17 Lionel Trilling: Freud and Literature

Dr. Valiur Rehman

Objectives

This module presents Lionel Trilling’s essay “Freud and Literature”. 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.

Psychoanalysis as the culmination of the Romantic literary art

Lionel Trilling’s “Freud and Literature” is a criticism of Psychoanalysis and Literature developed before and after the birth of Psychoanalysis. The essay was published in The Kenyan Review and later in his book Liberal Imagination (LI). He observed the impact of Literature in the works of Sigmund  Freud  (1856-1939),  the  father  of   Psychoanalysis.   Trilling   observed Psychoanalysis as culmination of the Romantic literary art. He regards Freudian  conceptualization of mind, instinct, human nature, dream and interpretation of dreams as great influencing forces in the formulation of the act of writing literature. Thus we can understand “Freud and Literature” by tracing Trilling’s three cardinal observations: that threads of the elements of psychoanalysis are found in the literature written ever before Freud; that Freud acknowledges literature as source of his conceptualizations; and that Freud’s Psychoanalysis influenced literary criticism and literature written during and after the period of Freud.

Trilling justifies discusses how Romantic poets of 18th century, and works of great writers of all the times such as Denis Diderot (1713-1784), Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). For him, their works had successfully presented the hidden realities of life, man and his mind even before the inception of Psychoanalysis. As Diderot brought forth the idea of tripartite of mind, dream, repression of desire and its result far before Freudian psychoanalysis had come. He illustrated further his justification with reference to Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche.

He also demonstrates how contemporary literary writers of Freud like T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) and Proust (1871-1922) have espoused the role of the unconscious, exhibited broken self  and distorted ideology of repression in their works, though they have never acknowledged the influence of Freud. Trilling acknowledges the influence of Freud on the Surrealists for “the “scientific” sanction of their program. Kafka (1883-1924) “has explored  the  Freudian conceptions of guilt and punishment, of the dream, and of the fear of the father” (Liberal Imagination LI: 40). Thomas Mann (1875-1955) confessed that he “was always in the direction  of Freud’s interests, has been most susceptible to the Freudian anthropology, finding a special charm in the theories of myths and magical practices” ((LI): 40). James Joyce’s technique of narration and types of characterization exposes the state of their minds. Trilling  notes  that Joyce’s use of “words as things and of words, which point to more than one thing” (LI: 40) and his treatment with familial relationship, reactions of the self to  the body exposes his inclination  to psychological reality.

Trilling argues that Freud’s postulations are the result of his reading the Romantic literature. For Trilling, the greatest masters of Romanticism had influenced Freud. The subject of both the theories rests on perception. The creeds of Romanticism and theory of Freud rests on the “perception of the hidden element of human nature” and “opposition between the hidden and the visible”. Both rest on the unconscious and conscious, spirit and the body, morality, desire creates conflict, and this conflict is the subject of literature (esp. written in the period of romanticism or similar to it like Enlightenment, Transcendentalism). “The common characteristic of both Freud and Romanticism, the perception of the hidden element of human nature and of the opposition between the hidden and the visible,” he contends (LI 36). In other words,  Literature envisages  the self of the writer with the reflection of both the hidden and the visible human predicaments. Trilling illustrates this notion with reference to Diderot, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Blake.

Dream, repression of desire, erotic and sexual abnormality in literature 

Trilling’s second argument justifies that literature envisions the elements of mind, which are the subjects of the theory of psychoanalysis. Freud’s thesis rests on the repression of desire, which distracts the human mind and results into dreams. The dreams satisfy the repressed desire of man. Morality stands after each repression of desire. In the world of Freudian theory, the desire stands for sexual desire. Trilling goes on saying that the ‘sex revolution’, sexual maladjustment, erotic feeling and their results on the self are the subject matter of works of P.B. Shelley, Schlegel’s novel Lucinde (1799), and works of George Sand, Ibsen; Ludwig  Tieck,  Schopenhauer and Stendhal.

