Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture

Citation preview

LIONEL TRILLING

FREUD

AND THE CRISIS OF OUR CULTURE

Freud and the

Crisis oi

Our Culture

p Mid-Century Essays No: •

1

—Wi

i

1

1

1

pH.

Freud

and of

the Crisis

Our Culture

THE BEACON PRESS

-

BOSTON

Mid-Century Essays edited by Sol Stein

© 1955 by Lionel

Trilling

Library of Congress catalog card number: 55-11594 Printed in U.S.A.

Second Printing, December 1955

To Charles Warren Everett

Digitized by the Internet Archive in

2012

http://archive.org/details/freudcrisisofoOOtril

This essay was written as the Freud Anniversary Lecture of 1955, the fifth of the annual lectures established

by the

Psychoanalytic Institute and Society to

day

of Freud's birth. It has

York

mark

the

been somewhat revised

and expanded for publication. L.T.

New

JLt has always been true that a chief reason for the alienation of one generation

from another

lies in their different

understanding of what constitutes the past. In every age

must have been

difficult for

some event which he

own

in his

merely a

still

past

experience was, to a younger friend or colleague,

fact to

be learned from a book. In our time, as

which the present

The

a man, and painful, to realize that

regarded as immediate and present

an enormous acceleration

often say, there has been rate at

it

is

so

in the

superannuated and retired as the

twentieth century

must sometimes seem

we

more than

is

to us that

half gone,

and

it

no equal period of time ever

put so large a distance of change between

its first

and

last

years as this one has, or so large a difference of formative

circumstance between those of the period years.

Our

who were born in the early years

and those who were born in the middle and later

belief that this

is

so

is

founded upon the nature of

the political events and the social changes and the scientific

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

•

9

developments that have taken place over this epoch. They do indeed set the early years of our century very far away from these middle years and justify the

commonplaces we

all

utter

about the bewildering speed at which we are carried down the stream of time.

Yet there are some elements of our opposite

effect.

They make

life

that have just the

the early years seem very close.

Among these are certain events of artistic creation. A teacher of literature, for example, cannot fail to see that there are

works of

literature

were relatively new

which meant much to him when they in his college

which mean quite as much to

both cases being pretty nearly the same. Modern literature

is

characteristically difficult

it

and exigent After a modern

we

for a time,

form a mistaken opinion of

its

are sometimes led to

general easy accessibility, for

has inevitably attracted imitators, and

mastery of the imitation

But the

fact

is

the century are

still

our

a mastery of the original work.

almost as

when they

only of that

art,

my

for

we mistake

that the great artists of the early years of

difficulty as

tous to

•

now, the meaning

in

work has been with us

10

days in the Twenties and

his students

first

new

it

and

appeared. In literature, to speak

the work of Joyce

students as

in their strangeness

was

to

is

as difficult

me; the work

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

and momenof

Lawrence

1

is

them

as startling to

and the same

as to me;

of the

work

of Eliot, of Proust, of

name

in the

pantheon of modern

course,

way

pressed. Yet they are under the dents, the

was

work

of art

is

to be said

Kafka, of almost every letters.

do not see quite the same object

they do not have the same

is

The

students, of

their teacher saw,

and im-

of being startled

same

almost as

to their teacher thirty years ago.

influence.

To the

new and unsolved

we

see that

men

of the

it is

Among

especially notable.

year since Freud was born.

It

scarcely seems possible. It

them.

Can

it

really be that long ago?

respects, of course, Freud's ideas

modern

practice of psychiatry

They have had

of education

is

years since he published the

lished themselves very firmly in our culture. It

that the

Sigmund

We have entered the hundredth

fifty-five

Interpretation of Dreams.

many

effect of bring-

these the work of

Freud published, with Joseph Breuer, the

sixty years since

Studies in Hysteria,

In

litera-

of the early years of the century.

ing the past very close. is

it

the literary creation, the literary ideas,

Other events of our history also have the

Freud

as

When we think of what

dominates and challenges our present consciousness of ture,

stu-

and

is

chiefly

a decisive influence

of child-rearing.

They

Freud and the

have estabis

not only

based upon

upon our

theories

are of prime impor-

Crisis of

our Culture

•

1

tance to anthropology, to sociology, to literary criticism; even

theology must take account of them.

We may

say that they

have become an integral part of our modern

intellectual

apparatus.

