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L I O N EL EL TR TR I L L I N G " FR EU EU D A N D LI L I T ER ER A TU T U R E" E" ( 1 9 4 0 )
Trilling, Trillin g, Lion el. “Freud and Literature.” The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and and Society. London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1951. 34-57. I
The Freudian approach to psychology is, Trilling argues, the “only systematic account of the human mind” (34) which is comparable “in point of subtlety and complexity, of interest and tragic power” (34) to the “mass of psychological insights which literature has accumulated through the centuries” (34). To pass from the reading of a great literary work to a treatise of academic psychology is to pass from one order of perception to another, but the human nature of the Freudian psychology is exactly the stuff u pon which the poet has always exercised his art. art. (34) This is why psychoanalysis has had a great impact on the study of of literature. Of course, the effect is “reciprocal, and the effect of Freud upon li terature has been no greater than the effect of literature upon Freud” (34). As Freud himself admitted, the “poets and and philosophers before me uncovered the unconscious” (34), what he “discovered was the scienti fic method by which the unconscious can be studied” (34). Trilling argues that what is at stake here is less “particular influences” (35) than a “whole Zeitgeist , a direction of thought” (35). Psychoanalysis, he contends, is “one of the culminations of the Romanticist literature of the nineteenth century” (35), suggesting a “contradiction in the idea of a science standing upon the shoulders of a literature which avows itself inimical ini mical to science” (35). He traces it in particular particular to a widely admired text, which Freud himself cited approvingly, approvingly , Diderot’s Rameau’s Rameau’s Nephew (1762). (1762). Trilling sees in it a “perception which is to be the common characteristic of both Freud and Romanticism, the perception of the hidden element of human nature and of the opposition between the hidden and the invisible” invisibl e” (36). This “idea of the hidden thing went forward to become one of of the dominant notions of the age” (36) in the work of Rousseau, Burke, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Schiller, and even others later like Arnold and Mill who were “aware of the depredations that reason might make on the affective life” (37). Autobiography, an important element of this “tradition” (36), hints at the th e way in which the mind progressively became more complex. compl ex. “Poets, making poetry by what seems to them al most a freshly discovered faculty, find that this new power may be conspired against by other agencies of the mind” (36). Trilling Tri lling proceeds to remark on the obsessions of the period with “children, women, peasants, and savages, whose mental life, it is felt, is less overlaid than that of the educated adult male by bildungsroman sroman in the wake of Goethe’s the proprieties of social habit” (37), the rise of the bildung Wilhelm Wilhel m Meister and the attendant “revolution “revolut ion in morals” (37) and the view that “we may not judge a man by any single moment in his life without taking into account the determining determining past and the expiating and fulfilling future” (37). Trilling Trillin g says that the “further we look the more literary affinities to Freud we fi nd” (37). He mentions the increasing demands for and discussions of a “sexual revolution” (37) by Shelley, Schlegel, Sand, Ibsen, Schopenhauer, Stendahl and others. Again and again we see the effective, utilitarian ego being relegated to an inferior position and a plea being made on behalf of the anarchic anarchic and self-indulgent id. We find the energetic exploitation fo the idea of the mind as a divisible thing, one part of which can contemplate and mock mock the other. (37-38) Trilling lists Dostoevsky’s emphasis on ambivalence, Novalis’ “preoccupation with the death wish” (38), the “fascination by the horrible” in Shelley, Poe and Baudelaire, the pervasive
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interest in dreams on the part of thinkers like Nerval, and the concern with “metaphor” (38) in Rimbaud and the later Symbolists, “metaphor becoming less and less communicative as it approaches the relative autonomy of the dream life” (38). If Freud is a product of this zeitgeist, Trilling wonders in turn “what it is that Freud added that the tendency of literature itself would not have developed without him” (38). Proust’s Les Fleurs du mal springs to mind, suggesting as it does an “enterprise of psychoanalysis” (38), not least in terms of its method: the “investigation of sleep, of sexual deviation, of the way of association, the almost obsessive interest in metaphor” (38). Though writers like Proust denied even having read Freud, Freud’s impact on the study of literature is enormous. A psychoanalytically-oriented criticism offers students of literature a “lively sense of its latent and ambiguous meanings, as it were, as indeed it is, a being no less alive and contradictory than the man who created it” (39). It has had an important impact on literary biography in particular where, notwithstanding the “dangers of theoretical systematisation” (39) of which one is more aware, the goal is “not that of exposing the secret shame of the writer and limiting the meaning of his work, but, on the contrary, that of finding grounds for sympathy with the writer and for increasing the possible significances of the work” (39). Many contemporaneous writers have cited their debts to Freud: the Surrealists, Kafka (who “explored the Freudian conceptions of guilt and punishment, of the dream, and of the fear of the father” [39]), Thomas Mann, and James Joyce, among others. II
