FREUD AND LITERATURE Lionel Trilling (Detailed Summary)

                                                     FREUD AND LITERATURE

Lionel Trilling

(Detailed Summary)

 

Trilling was an American literary critic and teacher who brought psychological, sociological, and philosophical methods and insights into criticism. His critical writings include studies of Matthew Arnold (1939) and E.M. Forster (1943), as well as collections of literary essays: The Liberal Imagination (1950), Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (1965).

 

Trilling maintained an interest in Freud and psychoanalysis throughout his career. However, he never based his criticism on any one system of thought. His attitude to criticism was similar to that of Matthew Arnold: (the) “disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best ... known and thought in the world.”

 

Thus, Trilling brought a wide range of ideas and positions to criticism. He remained loyal (like E. M. Forster) to the tradition of humanistic thought. His goal was to educate and stimulate the enlightened middle classes.

Nathan Glick, [writing in the Atlantic Magazine (July 2000)] praises Trilling as "the Last Great Critic."

 

·      Trilling, says Glick, became in the postwar years and remains today the "most influential, most admired, and at the same time most controversial and perplexing literary critic, a sorcerer who took no apprentices."

 

Trilling admired Freud enormously for recognizing the dark side of life and courageously “discovering and telling unpalatable truths”.

 

Trilling also believed that the great modern writers -- Lawrence and Kafka, Yeats and Eliot, Joyce and Proust, Mann and Conrad –offered subversive attitudes toward the basic tenets of liberal democracy. He found the abyss of terrors and mysteries in their works. But Trilling was unhappy that teaching the Works of the great moderns under the "respectable auspices of a university course simply legitimized and defanged" the subversive elements.

 

FREUD AND LITERATURE (1940) is an extract from The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. 

 

 

Trilling believes that Freud offers “a systematic account of the human mind”. The psychoanalytical theory has a profound impact on literature.

 

Yet the relationship is reciprocal, and the effect of Freud upon literature has been no greater than the effect of literature upon Freud.

 

On his 70th birthday celebrations, one of the speakers in the meeting described Freud as “the discoverer of the unconscious”. Freud corrected the speaker and stated: 

 

The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied. 

 

Influences on Freud

 

Next, Trilling speaks about the influences on Freud—

 

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche anticipated his ideas. But Freud did not read their works. Trilling comments: “… particular influences cannot be in question here but that what we must deal with is nothing less than a whole Zeitgeist, a direction of thought”.

 

Psychoanalysis is the culmination of the spirit of the Romantics. The Romantics thought that science stood on the shoulders of literature. They believed that literature was a scientific search into the self.

 

The connection between Freud and the Romanticist tradition

 

In any discussion of the above topic, it is “difficult to know where to begin”. But there is a “certain aptness” in starting with Rameau's Nephew (Denis Diderot). Thinkers and philosophers at “the heart of the nineteenth century” found “a peculiar importance in this brilliant little work”. Goethe translated it, Marx admired it, and Hegel praised and expounded it in detail. Shaw was impressed by the book, and Freud read it with “the pleasure of agreement”. 

 

The book is in the form of a dialogue between Diderot himself and a nephew. “The protagonist, the younger Rameau, is a despised, outcast, shameless fellow”. He breaks down all the “normal social values and makes new combinations with the pieces.” Diderot is “honest consciousness”. Hegel considers him reasonable, decent, and dull. 

 

Rameau is lustful and greedy, arrogant yet self-abasing, perceptive yet "wrong," like a child. Still, Diderot seems actually to be giving the fellow a kind of superiority over himself, as though Rameau represents the elements which, dangerous but wholly necessary, lie beneath the reasonable decorum of social life. It would perhaps be pressing too far to find in Rameau Freud's id and in Diderot Freud's ego, yet the connection does suggest itself…

 

Here, we have the perception that is 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 visible”. 

 

The Romantics believed in the hidden thing in the human soul. The hidden element takes many forms, and it is not necessarily "dark" and "bad"; for Blake, the "bad" was good, while for Wordsworth and Burke, what was hidden and unconscious was wisdom and power…

 

Blake, Wordsworth and Burke did not believe in the wisdom of mere analytical reason.

 

Trilling draws our attention to the sexual revolution demanded by Shelley, George Sand, and Ibsen as examples of “distinctly Freudian” elements in literature. Similarly, the belief in the sexual origins of art shared by Schopenhauer and Stendhal, the “ambivalent” feeling in Dostoevsky, and the “death wish” in Novalis display different traits of Freudian principles.  

