ABSTRACT

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston writes that her main character, Janie, is “full of that oldest human longing-self-revelation. [ . . . ] So Janie spoke.”1 In an early work, Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer offer a medical explanation for this longing when they write of the “curative effect” of confession: “It brings to an end the operative force of the idea which was not abreacted in the fi rst instance, by allowing its strangulated effect to fi nd a way out through speech [ . . . ].”2 Writing of a different kind of confession, that which takes place in police interrogations and courts of law, American Chief Justice Warren Burger states that “The human urge to confess wrongdoing is, of course, normal in all save hardened, professional criminals, as psychiatrists and analysts have demonstrated.”3 In the opening lines of The Psychology of Confession, Erik Berggren combines these views on confession when he writes:

It is common human knowledge that talking about painful and disturbing memories or experiences which have lain on our minds unburdens us of them and affords a sense of relief. This means that such recollections or experience may be felt as a weight. They induce a psychic pressure which can create worry and depression. The pressure, as if by its own force, impels a release; the process may take the form of a powerful need to make disclosures, to speak openly about oppressive secrets. This need fi nds expression in two ways: either in personal confi dences to a trusted friend or as a written description. In the latter case, the memories involved have perhaps left the writer no peace until he “got them out of his system.” The cathartic element involved is of importance in explaining the genesis of all literary confessions since Saint Augustine’s Confessions.4