Much of Freud’s thought, Trilling argues, “has significant affinity with the anti-rationalist element of the Romanticist tradition” (40). However, “much of his system is militantly rationalistic” (40). Thomas Mann is wrong, he argues, to stress that the “‘Apollonian,’ the rationalistic, side of psychoanalysis is, while certainly important and wholly admirable, somehow secondary and even accidental” (40). Though Mann, “gives us a Freud who is committed to the ‘night side’ of life” (40), Trilling argues, the “rationalistic element of Freud is foremost; before everything else he is positivistic” (40). The “interpreter of dreams came to medical science” (40) by way of Goethe’s scientific “disquisition on Nature” (40), not via his Faust. For Freud, “positivistic rationalism . . . is the very form and pattern of intellectual virtue” (40). Such an understanding is necessary for an appreciation of “Freud’s attitude to art” (40). The aim of psychoanalysis, he says, is the control of the night side of life. It is ‘to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the super-ego, to widen the field of vision, and so to extend the organisation of the id.’ ‘Where ego was,’ – that is, where all the irrational, non-logical, pleasure-seeking dark forces were – ‘there ego shall be,’ that is, intelligence and control. (40-41) Freud, by contrast, would never have accepted the role which Mann seems to give him as the legitimiser of myth and the dark irrational ways of the mind. If Freud discovered the darkness for science he never endorsed it. On the contrary, his rationalism supports all the ideas of the Enlightenment that deny validity to myth or religion; he holds to a simple materialism, to a simple determini sm, to a rather simple sort of epistemology. No great scientist of our day has thundered so articulately and so fiercely against all those who would siphisticate with metaphysics the scientific principles that were good enough for the nineteenth century. (41) “Conceptualism or pragmatism is anathema to him through the greater part of his intellectual career” (41).
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For Trilling, Freud’s “rationalistic positivism” (41) has both strengths and weaknesses. Its “strength is the fine, clear tenacity of his positive aims, the goal of therapy, the desire to bring to men a decent measure of earthly happiness” (41). Its weakness has to do with the “often naive scientific principles which characterise his early thought” (41) and which consisted largely in “claiming for his theories a perfect correspondence with an external reality” (41-42) that cannot be substantiated. Freud has “much to tell us about art” (42), Trilling stresses, and about writers who provide “specific emotional insights and observations” (42) derived from an understanding of the “part played by the hidden motives” (42). For this reason, “literary men” (42) are the “precursors and coadjutors of his own science” (42). Art, Freud writes, is a “‘substitute gratification’” (42) and an “‘illusion in contrast to reality’” (42). Its effect is “‘almost always harmless and beneficent’” (42) and is something of a “‘narcotic’” (42) and “shares the characteristic s of the dream, whose element of distortion Freud calls a ‘sort of inner dishonesty’” (42). The artist is “n the same category with the neurotic” (42). Trilling is of the view that it is understandable how Freud, “unprotected by an adequate philosophy” (43), comes to these conclusions. Psychoanalytic practice is about helping patients to cope with the seeming reality of their in fact most often unfounded fears and problems: For Freud there are two ways of dealing with external reality. One is practical, effective, positive; this is the way of the conscious self, of the ego which must be made independent of the super-ego and extend its organisation over the id, and it is the right way. The antithetical way may be called . . .the ‘fictional’ way. Instead of doing something about, or to, external reality, the individual who uses this way does something to, or about, his affective states. The most common and ‘normal’ example of this is daydreaming, in which we give ourselves a certain pleasure by imagining our difficulties solved or our desires gratified. Then, too, sleeping dreams are, in much more complicated ways, and even though quite unpleasant, at the service of this same ‘fictional’ activity. And in ways yet more complicated and yet more unpleasant, the actual neu rosis from which our patient suffers deals with an external reality which the mind considers still more unpleasant than the painful neurosis itself. (43-44) These are, for Freud, the “polar extremes of reality and illusion” (44) or, more precisely, “practical reality and neurotic illusion” (44). Reality basically “means what is there ” (44), while illusion “means a response to what is not there ” (44). The “essentially Freudian view assumes that the mind, for good as well as bad, helps create its reality by selection and evaluation. In this view, reality is malleable and subject to creation” (44). However, Freud also shares another conception of the mind that is derived from his “therapeutic-practical assumptions” (44) and according to which the “mind deals with a reality which is quite fixed and static, a reality that is wholly ‘given’ and not (to use a phrase of Dewey’s) ‘taken’” (44). Trilling is baffled why Freud insists on the second view even though the “reality to which he wishes to reconcile the neurotic patient is, after all, a ‘taken’ and not a ‘given’ reality” (44), to be precise, the “reality of social life and value, conceived and maintained by the human mind and will. Love, morality, honour, esteem – these are the components of a created reality” (44-45). From this point of view, “we must call most of the activities and satisfactions of the ego illusions” (45), just as art is an illusion, which is not something that Freud wants to do at all. Trilling then asks what is the difference between the dream and neurosis, on the one hand, and art on the other. Unconscious processes are at work in both, they share the element of fantasy. But the difference between them is that the “poet is in command of his own fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy”
