Page 129 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

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

II Notes
Much of Freud's thought, Trilling argues, has "significant affinity with the anti-rationalist element
of the Romanticist tradition" . However, "much of his system is militantly rationalistic" . 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" .
Though Mann, "gives us a Freud who is committed to the 'night side' of life" , Trilling argues, the
"rationalistic element of Freud is foremost; before everything else he is positivistic" . The "interpreter
of dreams came to medical science" by way of Goethe's scientific "disquisition on Nature", not via
his Faust. For Freud, "positivistic rationalism . . . is the very form and pattern of intellectual
virtue". Such an understanding is necessary for an appreciation of "Freud's attitude to art".
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 id was,' - that is, where all the irrational, non-logical, pleasure-
seeking dark forces were - 'there ego shall be,' that is, intelligence and control.
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
determinism, 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 sophisticate with metaphysics the
scientific principles that were good enough for the nineteenth century. "Conceptualism or
pragmatism is anathema to him through the greater part of his intellectual career" .
For Trilling, Freud's "rationalistic positivism" 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". Its weakness has to do with the "often naive scientific principles
which characterise his early thought" and which consisted largely in "claiming for his theories a
perfect correspondence with an external reality" that cannot be substantiated.
Freud has "much to tell us about art" , Trilling stresses, and about writers who provide "specific
emotional insights and observations" derived from an understanding of the "part played by the
hidden motives". For this reason, "literary men" are the "precursors and coadjutors of his own
science" . Art, Freud writes, is a "'substitute gratification'" and an "'illusion in contrast to reality'".
Its effect is "'almost always harmless and beneficent'" and is something of a "'narcotic'" and "shares
the characteristics of the dream, whose element of distortion Freud calls a 'sort of inner dishonesty'".
The artist is "in the same category with the neurotic".
Trilling is of the view that it is understandable how Freud, "unprotected by an adequate philosophy",
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 neurosis from which our patient
suffers deals with an external reality which the mind considers still more unpleasant than the
painful neurosis itself.
These are, for Freud, the "polar extremes of reality and illusion" or, more precisely, "practical
reality and neurotic illusion". Reality basically "means what is there", while illusion "means a
response to what is not there". The "essentially Freudian view assumes that the mind, for good as

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