Ambivalence in Literature

Trilling describes that literary arts before the evolution of psychoanalysis expose the ambivalent state of mind of human being. Ambivalence is one of the results of repression. Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) has dramatized ‘the mind as a divisible thing, one part of which can contemplate and mock the other.’ He thinks that Dostoevsky’s works are brilliant instances of ambivalent feeling.

“Death wish” and dream element in Literature

Trilling observes the concept of death wish, sleep, self-destroying impulses in the poetry of Novalis, German poet who is known as a founder of Romanticism. Novalis is pseudonym of Friedrich Leopold, Freiherr von Hardenberg (1772-1801). The trait of hidden perception is traceable in the works of Shelley, Poe, and Baudelaire. Trilling has traced the elements of dream in the works of French symbolists like Gérard de Nerval, pseudonym of Gérard Labrunie (1808- 55), and Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891). Trilling writes:

Novalis brings in the preoccupation with the death wish, and this is linked on the one  hand with sleep and on the other hand with the perception of the perverse, self-destroying impulses, which in turn leads us to that fascination by the horrible which we find in Shelley, Poe, and Baudelaire.

Trilling believes that Freud’s experiment of psychoanalysis is an inspired experiment based on  his interest in reading literature and its result. He called “the components of Zeitgeist” (38) to the writers of such literature. Trilling said that Proust and Eliot was Freud’s contemporary, yet none of them was reader of Freud’s works, nor they followed Psychoanalysis. He argues that Freud’s works have enriched the literary value. Literature, written under impression of Freud, has power to change the stream of thinking. It has made Literature a serious genre that tends to represent the complexity of the man’s mind and life. Trilling has defined literature in the context of psychological realities of human beings.

Freud’s ideas mostly influenced the Literary Critics and Biographers. Trilling observed that influence of Psychoanalysis made the critics and literary artists realize intrinsic value of a work  of literary art. His impact challenged the possibility of partial judgment toward the writers. He remarks:

I think it is true to say that now the motive of his interpretation is not that of exposing the secret shame of the writer and limiting the meaning of his work, but, on the contrary, that of finding grounds for sympathy with the writer and for increasing the possible significances of the work.

However, he criticized Thomas Mann’s views of Freud for he could not see the positivist and rationalist side of Freudian psychoanalysis. Trilling illustrates how Mann has apprehended the works of Freud. He defends Freud in the following words:

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 limited   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, and this, when we consider the nature of his own brilliant scientific methods, has surely  an  element of paradox in it. 

He justifies how positivism of Freud tempted us to comprehending life and its complexities, and, how his therapy tended to challenge the human complexities. Trilling has also observed Psychoanalysis as an exponent of the Enlightenment for its contention with the idea that religion does not civilize the human society but its chief function is to develop the self-recognition.

Trilling has appreciated Freud as an admirer of art for his interest in art of investigation of ‘the hidden motives’ in the character’s action and conditions they have to face in their lives. He says, “Freud is not insensitive to art on the contrary nor does he ever intend to speak of it with contempt.” Freud appreciates specific emotional insights of literary writers, because they have understood the part played in life by the hidden motives. He appreciates Freud’s thinking about Literature for Freud’s idea of therapeutic function of the literary art. He also appreciates for how Freud seriously would take characters of literature, colors of paintings into critical consideration as if they were patients and subjects of his psychiatric wards or laboratory.

However, Trilling discards Freud’s early views on literature on four grounds:

1. “Freud speaks of art with what we must call contempt. Art, he tells us, is substitute gratification / and as such is “an illusion in contrast to reality”.
2. Freud sees art as “almost exclusively hedonistic”.
3. Art for Freud is a narcotic: “the artist is virtually in the same category with the neurotic,” Trilling discards Freud’s views and supports Lamb’s essay on “The Sanity of Art.” Charles Lamb saw so clearly in his defense of the sanity of true genius: “The . . . poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject but he has dominion over it’”.
4.  He quotes Freud and concedes that the Psychoanalytic method “can do nothing toward elucidating the nature of the artistic gift, nor can it explain the means by which the artist works-artistic techniques”.