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(45). Secondly, the “illusions of art are made to serve the purpose of a closer and truer relation with reality” (45). Freud’s “assumption of the almost exclusively hedonistic nature and purpose of art bar him from the perception of this” (45). Freud does admit that there is a distinction between the artist and the neurotic in that the former “knows how to find a way back from the world of imagination and ‘once more get a firm foothold in reality’” (45). But this means simply, in Trilling’s view, that the artist returns to the real world “once he suspends the practice of his art” (45-46). All in all, Freud does not deny to art its function and its usefulness; it has a therapeutic effect in releasing mental tension; it serves the cultural purpose of acting as a ‘substitute gratification’ to reconcile ment to the sacrifices thet made for culture’s sake; it promotes the social sharing of highly valued emotional experiences; and it recalls men to their cultural ideas. (46). III
Trilling summarises his argument by saying that his point h as been that “Freud’s ideas could tell us something about art” (46) but that “Freud’s very conception of art is inadequate” (46). Freud, Trilling suggests, is very aware of the limits of the “application of the analytic met hod to specific works of art” (45). However, Freud does believe that it accomplishes two things: “explain the ‘inner meanings’ of the work of art and explain the temperament of the artist as man” (47). Freud’s and, later, Jones’ interpretation of Hamlet, for example, “undertakes not only the clearing up of the mystery of Hamlet’s character, but also the discovery of ‘the clue to much of the deeper workings of Shakespeare’s mind” (47 ), as well as “what Freud calls ‘the mystery of its effect’” (47). Given that, according to Freud, the “meaning of a dream is its intention” (47) and that the meaning of a play is also its intention, Jones sought to :discover what it was that Shakespeare intended to say about Hamlet” (47). This was “wrapped by the author in a dreamlike obscurity because it touched so deeply both his personal life and the moral life of the world” (48). What Freud and Jones asserted is that “what Shakespeare intended to say is that Hamlet cannot act because he is incapacitated by the guilt he feels at his unconscious attachment to his mother” (48). Similarly, Freud asserts that the “meaning of King Lear is to be found in the tragic refusal of an old man to ‘renounce love, choose death, and make friends with the necessity of dying” (48)l. However, in Trilling’s view, this is “not t he meaning of King Lear any more than the Oedipus motive is t h e meaning of Hamlet” (48). Trilling is of this view because he believes that there is “no single meanin g to any work of art” (48) as attested to by “historical and personal experience” (49): Changes in historical context and in personal mood change the meaning of a work and indicate to us that artistic understanding is not a question of fact but of value. Even if the author’s intention were, as it cannot be precisely determinable, the meaning of a work cannot lie in the author’s intention alone. It must also lie in its effect. . . . In short, the audience partly determines the meaning of the work. (49) Freud seems to hint at this but assumes that the effect of a play like Hamlet is “single and brought about solely by the ‘magical’ power of the Oedipus motive to which, unconsciously, we so violently respond” (49). The thing is, though, that Hamlet’s appeal and impact is historically and culturally variable. Trilling points out that just as Bacon “remarked that experiment may twist nature on the rack to wring out its secrets” (49), so too “criticism may use any inst ruments upon a work of art to find its meanings” (49). However, one form of “research into the mind of the artist is simply not practicable” (49): the “investigation of his unconscious intention as it exists apart from the work itself” (50). It is difficult enough to determine the “artist’s statement of
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his conscious intention” (50), therefore how “much less can we know from his unconscious intention considered as something apart from the whole work?” (50). The answer: “very little that can be called conclusive or scientific” (50). The biggest hindrance is the absence of the author himself: we must interpret the symbols which comprise his ‘dream-text’ without reference to the “dreamer’s free association with the multit udinous details of his dream” (50). Trilling then turns his attention to the view that an artwork reveals much about the mind of the artist which in turn sheds light on the artwork. Jones credits, on the basis of only the flimsiest of evidence, Hamlet with more importance in Shakespeare’s oeuvre than it necessarily has and, on these grounds, proceeds to claim that there is a link between the “inner meaning of the play” (51) and the “deeper workings of Shakespeare’s mind” (51). Trilling hastens to add that it is not his intention to dismiss a psychoanalytic reading. Far from it. Rather, he is of the view that he best practitioners of psychoanalytic criticism are those who have “surrendered the early pretensions . . . to deal ‘scientifically’ with literature” (51). More recent work “pretends not to ‘solve’ but only to illuminate the subject” (51). Such a nuanced approach produces interpretations that are not “exclusive of other meanings” (51) for the simple reason that it does not assume that “there is a reality to which the play stands in the relation that a dream stands to the wish that generates it and from which it is inseparable” (52). IV