 

Freudian influences on Mind and Dreams

 

“The mind has become far less simple; the devotion to the various forms of autobiography” provides abundant examples of the change that has taken place in human thoughts. We see “the effective utilitarian ego” relegated to an inferior position and “the anarchic and self-indulgent id” gaining prominence. We also come across an “energetic exploitation of the idea of the mind as a divisible thing, one part of which can contemplate and mock the other”.

 The profound interest in dreams is another feature of the same period. "Our dreams," said Gerard de Nerval, "are a second life.” The dreams as metaphor climax in Rimbaud and the later Symbolists.

Freud, Proust and Eliot

 

Trilling admits that Freudian principles developed from the components of Zeitgeist noted above. In that case, should we claim that Freud produced a vast literary effect? Despite the dominance of Freudian elements in Proust (the investigation of sleep and sexual deviation, “the almost obsessive interest” in metaphor), we know that Proust did not read Freud. Again, the "exegesis of The Waste Land often reads remarkably like the psychoanalytic interpretation of a dream, yet we know that Eliot's methods were prepared for him not by Freud but by other poets”.

 

Nevertheless, Freudian influence on literature has indeed been very great. Much of it is so pervasive that its extent is difficult to determine. It has been “infused into our life and become a component of our culture of which it is now hard to be specifically aware”.

 

Using Freud Seriously

 

Only a relatively small number of writers have made use of Freud seriously.

·      The Surrealists used him for the "scientific" sanction of their program. 

·      Kafka explored the Freudian conceptions of guilt and punishment, the dream, and the "fear of the father". 

·      Thomas Mann “has been most susceptible to the Freudian anthropology, finding a special charm in the theories of myths and magical practices”. 

·      James Joyce has "most thoroughly and consciously" exploited Freudian ideas--“receding consciousness”, use of words that indicate more than one thing, etc. 

 

Rationalistic side of Psychoanalysis

 

Thomas Mann thought that the rationalistic side of psychoanalysis is secondary and even accidental. He pictures a Freud committed to the "night side" of life. On the other hand, Trilling believes the rationalistic element is primary in Freud. Freud believed passionately in rationalism. For him, it was “the chief intellectual virtue”. 

 

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 its field of vision, and so to extend the organization of the id." "Where id was,"-that is, where all the irrational, non-logical, pleasure-seeking dark forces were-"there shall ego be,"-that is, intelligence and control. "It is," he concludes … "reclamation work, like the draining of the Zuyder Zee."

 

Freud would never have accepted the role (which Mann seems to give him) as “the legitimizer of the 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.

 Views on art

Freud has much to tell us about art. He was never insensitive to art.  He speaks of it with a “real tenderness and counts it one of the true charms of the good life”. He regards writers with “admiration and even a kind of awe.”

Art as “substitute gratification.”

 

And yet Freud speaks of art with contempt. Art, he tells us, is a "substitute gratification" and "an illusion in contrast to reality." Unlike most illusions, art is "almost always harmless and beneficent" as "it does not seek to be anything but an illusion”.

 

Art serves as a "narcotic." It shares the characteristics of the dream, whose element of distortion Freud calls a "sort of inner dishonesty." As for the artist, he is virtually in the same category as the neurotic. Freud says of the hero (of a novel):  "By such separation of imagination and intellectual capacity," he is a poet or a neurotic and belongs not to this world.

 

Analytical therapy and illusion

 

Trilling asserts that Freud’s views are not based on psychoanalytical thought but on the practice of psychoanalytical therapy. Analytical therapy deals with illusion. “The patient comes to the physician to be cured, let us say, of a fear of walking in the street”. The fear is real enough, but the patient knows there is no cause. The physician knows it is within the patient. The therapy attempts to discover the real reason and free the patient from its effects. The treatment undertakes to train the patient in the proper ways of coping with this reality. 

 

Dream, Neurosis, and Art.

 

Dream, neurosis and art have common elements-- unconscious processes work in them, and they share "elements of fantasy". 

 

Charles Lamb had seen the variations between them: "The ... poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject but he has dominion over it... The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy”. 

 

The differences between the artist and the neurotic 

 

Freud is aware of the differences between the artist and the neurotic. He tells us that the artist is unlike the neurotic because he knows how to find a way back from the world of imagination and "once more get a firm foothold in reality." Freud does not deny art its function and usefulness; it has a therapeutic effect in releasing mental tension; it serves the cultural purpose of acting as a "substitute gratification.” Art promotes the social sharing of highly valued emotional experiences and recalls men to their "cultural ideals". 

