Page 127 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Digvijay Pandya, Lovely Professional University Unit 11: Freud and Literature—Lionel Trilling: Detailed Study

Unit 11: Freud and Literature—Lionel Trilling: Notes
Detailed Study

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
11.1 Text—Freud and Literature
11.2 Summary
11.3 Key-Words
11.4 Review Questions
11.5 Further Readings

Objectives

After reading this Unit students will be able to:
• Understand Freud and Literature.
• Discuss Trilling Views on Freud and Literature.
Introduction

Trilling discusses the relationships that exist between Freud and literature. Beginning with the
statement that psychoanalysis may be viewed as a culmination of the nineteenth-century Romantic
movement in literature, Trilling develops a striking thesis that revolves around the delineation of
three Romantic hallmarks: devotion to research into the self, recognition of the hidden element in
human behavior, and the concept of the mind as a divisible entity. While all these items are
undoubtedly part of the Freudian base, Trilling suggests that Freud added a rationalistic anti-
Romantic construct to the system, viewing the final aim of psychoanalysis as control of the impulses-
- "where id was, there shall ego be." In critical, but not unsympathetic fashion, Trilling regards
Freud's views on the artist as somewhat narrow and undertakes at some length to reconcile
certain contradictions. A picture of the difference between the creative artist and the neurotic
ultimately emerges; the former in command of his fantasies, the latter possessed by them. Trilling
feels that Freud's conception of the mind as imagistic "naturalizes" poetry. The entire Freudian
depiction of the unconscious both opens and complicates the world for the artist, and Freudian
man is seen as a "creature of far more dignity and far more interest than the man which any other
modern system has been able to conceive--an inextricable tangle of culture and biology."
11.1 Text—Freud and Literature

I
The Freudian approach to psychology is, Trilling argues, the "only systematic account of the
human mind" which is comparable "in point of subtlety and complexity, of interest and tragic
power" to the "mass of psychological insights which literature has accumulated through the
centuries". 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 upon which the poet has always exercised his art.
This is why psychoanalysis has had a great impact on the study of literature. Of course, the effect
is "reciprocal, and the effect of Freud upon literature has been no greater than the effect of literature

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 121