What then, Trilling wonders, does Freud contribute to our understanding of art? The value of Freud’s approach lies in his “whole conception of the mind” (52). Freudian psychology “makes poetry indigenous to the very constitution of the mind” (52). The mind is largely a “poetrymaking organ” (52), notwithstanding the fact that “between the unconscious mind and the finished poem there supervene the social intention and the formal control of the conscious mind” (52). “Freud has not merely naturalised poetry; he has discovered its status as a pioneer set tler, and he sees it as a method of thought” (53). Though he sees poetry as “unreliable and ineffective for conquering reality” (53), he is forced to make use of it himself, “as when he speaks of the topography of the mind and tells us with a kind of defiant apology that the metaphors of space relationship which is using are really most inexact since the mind is not a thing of space at all” (53). Vico in the eighteenth century “spoke of the metaphorical, imagistic languag e of the early stages of culture; it was left to Freud to discover how, in a scientific age, we still feel and think in figurative formations, and to create, what psychoanalysis is, a science of tropes, of metaphor and its variants, synecdoche and metonomy [sic]” (53). Moreover, Freud shows how the mind, in one of its parts, could work without logic, yet not without that directing purpose, that control of intent from which . . . logic springs. For the unconscious mind works without the syntactical conjunctions which are logic’s essence; It recognises no because , no therefore , no bu t ; such ideas as similarity, agreement, and community are expressed in dreams imagistically by compressing the elements into a unity. The unconscious mind in its struggle with the conscious always turns from the general to the concrete and finds the tangible trifle more congenial than the large abstraction. Freud discovered in the very organisation of the mind those mechanisms by which art makes its effects, such devices as the condensations of meanings and the displacement of accent. (53) In addition to this, Trilling writes, there are two other elements have great bearing on art and its study.
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In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Trilling contends, Freud offers both a “speculative attempt to solve a perplexing problem in clinical analysis” and an important contribution to the study of catharsis in tragedy à la Aristotle. Freud stumbles here upon certain facts that contradict his earlier theory that all dreams “have the intention of fulfilling the dreamer’s wishes. They are in the service of what Freud calls the pleasure principle, which is opposed to the reality principle” (54). However, he was forced to reconsider this view of dreams in the light of traumatic events like shellshock where the patient “recurred in his dreams to the very situation, distressing as it was, which had precipitated his neurosis” (54). There is no “hedonistic intent” (54) to and very little distortion of such dreams in that the patient “recurred to the terrible initiatory situation with great literalness” (54). This was also true of children’s games which, in some cases, “far from fulfilling wishes, seemed to concentrate upon the representation of those aspects of the child’s life which were most unpleasant and threatening to his happiness” (54-55). To solve these problems, Freud posits the existence of a “repetition-compulsion which goes beyond the pleasure principle” (55), the “intent” (55) of which is the “developing of fear” (55). That is, the dream is the effort to reconstruct the bad situation in order that the failure to meet it may be recouped; in these dreams there is no obscured intent to evade but only an attempt to meet the situation, to make a new effort of control. And in the play of children it seems to be that ‘the child repeats even the unpleasant experiences because through his own activity he gains a far more thorough mastery of the strong impression than was possible by mere passive experience.’ (55) There are implications of this for our understanding of tragedy. The pleasure involved therein is an “ambiguous one” (55), partly a “glossing over terror with beautifu l language rather than the evacuation of it” (55), partly the “stark” (55) expression of this terror. However, there is another “function for tragedy” (55): “tragedy is used as the homeopathic administration of pain to inure ourselves to the greater pain which life will force upon us” (56). From this perspective, tragedy affords us a “sense of active mastery” (56) of an unpalatable reality. Also in this essay, Freud suggests that there is a “hu man drive which makes of death the final and desired goal” (56), a view of “grandeur” (56) and “tragic courage i n acquiescence to fate” (56). Freud offers, in Trilling’s view, a vision of man allied to that of Copernicus and Darwin and partly designed, seemingly, to undermine human pride. Yet, he avers, the “Freudian man is . . . a creature of far more dignity and far more interest” (57) than any other modern model. For Freud, man is not to be conceived by any simple formula (such as sex) but is rather an inextricable tangle of culture and biology. And not being simple, he is not simply good; he has . . . a kind of hell within him from which rise everlastingly the impulses which threaten his civilisation. (57) “His desire for man is only that he should be human, and to th is end his science is devoted” (57).