Lionel Trilling deprecates the way Freud has defined art as an illusory representation of life, which is harmless, his observations of the artist as dweller in the neurotic world, and his views   on the characters (esp. heroes) appeared in Literature as sufferers from neurosis. Freud declares that art is a “substitute gratification.” The term “substitute gratification” refers to a substituted pleasure gained from the satisfaction of a desire of a sufferer from neurosis. Trilling deprecates this notion made by Freud to literature as an illusion, and the author as a daydreamer and a neurotic. Trilling discards the views of Freud that pronounces the function of literature is akin to narcotic reactions.

Trilling deprecates Freud and defended literature by maintaining his idea that every scientific and rationalistic discovery begins from illusion and ends with reality. Literature juxtaposes both the illusion and reality that represent the life-truth i.e. the complexity. “Reality is an honorific word, and it means what is there; illusion is a pejorative word, and it means a response to what is not there”. Life is woven text of both the senses ‘what is there’ and ‘what is not there’;  ‘what is’ and ‘what is not’ and vice versa. Literary artists empower their words to  juxtapose  these two unique senses of life. Thus, Trilling argues for literature is as much significant as psychoanalysis. Both Literature and Psychoanalysis live upon the subjects related to theories of unconscious apparatus, dream, and neurosis. The artist is not a sufferer from neurosis but the commander of his fantasies and emotions. Trilling supports his views by citing Charles Lamb’s statement, “The … poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject but he has dominion over it”. He clarifies a distinction between a creative artist’s mind and a neurotic mind: “The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy” and, “the illusions of art are made to serve the purpose of a closer and truer relation with reality.” In this regard, he alludes to French-American historian and critic Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) who has also depreciated Freud for this account and says that literature has always its concern with realities of life. But Trilling noted that Freud did not realize the truth of literature because he had instilled himself with hedonism. Hence Trilling  called  Freud a hedonist. He says, “Freud’s assumption of the almost exclusively hedonistic nature and purpose of art bar him from the perception of this”.

Trilling’s views on Freud and Dr. Earnest Jones as Psychoanalytic Critics

In chapter four of Interpretation of Dream entitled, “Material and Sources of Dreams,” Freud has illustrated the concept of dream and the need of a new interpretation of Hamlet’s procrastination. He has expressed his desire to see anyone read Hamlet as a victim of Oedipus complex and Hysteric with reference to the motive of Shakespeare’s repressed desire and his deepest layer of impulses (Freud 283). Trilling’s opinion rests on Freud’s ideas as expressed below:

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, has its roots in the same soil as Oedipus Rex. In the Oedipus the child’s wishful phantasy that underlies it is brought into the open and realized as it would be in a dream. In Hamlet it remains repressed; and—just as in the case of a neurosis—we only learn of its existence from its inhibiting consequences. Strangely enough, the overwhelming effect produced by the more modern tragedy has turned out to be compatible with the fact that people have remained completely in the dark as to the hero’s character. The play is built up on Hamlet’s hesitations over fulfilling the task of revenge that is assigned to him; but its text offers no reasons or motives for these hesitations and an immense variety  of attempts at interpreting them have failed to produce a result (Freud 282) … Hamlet is able to do anything—except take vengeance on the man who did away with his father and took that father’s place with his mother, the man who shows him the repressed wishes of his own childhood realized. Thus the loathing which should drive him on to revenge is replaced in him by self-reproaches, by scruples of conscience, which remind him that he himself is literally no better than the sinner whom he is to punish.

The distaste for sexuality expressed by Hamlet in his conversation with Ophelia fits in very well with this: the same distaste which was destined to take possession of the poet’s mind more and more during the years that followed, and which reached its extreme expression in Timon of Athens. For it can, of course, only be the poet’s own mind which confronts us in Hamlet.