Yet no one ideas can

new

who speaks

to

fail

of the establishment of Freud's

be aware of the

fact that they are

the slang of our culture, ideas which, taken at

it is

first

them

also true of

first

hand, from Freud's

easily they are

idea,

make

own

that they are

is

How

seldom they

exposition of them!

misunderstood—how

are misunderstood! There that does not

call

hand, seem very startling, very

radical, calling for instinctive resistance.

How

very

they have become part of what we might

ideas. If

are taken at

still

strategically they

scarcely a play on

Broadway

use of some version of some Freudian

which the audience can be counted on to comprehend.

Yet when we go back to the works in which Freud sets forth

we are confronted

his ideas, difficulty,

we have

by

again by their original force and

their original aggressive novelty.

We know that

not yet begun to comprehend what they have dis-

covered. It is not, of course,

an accident that literature and psycho-

analysis should be at one in the effect they have of fore-

shortening history, of confusing our perspective of time by

12

•

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

making

seem that the early years

it

political events

and

social

of the century,

changes and

set at a great distance, are in fact

scientific

very near to

us.

nection between psychoanalysis and literature iar intimacy. It is this

connection that

specifically the connection

mean

advances

The

to talk about,

and continuing kind.

by way

con-

of a pecul-

between Freud's ideas and

tain literary ideas of an ancient

talk about this connection

I

is

which

of prelude, as

it

cer-

I shall

were, to a

consideration of Freud's conception of culture, using that

word not to

mean

in the old sense in

which Matthew Arnold used

it,

a certain kind of training of the individual mind,

but in the contemporary sense in which the social scientists use

it.

And from what may be

I shall

said of Freud's view of culture

attempt to draw some inferences about the cultural

situation of our country.

The important mental

life

place which literature had in Freud's

and the strength

which he

of the feeling with

re-

garded literature are well known. Dr. Ernst Kris, in his introduction to the letters which Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fliess,

speaks of Freud's

scientific interest as

being "based

on a firm foundation of the humanities." This true,

and

it is

is

of course

one of the remarkable things about Freud.

Freud and the

Crisis of

It

our Culture

•

13

is

the

more remarkable when we consider the nature

scientific training,

rialism,

and the

which was uncompromising

in its

of his

mate-

force of the scientific ethos of his day, to

which Freud himself enthusiastically subscribed.

We must,

of course,

keep

it

in

mind

that only a relatively

few years earlier in the nineteenth century

it

had not been

at all remarkable to base one's scientific interests

humanities. This earlier attitude

convenient and accurate

way by the figure

know what

set

store

Goethe

by

his

on the

represented to us in a

is

own

of Goethe.

We all

scientific researches,

and we know what part Goethe's famous essay on Nature played not only in the

many

life

of

Freud but

also in the lives of

other scientists of the century. Goethe, of course, was

in the tradition of the philosophes

who were preponderantly men late seventeenth century

on a tide of

literary

and the Encyclopedists,

of letters: the science of the

and the eighteenth century moved

enthusiasm and literary formulation.

Yet by the middle of the nineteenth century the separation

between science and

literature

becomes complete, and

an anatagonism develops between them, and while

deed true that Freud based humanities, he

is,

above

his scientific interests

all else,

a scientist.

it is

in-

on the

He was reared in

the ethos of the nineteenth-century physical sciences, which

14

•

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

was

as rigorous

possibly be,

and as jealous

and he found

he always looked

for in

as a professional ethos can

in that ethos the

men,

in groups,

and

heroism which in himself.

He

did not set out with the intention of becoming a humanist or of finding support for his scientific ideas in ity

humanism might

his achievement,

And

have.

we cannot

if,

to

fail

whatever author-

when we have examined pronounce him one of the

very greatest of humanistic minds, we yet cannot say of him that he

A

in the least a literary

for

belief,

which

is

now

is

men

is

it

to continue that claim.

to be observed in

quarters, that Freud's science ature,

claimed Freud for their

reasons that are obvious enough, but nowadays

not the tendency of literary

The

mind.

men

generation ago, literary

own, is

was

some

literary

hostile to the spirit of liter-

as unconsidered a notion as the former belief that

psychoanalysis was a sort of literary invention. Yet tainly true that, whatever natural affinity

Freud and

literature,

cer-

however great a contribution to the

understanding of literature

must seem

it is

we see between

to a literary

we judge him

man

that

Freud

to have made,

it

sees literature not

from within but from without The great contribution he has

made

to our understanding of literature does not arise

what he says about

literature,

from

but from what he says about

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

•

15

the nature of the

human mind: he showed

us that poetry

is

indigenous to the very constitution of the mind; he saw the

mind

as being, in the greater part of

poetry-making faculty. self,

he

times,

is

When

its

tendency, exactly a

he speaks about literature

it-

sometimes right and sometimes wrong. And some-

when he

is

wrong, his mistakes are more useful than

men are willing to perceive. But he is always, I think, outside the process of literature. Much as he responds to the product, he does not really imagine the process. He does not have what we call the feel of the thing. literary

Freud was a

scientist— this

was the name he cherished and

sought to deserve. Nowadays some of us have fallen into the habit of saying that there

mind

of the scientist

is

no

real difference

and the mind

dismayed at the separateness and specialness plines of the mind,

between the

of the artist.

