Studies on the subconscious were very influential in the literary movement of Modernism, because it encouraged authors to explore the realm of the subconscious when describing their characters.
This was motivated by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Ernst Mach. Their theories seemed to indicate that our understanding of humans had been extremely limited before, and Modernist authors focused on subverting the rules of previous literature by exploring these new horizons of the mind.