 

The autonomy of the artist

 

Freud has no desire to trespass upon the autonomy of the artist. "The psychiatrist cannot yield to the author. The author cannot yield to the psychiatrist".  

 

The commoner may expect too much from psychoanalysis, but it throws no light on the two problems that bother him most. It cannot elucidate the artistic gift or explain how the artist works.

 

The analytical method can do two things--explain the inner meanings of the work of art and the artist's temperament.

 

A famous example of the analytical method is the attempt to solve the "problem" of Hamlet as suggested by Freud and as carried out by

 Dr Ernest Jones, his early and distinguished follower.

 

Ernest Jones and the mystery of Hamlet

 

Dr. Jones tried to clear the mystery of Hamlet. He believed that Hamlet gives the clue to the workings of Shakespeare’s mind.

Mystery in the play

 

Why does Hamlet hesitate to avenge the murder of his father? What is the secret of the magical appeal of the play?

Jones believes that it is not solely on the impressive thoughts and the splendour of the language. It is something beyond this.

 

1. Freud says, “the meaning of a dream is its intention”. “The meaning of a drama is its intention”.

2. According to Jones, the play has a dream-like quality. It touched on the personal and moral life of Shakespeare. Jones thinks that it shows the author’s unconscious attachment to his mother.

 

We do not quarrel with the assumptions of Jones. But it must be remembered that there is no single meaning to any work of art. Changes in the historical and personal mood transform a work of art. It makes art richer. The meaning of a work does not lie in the author’s intention. It also does not lie in the effect of the work. The audience partly determines the value of a work. The mystery of Hamlet is not uniform.

 

Moreover, the elements of art are not limited to art. They reach into life. To find out the mind of the artist is not practical. Jones’ assumption that Hamlet is central to Shakespeare’s character is a purely subjective assessment.

 

When Freud speaks about the “magical power” of the Oedipus motive, he believes that historically, Hamlet's effect had been uniform. “Yet there was a period when Hamlet was relatively in eclipse, and it has always been scandalously true of the French, a people not without filial feeling, that they have been somewhat indifferent to the "magical appeal" of Hamlet”.

 

Psychoanalysis and Henry IV

 

Dr Franz Alexander analyses Henry IV. 

The attempt is not to solve the problems in the drama but only to "illumine" them. Prince Hal’s struggle is the struggle between the ego and the superego. Hal is the ego, and Hotspur is the superego. Before overcoming the superego, Hotspur, Hal has to conquer his ‘id’ – Falstaff. The ‘id’ is "anarchic self-indulgence" seen through the character of Falstaff. Dr Alexander is not looking for hidden motives in the drama. He simply tries to explain it.

 

Freud’s achievements

 

Freud tried to show that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind. The mind is seen as a poetry-making organ. 

Poetry is seen as a method of thought though unreliable and ineffective for conquering reality. The mind is one of its parts that could work without logic. “It recognizes no ‘because’, no ‘therefore’, no ‘but’.”

 

Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

 

In "Beyond the Pleasure Principle", Freud puts forward a new idea that supplements the Aristotelian theory of Catharsis. The earlier notion was that all dreams originate from the efforts to fulfil the wishes. The pleasure principle worked in dreams. Freud reconsiders this view in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle". He feels that in cases of war neurosis – shell shock- the patient recollects the experience with utmost anguish; hence, no "pleasure principle" is involved.

 

In psychic life, there is repetition compulsion that goes beyond the pleasure principle. This traumatic neurosis is an attempt to mithridatize.  (A term from medical sciences, where a patient gets small doses of poison administered. The dosage is increased gradually, and, ultimately, the patient becomes immune to poison). The nightmare that a person sees is an attempt to overcome a bad situation. By repeating the same, he makes a new effort to control it.

 

In his theory of the effect of tragedy, Aristotle glossed over this function. The terror we experience when we see the bleeding sightless eyes of Oedipus has no "cathartic" effect. Seeing this painful sight of the blind Oedipus, we become immune to the "greater" pain that life may inflict on us.

 

Freud says that human pride is the ultimate cause of human wretchedness. Freud’s man has more dignity than any other system can give. He is an inextricable tangle of culture and biology. He is not simply good.  There is hell within him waiting to engulf the whole civilization. For everything he gains, he pays in equal coin.

[2625 words]

Dr. S. Sreekumar, Retd. Professor of English

Disclaimer 

All the essays in this blog are for the undergraduate and postgraduate students of Indian Universities. They do not substitute the originals.  The students must necessarily go through the original texts. The writer hopes to help the students from the underdeveloped areas of our country.