We

are

of the disci-

and when we meet together at conferences

and round-tables designed to overcome this bad situation, find

it

in our hearts to say to

thing in

common, very

in its motive,

all

little

and no doubt

we

each other that we have everyin difference. it is

This

is

laudable

true enough under

some

sufficiently large aspect. Yet in practical fact the difference is

real

and important, as of course we know. The reason

insisting

16

•

on the difference between the mind of the

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

I

am

scientist

and the mind scientist,

humane

interesting

Literature

is

large

letters is patently

not to be encom-

to suggest the connection

between the two.

not a unitary thing, and there

is

that literature

what

is

not, a unity,

it is

in those of its aspects in

and

thing that occurs to

as I consider

it

that literature is

probably no

I shall

in the relation in

"is"

deal with

me

it is

not wholly

or "does" this or that.

to say about literature,

which Freud stands to

dedicated to the conception of the

is

assume

which that assumption does not

impossible to say that literature first

is

I shall

immediately appear to be absurd, in which

The

Freud

and complex. The

such single entity as the literary mind. But

it

so

must therefore be hopelessly crude and summary

any attempt

in

significant the relation of

work

of Freud's

humane

tradition of I

and

makes

letters.

The canon passed.

man, and on Freud's being a

obviously, that the recognition of this

is,

much more to

of the literary

self.

it,

is

This

a very simple thing to say, simple perhaps to the point of

dullness.

But

becomes more complicated when we per-

it

ceive

how much

far

may

it

ture,

be

in

of

an achievement

advance of what

can conceive. Tolstoi

wept buckets

tells

this conception

is,

how

society, or the general cul-

the story of the countess

at a play while her

coachman

sat

who

on the box

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

•

17

of her waiting carriage, perishing of the cold through the

long hours of the performance. This

may

stand for the dis-

crepancy between what literature conceives of the

what

society, or the general culture, conceives.

of literature, and with

its

help, the countess

is

self

and

At the behest

able to imagine

the selfhood of others, no doubt through the process of identification;

of her

she

own

selfhood

is

is

not able, of herself, to realize the selfhood

servant.

ture in which

What

the Iliad conceives in the

it

was

written.

The Trojan

must sometimes seem unendurable,

it is

possible that

The Trojan

of

cul-

Women of Euripides

so intense

tion of the selfhood of others in pain that

Yet

way

beyond what could be conceived by the

far

it

is

the realiza-

forces

Women was

upon

us.

being com-

posed at the very moment that Athens was infamously carrying out

its

reprisal against the city of

Melos

for

wishing

to remain neutral in the Peloponnesian War, slaughtering

the

men

of the city

and enslaving the women and

children,

doing this not in the passion of battle but, like the Greek princes of The Trojan of policy.

deed, and

Women,

in the horrible deliberateness

Thucydides understood the hideousness it is

of the

thought by some modern scholars that he con-

ceived his History in the form of a tragedy in which the downfall of Athens

18

•

Freud and the

is

the consequence of her sin at Melos;

Crisis of our Culture

but Thucydides does not record any party of opposition to the Melian decision or any revulsion

among

his fellow-

countrymen. In almost every developed society, literature able to conceive of the

more

self,

and the selfhood

is

of others, far

intensely than the general culture ever can.

One

of

the best-known tags

of

literary

criticism

is

Coleridge's phrase, "the willing suspension of disbelief."

Coleridge says that the willing suspension of disbelief "constitute poetic faith." I

suppose that

we might say

stitutes scientific faith too, or scientific

beyond the notion that science was, "organized

common

stand that science phantasy, belief

is

is

we begin

is,

sense,"

as

that

it

con-

method. Once we get

we used

to be told

and have come

it

to under-

organized improbability, or organized

to see that the willing suspension of dis-

an essential part of

scientific thought.

