16 Lionel Trilling and Sigmund Freud as Literary Critics

Dr. Valiur Rehman

Objectives

This module presents Lionel Trilling and Sigmund Freud as literary critics. This module will help understand Lionel Trilling’s essay “Freud and Literature”, discussed in the next module. The module aims at explaining Trilling’s opinion about the influence of Freud’s Psychoanalysis on Literature and its value in Literature on the one hand, the influences of Literature on Freud as a Psychoanalytic critic on the other. The module also presents Trilling as a critic with special reference to his concept of “liberal imagination”.

Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) and his Contemporaries 

Lionel Trilling was an American literary critic. He was contemporary of T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, the new critics, and critics belonging to the Chicago School of Criticism: R. S. Crane, Richard McKeon, and Elder Olson. German existentialist Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), French phenomenological and surrealist poet Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962), the Existentialist Jean- Paul Sartre (1905–1980), Georges Poulet (1902–1991), Jean-Pierre Richard (b. 1922), and Georges Bataille (1897–1962) were also his contemporary writers.

Lionel Trilling married to Diana Rubin in 1929. Both Diana Rubin and Lionel Trilling were the members of the New York Intellectuals (1930-50). Trilling’s wrote The Liberal Imagination (1950), Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture (1955), The Opposing Self (1955), Beyond Culture (1965), Mind in the Modern World (1972), and Sincerity and Authenticity (1972). He was not obsessive with any particular literary dimension. As a critic, he appreciated the spectrum of literature and explication of literature.

Lionel Trilling as a literary critic 

Trilling was a self-claimed liberal or democratic socialist. He read literature from sociological, psychological and ethical points of view. These three point of views exposit strength of literature. He thinks that man revolves around the entities of the self, society and morality. Literature is the best medium of exposition of these three entities. This is the reason why he observes literature as exposition of cosmopolitan self, society and morality or a cosmopolitan writing. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Iago, Othello, Osborn’s Jimmy, Conrad’s Marlow and Kurtz so on are the characters of literature. This is true. And, since they represent our psyche, one of the selves of our society, they challenge our established society; therefore they are pertinent scepters that control our existence. This feature of literature exemplifies the logic behind Iago or Hamlet so on still exist, though they are results of the poets’ imagination and are words in books and nothing more. For Trilling, literature is an ever living and existing phenomenon. For reading literature, one should have multiple perspectives. A peculiar perspective or obsession with a particular point of view of a reader will fetch him nothing but a simple narration of story related to a piece of publication.

He wrote in his preface to Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society that literature represents the complexity of human life and the critic’s task is to observe the characters living under complexities. To quote him:

The job of criticism would seem to be, then, to recall liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty. To the carrying out of the job of criticizing the liberal imagination, literature has a unique relevance, not merely because so much of modern literature has explicitly directed itself upon politics, but more importantly because literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

Observing the works of Edmund Wilson (1895-1977), the New York Intellectuals considered themselves aloof from bourgeois society, Commercialism, Stalinism, and the Mass Culture, René Wellek regards Trilling as a culture critic. He says:

Trilling belongs, with Edmund Wilson, to critics of culture, in particular American culture, and he is often concerned with questions of politics, pedagogy, psychology, and self-definition, which are only remotely related to literature. Politically Trilling preserved his “liberalism,” the term oddly used in the United States which, in economic convictions, means the opposite of what in England and on the continent of Europe had been the creed of liberalism: laissez-faire, free enterprise. Here it rather favors socialism or at least the welfare state. But liberalism for him means also a belief in progress, in humanitarianism, in human and civil rights, in equality for the Negro and, of course, the Jew, still discriminated against in the Academy.

Trilling loved to read Joyce, Jane Austen, Henry James, and E. M. Forster. The general tendency of his first book of essays, The Liberal Imagination (1950), is a plea that the liberal class be reconciled with modern literature.

As critic, Trilling looks for a link between “the political ideas of … educated class and the deep places of the imagination” in literature (LI: 99). His concept of “the liberal imagination” has exemplified this link. In fact, Trilling has illustrated the power and ethics of liberal mentality of the writers who reflect life in general without following the discrimination policies and prejudices. He connects this mentality with the characteristics of the Enlightenment. He offers an interdisciplinary approach to reading literature. As he describes his method of criticism in Beyond Culture (I960).

