Joseph Conrad once voiced the hope that from the reading of his pages might "emerge at last the vision of a personality: the man behind the books ... a coherent justifiable personality both in its origin and its actions." Dr. Meyer arrives at a unified picture of Conrad's personality by applying psychoanalytic principles and insights to two main sets of data on Conrad: his unusual history and his creative work. Basic psychological and emotional patterns appear repetitively, and Dr. Meyer concludes that Conrad's art served an important psychological function in his life—the achievement through his creative fiction of a corrective revision of painful reality.

Originally published in 1967.

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