And

certainly

the willing suspension of disbelief constitutes moral faith—

the essence of the moral

life

would seem

that most difficult thing in the world,

to consist in doing

making a

willing sus-

pension of disbelief in the selfhood of someone

Freud was able

to

do

by the mere impulse imagine, what

we

in a

else.

This

most extraordinary way, and not

of his temperament, for he

was

not, I

ordinarily think of as a sympathetic

but systematically, as an element of his science.

We

man,

recall,

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

•

19

for instance, that

psychoanalysis stories told

dramatic

moment

when Freud accepted

him by

so

many

development of

in the

as literally true the

of his early patients, of their

having been, as children, sexually seduced or assaulted by adults, often

by their own

We know how his patients

parents.

any

rewarded

his credulity— scarcely

the truth.

They had betrayed Freud

hypothesis on the basis of their precious things and this one so

Freud had reason

them were

of

into constructing an

Hypotheses are

stories.

now had

telling

to

be abandoned, and

to think very harshly of his patients

if

he wished to. But he did not blame them, he did not say they

were lying— he willingly suspended

his disbelief in their

phantasies, which they themselves believed, self

how

It is

to find the truth that

was

really in them.

hard to know whether to describe

triumph of the

scientific

and taught him-

imagination and

this incident as a its

method

the moral triumph of an impatient and even censorious in

or as

man

whom the intention of therapy and discovery was stronger

than the impulse to blame. But in whatever terms we choose to praise

it, it

has been established in the system of psycho-

analytical therapy.

From

it

followed the willing suspension

of disbelief in the semantic value of dreams,

and the

suspension of disbelief in the concept of mind, which

20

•

Freud and the

Crisis of

our Culture

willing

all

well-

trained neurologists and psychiatrists of Vienna

knew

to be

but a chimera. Freud's acceptance of the phantasies of his

mean-

early patients, his conclusion that their untruths had a ing, a

purpose, and even a value, was the suspension of dis-

belief in the selfhood of these patients. Its analogue

think, the religious virtue of Charity, but

the intelligence plays a greater part.

We

something

is

in

not, I

which

must be reminded

of that particular kind of understanding, that particular

exercise of the literary intelligence

by which we judge ad-

versely the deeds of Achilles, but not Achilles himself,

by

which we do not blame Macbeth, nor even, to mention the hero and heroine of Freud's favorite English poem,

Adam

and Eve, who, because they are the primal parents, we naturally If

ture

want

to

blame

for everything.

we go on with our

gross

summary comparison

and psychoanalysis, we can say that they are

lar in this respect, that

of the essence of

it is

of litera-

also simi-

both to represent

the opposition between two principles, those that Freud called the reality principle

and the pleasure

principle.

When-

ever Freud goes wrong in his dealings with literature,

because he judges literature by of these principles.

because of

its

When

it is

too limited an application

he praises

literature,

powers of factual representation,

it is

its

chiefly

powers of

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

•

21

discovery— "Not unconscious." tion),

it is

I

but the poets," he

When

said, "discovered the

he denigrates literature (by implica-

by speaking

of its

mere hedonism,

of

its

being an

escape from reality, a substitute-gratification, a daydream,

an anodyne. Some years ago

I dealt as sternly

as I could with

the errors of these formulations of Freud's, and so

haps

I

am

now

per-

privileged to lighten the burden of reprobation

they have had to bear and to take note of a certain Tightness

and usefulness they have. Freud

scarcely unique in conceiving of literature in

is

terms of the opposition between reality and pleasure. This conception is endemic in literary criticism

itself

since at least

the time of Plato, and often in a very simple form. It was

made

usually in a very simple form that the opposition was in the nineteenth century.

We

have but to read the young

Yeats and to observe his passion against fact and the ture of fact,

and

dream, to see

his

how

avowed preference

litera-

for the literature of

established in the thought of the time

was

the opposition between the pleasure principle and the principle of reality.

Nowadays opposition,

omy

22

•

literary criticism tends to

which

it

of literature, a

be restive under the

takes to be a covert denial of the auton-

way

of judging literature

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

by the

cate-

.

But the poets themselves have always

gories of science.

accepted the opposition and

do.

still

They

accept the com-

mission to represent something called reality, which side

of

and which they think

literature,

antagonistic to the

pleasure and, as

dream

it

of

of pleasure, or as standing

were, led to and served

Sometimes, at the behest of

reality,

lies

by

out-

either

as

beyond

pleasure.

they question and even

reprobate their hedonistic dreams. Wordsworth blames himself for

having "lived in a dream," for having failed to repre-

sent to himself the painful adversity of the world. Keats de-

nounces himself

for his

membership

dreaming poets, who are so much the miseries of

in the "tribe" of

less

than "those to

the world / Are misery, and

mere

whom

will not let

them

rest"

What

benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe,

To the great world? Thou

art a

dreaming thing,

A fever of thyself —think of the Earth

. .