Since my own interests lead me to see literary situations as cultural situations, and cultural situations as great elaborate fights about moral issues, and moral issues as having something to do with literary style, I felt free to begin with what for me was a first concern, the animus of the author, the objects of his will, the things he wants or wants to have happen.

It is explicit that Lionel Trilling insists on reading a work of literary art from psychological, sociological, and ethical perspectives. For example, we can also see how he relates literary features with human psychology and vice versa:

In literature, as in our personal lives, the debate between the heroic and the anti-heroic principle would seem to be a natural rhythm of the psyche, an alternation of commitment to the superego, which is the repository of our governing ideals, and to the id, which is the locus of our instinctual drives. In the Renaissance, however, the heroic style of the superego was confronted with a new antagonism, that which was offered by the ego, the aspect of the self which has for its function the preservation of the self The heroic mode came under attack not only as being absurd in the grandiose elevation of its style and in the moral pretensions which this expressed, but also as standing in the way of the practical conduct of life.

Trilling is still regarded as an anarchist, but, his reputation as a critic is stamped with intellectual eclecticism. He never read any literary piece without relating it to representation of psyche, society and ethics. He always concerns himself with the responsibility of a writer to transform the mind of men of the period for the best human future.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) as literary critic 

Sigmund Freud’s unique contribution is always discussed with results of his study of mind, personality of man, and dream as satiable medium of human satisfaction. Freud was Austrian medical scholar, unexpectedly turned his research on the reasons of human activities. He as doctor developed many theories related to psychology of human activities and forces  after human activities. Few include theory of instinct, theory of dream, theory of mind, and theory of sex. These theories collectively resulted into what he called psychoanalysis as therapy. Many words like Oedipus complex, Electra complex, slip of the tongue/pen, and above all the concept of defense mechanism are the results of reading works of Sigmund Freud. Of all these intellectual attempts and experimentations, Freud is regarded as father of Psychoanalysis.

His career can be divided into two significant periods: before the World War and after. Freud before the War engaged himself to promotion and expansion of psychoanalysis as medical experiment and psychoanalytic literary criticism. He, therefore, establish schools, societies and forums for promoting his science. In developing psychoanalysis, he experimented with his idea of “free association” with his patients. According to Freud, the patients by knowing their conditions and sharing their views on medications and results express their minds unknot their problematic complexities. This helps the doctor cure his patients soon. Thus his contribution to the study of human life is inescapable. It may be a commonplace by now that we a11 speak Freud whether we know it or not, but the commonplace remains both true and important. Freud’s terminology and his essential ideas pervade contemporary ways of thinking about human feelings and conduct. Even critics who find psychoanalysis both as a therapy and as a theory of mind fatally flawed will catch themselves borrowing such Freudian categories as repression and narcissism to make knowing comments about the deeper meanings of slips, or resorting to the Oedipus complex to interpret family tensions (Peter Gay in Introduction to Freud Reader 1995).

For the first time in the history of European philosophy, the concept of dream as satisfying cause was occurred. As Freud pointed out in his first masterpiece, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) in arguing that dreams have meanings that can be understood and interpreted, he was taking the side of the unlettered and the superstitious against blind philosophers and obtuse psychologists. Over and over, Freud joined his audacious championship of innovative and troubling ideas to the lament that he had been for a long time a general without an army, a pioneer wholly alone and wholly unappreciated (Peter Gay 1995). It was not easy to believe for contemporary people. He discussed psychoanalysis as therapy in the essays entitled “Project for a Scientific Psychology”, “The Etiology of Hysteria”, “On Dreams”, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality”, “Family Romances”, “Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis”, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” and so on.

