schizophrenia--though the word and disease were unknown in Holmes's day.

Oberndorf's interpretations of Holmes's words sometimes seem farfetched. But in the light of Freudian psychiatry many of Holmes's aphorisms assume striking new meanings: e.g., "The woman a man loves is always his own daughter." The autocrat of the breakfast table, says Oberndorf, well understood the Oedipus and other complexes.

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