Trilling appreciates Psychoanalysis as a new approach to literature for its power to illustrate realities of life and human mind controlled with cathexis. He also appreciates Freud’s serious responses to Literature. Freud’s disciple Dr. Earnest Jones has studied Hamlet as a creation of Shakespeare’s “intention” or “motif”. Trilling praises Dr. Franz Alexander’s essay on Henry IV for his liberal semantic treatment with the play but he does not treat Earnest Jones’s attempt to find ‘hidden motive’ and ‘deeper workings of Shakespeare’s mind’ in Hamlet with favor.  He says:

Hamlet is not merely the product of Shakespeare’s thought, it is the very instrument of his thought, and if meaning is intention, Shakespeare did not intend the Oedipus motive or anything less than Hamlet; if meaning is effect then it is Hamlet which affects us, not the Oedipus motive.

However, Trilling disagrees with the extremism of Freud’s ‘analytical method’ to read literature and art. For Trilling, analytical method has two standpoints: explanation of the “inner meanings” of the work of art, and explanation of the “temperament of the artist as man”. But, he never follows any sort of extremist approach to literature. He observed extremism opinion both in  Freud and Jones’s approaches to reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Thus, he  justifies  psychoanalysis as an unsuitable approach to literature but it remains an unsuitable approach in case it is used with extremism.

The value of Literature lives upon its effect 

Trilling exemplifies things that increase the value of art. He cites Denis Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew (1762) in this regard. Diderot’s Rameau’ s Nephew is a story about a chance of meeting of the unnamed “I” with “He”— the nephew of the composer, Rameau—leads to a dialogue that covers many topics related to various follies and attitudes of French society of the time. The work influenced the Enlightenment period. It maintained a great tradition of literary reading. Trilling regards the work for its literary power to influence the great minds of the world. Goethe translated this work, Marx admired it, and Hegel studied Rameau as “disintegrated  consciousness” (LI 35) and studied its author as honest consciousness. Shaw and Freud have also given their opinion both the unnamed characters of Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew (35). What Trilling wants to say is that the selves described  in the Rameau are much akin to id (Rameau)  and ego (author). In all these opinions framed on Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, there is no Diderot’s intention. Moreover, these opinions or interpretations are examples of decryption of literary value that lies in the effects of literature. Trilling argues for this literary value:

Changes in historical context and in personal mood change the meaning of a work and indicate to us that artistic understanding is not a question of fact but of value. Even if the author’s intention were, as it cannot be, precisely determinable, the meaning of a work cannot lie in the author’s intention alone. It must also lie in its effect.

For Trilling, the critics’ task is not to observe the meaning of a text by relating it to author’s intention. The opinion justifies him as a new critic, though he never declares his belongings to a specific school of criticism. René Wellek justified it in his essay “The Literary Criticism of  Lionel Trilling” (1979).

Trilling’s Views on Tragedy 

Trilling furthers his ideas with reference to Freud’s later work Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle is the result of Freud’s dissatisfaction with the common human nature. It was published after the First World War and the Anti-Semitic period. Freud lost his daughter due to the Jewish Holocaust. He had to live without shelter, companion, and relatives during the period. His books were burnt. In his early creative period, he gave little attention on the destructive instincts of human beings. He talked of dream as satisfying tool for the repressive desires of human beings, balance of tripartite mind, Eros and Libido as creative forces in human life. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle he added two cardinal points: the first point was about an irresolvable and irrefutable “instinct of death or destruction” (thanotos) that works in silence in human action. The other one was the concept of transference according to which patient must know about his treatment and techniques through which he was being treated for his cure.

In the last paragraph of part two of the chapter, entitled “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” of his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud concludes that an unpleasant situation in a play  causes the pleasure for the audience. This idea refers to Aristotle’s idea of “catharsis”—the function of tragedy. He has observed that a child’s play may have some motives: motives of pleasure. He observes the instinct prevails on the period of the adult developed as the result of imitation to play the games since one and half years. An adult audience, usually, watches the drama for gaining pleasure. The adults receive pleasure out of seeing the scenes in the drama embedded with the “pity and fear”. Freud says that the habit is driven by a destructive instinct, which develops a masochistic tendency in the man.

