FREUD AND LITERATURE - Lionel Trilling

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 endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.” Therefore, Trilling brought a wide range of ideas and positions to his criticism. He always 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) praised Trilling as ‘the Last Great Critic’. Trilling, says Glick, “became in the postwar years and remains today our 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 his recognition of the dark side of life and for his courage in discovering and telling unpalatable truths. He also believed that the great modern writers -- D. H. Lawrence and Franz Kafka, Yeats and Eliot, Joyce and Proust, Mann and Conrad –offered a subversive attitude towards the basic tenets of liberal democracy.  In their works he found the abyss of terrors and mysteries. 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.

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

            Trilling believes that Freudian psychology offers a systematic account of the human mind.

Psychoanalytical theory had a great impact on literature. But “the effect of Freud on literature has been no greater than the effect of literature on Freud”. When his 70^th birthday was celebrated, one of the speakers in the meeting described him 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”.

Next Trilling speaks about the influences on Freud—

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche anticipated his ideas. But Freud did not read their works. It is nothing but the zeitgeist (the direction of thought of that era). Psycho- analysis is the culmination of the spirit of the Romantics. The Romantics thought that science is standing on the shoulders of literature. They believed that literature itself is a scientific search into the self.

The Romantics believed in the hidden thing in the human soul. Blake, Wordsworth and Burke did not believe in the wisdom of mere analytical reason.

Freud’s Contribution to Literature

Trilling speaks about the influence Freud had on literature. Kafka explored Freudian concepts of guilt and punishment. Joyce and Thomas Mann looked at the rational side of Freud who was “committed to the night side of life”.

Freud believed that the aim of psychoanalysis is to consider ‘the night side of life’. It is to make the ego more independent of the superego, to widen its field of vision and so to extend the field of vision and 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 reclamation work, like the draining of the Zyder Zee.  [Zyder Zee is a shallow bay of the North Sea in Netherlands]

Freud’s Views on Art.

Freud considered art as one of the charms of life. He speaks with admiration about the artists. Writers understood the motives of men.

Yet sometimes he speaks with contempt about art. Art is substitute gratification – an illusion in contrast to reality. But unlike other illusions art is harmless and beneficent that ‘it does not seek to be anything but an illusion’.

Art serves as a narcotic. Freud thinks that artist is in the same category as the neurotic. Freud believed that there are two ways of dealing with reality. The practical and effective way of the conscious self. The antithetical way or the ‘fictional’ way.

“The poet dreams being awake. His subject does not possess him but he has dominion over it. The poet is in command of his fantasy. The neurotic has very little command over it. The artist is not like the neurotic. He knows a way back from his fantasy”. Art has a therapeutic function in releasing mental tension. It promotes the social sharing of highly valued emotional experience. It recalls men to their cultural ideals.

Freud has no desire to encroach upon the autonomy of the artist. The psychiatrist cannot yield to the author. The author cannot yield to the psychiatrist. Laymen may expect too much from psychoanalysis. But it must be remembered that it does not throw light on the two problems that bother him most. It can do nothing towards elucidating the artistic gift. It cannot explain the way in which the artist works. Analytical method can do two things. It can explain the inner meanings of the work of art. It can explain the temperament of the artist.

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 Hamlet did not 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 splendor 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 is wrapped in a dream like quality. It touched Shakespeare’s personal and moral life. Jones thinks that it shows the playwright’s unconscious attachment to his mother.

We have no 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 mood and changes in the personal mood change the meaning of a work of art. It makes art a richer thing. 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.

More over 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’s assumption that Hamlet is central to Shakespeare’s character is a purely subjective assessment.

PSYCHO ANALYSIS AND HENRY IV

Dr. Franz Alexander analyses the drama Henry IV. But his attempt is not to solve the problems in the drama but only to illumine it. Prince Hal’s struggle in the drama is seen as the struggle between the ego and the superego. Hal is the ego and Hotspur is the superego. Before conquering 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. 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 in one of its parts could work without logic. The unconscious mind works without any logic. “It recognizes no ‘because’, no ‘therefore’, no ‘but’.”

Freud  and ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’.

(This point is very important – S. Sree Kumar)

Freud puts forward a new idea in his essay ‘Beyond the Pleasure   Principle’. This new idea supplements Aristotle’s notion of Catharsis. Freud’s earlier theory was that all dreams could be understood as the effort to fulfill the dreamer’s 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. Here no ‘pleasure principle’ is involved.

Freud says that in psychic life there is a repetition compulsion that goes beyond the pleasure principle. This traumatic neurosis is an attempt to mythridatize (another term from medical science, where a patient is administered small doses of poison. Ultimately, the dosage is increased and he becomes immune to poison). The nightmare that a person sees is an attempt to overcome a bad situation. By repeating it he is making 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 little cathartic function. Seeing this painful sight of the blind Oedipus, we become immune to the greater pain that life may inflict on us.

Freud says that in 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 a hell within him that is waiting to engulf the whole civilization. For everything he gains, he pays in equal coin.

Notes By Dr. S. Sreekumar