Page 139 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 12: Freud and Literature—Lionel Trilling: Critical Appreciation

appreciates in literature are specific emotional insights and observations ; he speaks of literary Notes
men, because they have understood the part played in life by the hidden motives, as the
precursors and coadjutors of his own science.
And yet eventually Freud speaks of art with what we must indeed call contempt. Art, he tells us,
is a 'substitute gratification', and as such is 'an illusion in contrast to reality'. Unlike most
Illusions, however, art is 'almost always harmless and beneficent' for the reason that 'it does not
seek to be anything but an illusion. Save in the case of a few people who are, one might say,
obsessed by Art, it never dares make any attack on the realm of reality.' One of its chief functions
is to serve 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 with
the neurotic. 'By such separation of imagination and intellectual capacity', Freud says of the hero
of a novel, 'he is destined to be a poet or a neurotic, and he belongs to that race of beings whose
realm is not of this world.'
Now there is no in the logic of psycho-analytical thought which requires Freud to have these
opinions. But there is a great deal in the practice of the psycho-analytical therapy which makes it
understandable that Freud, unprotected by an adequate philosophy, should be tempted to take
that he does. The 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, there is no lllusion on
that score, and it produces all the physical symptoms of a more rational fear, the sweating
palms, pounding heart and shortened breath. But the patient knows that there is no cause for the
fear-or, rather, that there is, as he says, no 'real came': there are no machine-guns, man-traps or
tigers in the street. The physician knows, however, that there is indeed a 'real' cause for the fear,
though it has nothing at all to do with what is or is not in the street; the cause is within the
patient, and the process of the therapy will be to discover, by gradual steps, what this real cause
is and so free the patient from its effects.
Now the patient, in coming to the physician, and the physician in accepting the patient, make a
tacit compact about reality; for their purpose they agree to the limited reality by which we get
our living, win our loves, catch our trains and our colds. The therapy will undertake to train the
patient in proper ways of coping with this reality. The patient, of course, has been dealing with
this reality all along, but in the wrong way. 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 organization over the id, and it is the
right way. The antithetical way may be called, for our purpose now, 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 day-dreaming
in which we give ourselves a certain pleasure by imagining our difficulties solved or our desires
gratified. Then, too, as Freud discovered, 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. For Freud as psycho-analytic practitioner there are, we may say, the polar
extremes of reality and illusion. Reality is an honorific word, and it means what is there; lllusion
is a pejorative word, and it means a response to what is not there. The didactic nature of a course
of psycho-analysis no doubt requires a certain firm crudeness in malign the distinction; it is, after
all, aimed not at theoretical refinement but at practical effectiveness. The polar extremes are
practical reality and neurotic illusion, the latter judged by the former. This, no doubt, is as it
should be; the patient is not being trained in metaphysics and epistemology.
12.2 Plot and Major Characters

Of This Time, Of That Place and Other Stories is comprised of five stories, all of which had been
published previously in periodicals. "Impediments," originally published in Menorah Journal in
1925, is the account of an uncomfortable encounter between two university students. "The Other

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