But, Trilling discards any such the Freudian analysis. He says that the catharsis or pleasure  gained by seeing the scenes embedded with the sense of pain, fear, terror, and pity purifies the audience’s mind for it often develops an identification of the same sense of tragic or terror situations in the audience. The actors on the stage develop the power in the audience to bear the utmost terrifying situation, if it comes to him. To this function of tragedy, he called “mithridatic function.” Thus Trilling reads into Freud’s ‘traumatic neurosis’ a theory of the “mithridatic function” of tragedy. For Trilling, tragedy has “mithridatic function by which tragedy is used as the homeopathic administration of pain to inure ourselves to the greater pain which life will force upon us. There is in the cathartic theory of tragedy, as it is usually understood, a conception of tragedy’s function which is too negative and which inadequately suggests the sense of active mastery which tragedy can give”.

To conclude, Trilling in “Freud and Literature” clarifies that psychoanalysis is an experimental and new approach to understanding the hidden meaning of a text if it will be used with “liberal imagination”. If one uses psychoanalysis as an analytical method in the strict sense, it cannot embrace the goal for which Freud has formulated it.

Additional notes on the authors cited in Trilling’s “Freud and Literature”

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Austrian physician, neurologist, and founder of  psychoanalysis, who created an entirely new approach to the understanding of human personality. Schopenhauer (1788-1860), German philosopher, is known for his philosophy of pessimism. He disagrees with Hegelian truth and explains how the desire of life in man brings forth problems and suffering.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), German philosopher, poet, and classical philologist, was one of the most provocative and influential thinkers of the 19th century. He was deeply influenced by Schopenhauer.

Marcel Proust (1871-1922), French writer, wrote the 16-volume À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27), the lengthy cyclic novel known in English as Remembrance of Things Past (1922-31) and regarded as one of the greatest achievements in world literature.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924), Austrian (Czech) Jewish novelist and short-story writer, whose disturbing, symbolic fiction, written in German, prefigured the oppression and despair of the late 20th century.

Thomas Mann (1875-1955), a German novelist, essayist, and short-story writer, a Nobel laureate and one of the most prominent and influential European writers of the 20th century.

Friedrich von Schlegel, worked as editor of journals like Europa and Concordia, and delivered lectures on Philosophy, History, and Literature. He is regarded for his most important work On the Language and Wisdom of India (1808). His most controversial novel Lucinde (1799; translated 1913-1915) was perhaps responded by Dorothea Veit’s novel Florentin (1801). The novel is based upon issues related to romantic irony of sex and sexualities.

George Sand (1804-1876), pseudonym of Amandine Aurore Lucile, Baronne Dudevant, French novelist of the Romantic Movement, whose irregular life and many love affairs shocked Parisian society.

Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853), a leading German Romantic writer. He worked on folktales, which were translated by Carlyle. His plays inspired Brecht, Genet, and Beckett. He influenced surrealism. His prose work Aurélia (1853-54) blends the themes of lost love and religious salvation. The stories in Daughters of Fire (1922) notably “Sylvie,” are eerie reminiscences of lost youth and lost beauty. The sonnets in Les chimères (1854) are dominated by a sense of despair.

Reference

• Freud, Sigmund Interpretation of Dream, translated from the German and edited by James Strachey, Basic Books, NY, 2010. p. 282-3. Print.
• Freud, Sigmund. Part III, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey, Norton 1961.
• Jones, Ernest. Hamlet and Oedipus (1949) reprint, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, n. d.,pp 59, 75. Print.
• Trilling, Lionel. “Freud and Literature” in The Liberal Imagination (1949). USA: Viking Press. 1950 pp34-57. Print.
• Wellek, René. “The Literary Criticism of Lionel Trilling” New England Review. Vol. 2, No. 1. Autumn 1979, pp. 26-49. Middlebury College Publications. Web. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/40355858>. Accessed: 15 Jan. 2015.