His essays entitled “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices”, “Creative Writers and Day- Dreaming”, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood”, “Totem and Taboo”, “The Theme of the Three Caskets”, “The Moses of Michelangelo”, and “Contribution to a Questionnaire on Reading” justify Freud a literary critic. These essays are further discussed with reference to his other essays “On Narcissism: An Introduction”, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes”, “Repression”, “The Unconscious”, and “Mouming and Melancholia”. Besides these experimental and conceptual works, Freud wrote The Future of an Illusion (1927) in which he maintains the view that religious faith is the outcome of fear of nature and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) which are considered as his significant works from points of views of culture studies.

As the first psychoanalytic critic, Freud investigates the influence of the unconscious of an author in literature and his mental attempts to recreate the facts through imagination. These recreations or representations of the unconscious, as he believes, are identical to the wishes buried or mystified in the unconscious of the audience. The identification of the author’s unconscious with that of the reader or audience reveals the function of literature i.e. pleasure in Freud’s terms. The concept of the mind of an author or an artist is compared with a dreamy human being or a person who lives with delusion and dream or in the world of the unconscious. In Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s “Gradiva” (1917), which is a psychoanalysis of an archaeologist called Hanold, a protagonist of Jenson’s short story “Gradiva”, Freud writes about the unconscious of an author: “the author no doubt proceeds differently. He directs his attention to the unconscious in his own mind, he listens to its possible developments and lends them artistic expression instead of suppressing them by conscious criticism. Thus he experiences from himself what we learn from others – the laws which the activities of the unconscious must obey” (1917). So, the writing is, for an author, a satisfying tool and, for a reader or audience, it is a tool of his identification with repressed wishes. The identification of the sentiments generate a self- evolving audience’s interest to literary arts. Thus, “Freud gave considerable thought to what made an artist produce a work of art and to how an artistic creation could have such an emotional impact on the spectator or reader”.

This is a matter of fact that Freud’s analysis of literary texts is not done for literary criticism but for exemplifying corollary of his clinical observation. However, the method is expanded by his follower Carl Jung and Earnest Jones. Carl Jung applied his theory of unconscious to understand mythical and archetypal subjects of the world whereas Jones followed Freudian model of the unconscious to read literary or imaginative figures and analyzed Greek and Elizabethan tragedies. Freud’s dream analysis of Henold, the protagonist of Jenson’s “Grediva”, and his delusion shows that our dreams fulfil our wishes mystified in the unconscious. His dissatisfied life without women or detachment from women exemplify his mythical world that is broken only when he visits Pompii. In the same manner, he analyzed Hamlet and proved him a victim of Oedipus complex who was later reexamined by Earnest Jones, Coleridge and T.S. Eliot.

Criticism of Freud’s Psychoanalysis as an approach to literature

Psychoanalysis is a complex phenomenon. It needs intensive specialization of the field to look into the matters related to psychology of human being. Freud continued justifying it a clinical practice, it could not be accepted as a medical or pathological subject because of its hypothetical or abstract analysis of mind, dream, and personality of man. Even in literature Freud remained a mystical figure till Lacan’s re-examination of Freud’s theory was explored with additional information related to human mind in a mirror stage and symbolic condition of human life. Derrida, in his “Geopsychoanalysis”, maintains the idea of psychoanalysis as a foreign concept to the Asian society esp. for Indians (Rahaman 2016). Freud is often criticized for the following reasons:

• He thinks that literary artists are day-dreamers and literature as satisfying cause of writer’s repression. A British psychoanalyst Hanna Segal counterpoints the Freudian concept of an author or an artist and asserts that an artist “is not only a dreamer, but a supreme artisan. An artisan may not be an artist, but an artist must be an artisan” (Segal 1991: 176).
• Irrational arguments for Oedipus complex and his exemplification from Hamlet.
• Psychoanalysis can occupy or equate pure medical sciences.
• Female sexuality and passive nature of female. Feminists criticize his phallocentric (Earnest Jones’ term) ideology. As Earnest Jones notes that “the most remarkable feature of the sexual life of man is its diphasic on set, its onset in two waves, with an interval between them. It reaches a first climax in the fourth or fifth year of a child’s life. But thereafter this early efflorescence of sexuality passes off; the sexual impulses which have shown such liveliness are overcome by repression, and a period of latency follows, which lasts until puberty and during which the reaction formations of morality, shame, and disgust are built up. Of all living creatures man alone seems to show this diphasic onset of sexual growth, and it may perhaps be the biological determinant of his predisposition to neuroses” (The Freud Reader 23). Further he adds: “At puberty the impulses and object-relations of a child’s early years become re-animated, and amongst them the emotional ties of its Oedipus complex. In the sexual life of puberty there is a struggle between the urges of early years and the inhibitions of the latency period. Before this, and while the child is at the highest point of its infantile sexual development, a genital organization of a sort is established; but only the male genitals play a part in it, and the female ones remain undiscovered. (I have described this as the period of phallic primacy.) At this stage the contrast between the sexes is not stated in terms of ‘male’ or ‘female’ but of ‘possessing a penis’ or ‘castrated’. The castration complex which arises in this connection is of the profoundest importance in the formation alike of character and of neuroses (Freud Reader 23 original parenthesis).

Freud was a versatile genius who did not confine his thinking, and writing, to the suffering men and women he saw before him on the couch day after day. It is true that his case histories, his papers on psychoanalytic technique, and his theoretical papers are at the heart of his thought. But he developed a theory of mind that he thought explained all of mental activity, normal and neurotic alike, and he applied that theory to virtually every aspect of culture: to the arts, to literature, to biography, to mythology, to religion, to politics, to education, to the law, to prehistory.

Trilling’s psychological perspectives to literary arts perhaps inspired him to trace psychological principles of life in literature existed before Freud’s principles of psychology, and Trilling argued for the standpoints that psychanalytic analysis of literary arts came after Freud. Lionel Trilling’s “Freud and Literature” is one of the best examples of such arguments. In this essay he criticizes extremist perspectives to literary arts and conceptualizes the theory of liberal imagination as creative force to reading and writing literature.

Trilling’s essay “Freud and Literature”

Lionel Trilling’s essay “Freud and Literature” was first published in J.C. Ransom’s  edited journal The Kenyan Review in 1940. The essay reappeared in a revised form in Horizon in 1947. Lionel Trilling finally collected the essay as a chapter in his book The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society and published it in 1950. The essay discusses the problems of psychoanalysis as an analytic method of understanding Literature: His ideas maybe enumerated as mentioned below:

1. Psychoanalysis is an experimental, and, apparatuses of Psychoanalysis are identical in Romanticism.
2. An author’s intention or motive cannot tell everything related to his art.
3. Freud’s hedonism and cynicism did not let him realize an inseparable disposition of reality and illusion.
4. Literature must be read with reference to its historical context. Each reading then becomes an interpretation, which carries specific effect of literature and establishes the perennial value of literature.
5. Both Aristotle and Freud have justified the Hedonist function of Literature. Aristotle, for Trilling, has defined the value of Tragedy for its effect to clean the mind of the audience i.e. “cathartic effect” Freud renamed Literature for its effect and called it “traumatic neurosis”. In this reference, Trilling expounded the concept of ‘mithridatic function’ of literature.

In “Freud and Literature,” Trilling has, thus, critically elaborated these issues with special attention to Freud as literary critic. For Trilling, Freud has influenced the writers and artists of coming generation, being he influenced by the greatest literary canons of the world.

Reference

• Freud, Sigmund Interpretation of Dream, translated from the German and edited by James Strachey, Basic Books, NY, 2010. p. 282-3
• Freud, Sigmund. Part III, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey, Norton 1961 Trilling, Lionel. “Freud and Literature” in Liberal Imagination (1949), USA: Viking Press. 1950. pp34-57.
• Jones, Ernest. Hamlet and Oedipus (1949; reprint, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, n.d.) pp. 59, 75.
• Rahaman, Valiur. Acts of Literary Theory, Yking Books, Jaipur. 2016.
• Segal, Hanna. Dream, Phantasy and Art, London: Routledge. 1991. pp. 167.
• Wellek, René. “The Literary Criticism of Lionel Trilling” New England Review (1978-1982). Vol. 2, No. 1 (Autumn, 1979), pp. 26-49. Middlebury College Publications http://www.jstor.org/stable/40355858 Accessed: 15/01/2015 03:38