Yet with the dream of pleasure, or with the actuality of pleasure, the poets always tal life

was an

effort to

keep

in touch. Keats's

whole men-

demonstrate the continuity between

pleasure and reality. Wordsworth speaks of the principle of

pleasure— the phrase

is

his— as constituting the "naked and

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

•

23

He says, moreover, that it is the prin-

native dignity of man." ciple

by which man not only

"feels,

and

lives,

and moves,"

for

Wordsworth

but also "knows": the principle of pleasure

is

the very ground of the principle of reality, and so of course it is

for

Freud, even though he seems to maintain the irrecon-

cilability of the

two

famous sentence as

it is

principles.

of his,

Wordsworthian,

He

sponsibility."

which

bases the developed moral

forget

on four great

is

facts of

truth,

life.

When his

he

is

among

to

of the fact that

these.

may,

When

art,

and

Keats says that

saying that the pleasure principle

and

of knowledge,

he says that truth

it

and genera-

us that the equations

existence— love, death,

is

enormously complex

develop that

on the

life

what meaning we are required

human

at the root of existence,

words

tendency

in the context of a passionate meditation

the relation that exists

beauty

tell

two predications by reason

Keats utters them

its

hedonistic phantasies.

have been at pains to

They

assign to the

as Freudian in

truth, truth beauty," said Keats,

is

tions of critics

are false.

is

in that

us that, "In dreams begins re-

tells

autonomy of the youthful "Beauty

And the mature Yeats,

beauty, he

and is

of the

is

moral

putting in two

belief that the self

can so

in the intensity of art or meditation,

perceive even very painful facts with a kind of pleasure, for

24

•

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

it is

one of the striking things about Keats that he represents

so boldly and accurately the development of the that,

when he speaks

of pleasure, he

self,

may mean— to

language not his— sometimes the pleasure of the

and

use a

some-

id,

times the pleasure of the ego, and sometimes the pleasure of the super-ego.

mind was profoundly engaged by the paradox

Keats's

of

the literary genre of tragedy, which must always puzzle us

seems to propose to the

because

it

garding

its

own

extinction.

a gratification in re-

Very eminent psychoanalysts,

continuators of Freud's science

with him on no other point, do of his having conceived a

self

who would perhaps

differ

with him on the point

tendency of the

acquiesces in and even desires

its

differ

own

self

end.

by which

Whether

it

or not

Freud's formulations of the death instinct stand up under scientific inquiry, I of

course cannot venture to say. But cer-

tainly they confirm our sense of Freud*s oneness with the tradition of literature.

impulse of the

its

always recorded an

literature has

self to find affirmation

even by

tinction,

For

own

even

extinction. If

we read

scene of the death of Oedipus at Colonus, trouble, idea.

I think, in at least

We

in its

own

ex-

the great

we have

little

suspending our disbelief in Freud's

do so the more willingly because the impulse to

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

•

25

death fied

in this magnificent

is,

moment, expressed and exempli-

by the most passionate

of

and

was

energy of at the

will

moment

intellect

men, the

man

greatest, the

in

whom

man,

too,

It is possible to

argue that Oedipus

does not in fact go to his death but to his apotheosis. possible, too, to say that

when

It is

the poets speak of the desire

death or the happy acquiescence in death, they do not

really

mean death

at all but apotheosis, or Nirvana, or

Yeats imagined, the existence "out of nature," in the of eternity." It is

who

of his desire for death speaks of his extraor-

dinary power of love.

for

the

really

much

is

what

"artifice

possible to say that something of this sort

what Freud meant. But the poets call

of the aspect of death;

it

and when we take

death;

it

has

into account

the age-old impulse of highly developed spirits to incor-

porate the idea of death into the experience of

make death

the criterion of

life,

we

that the assertion of the death instinct

pathology, that

it is

to affirm the self in

There

is

life,

are hard put to is

even to it

to say

nothing but a

not the effort of finely tempered minds

an ultimate confrontation of

reality.

yet another theme with which literature and

Freud have an equal preoccupation.

It is

again a theme of

opposition, cognate with the opposition between pleasure

and reality— the theme

26

•

of the opposition

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

between love and

power. That literature does conceive love and power as being

obvious enough from the frequency with

in opposition is

which

it

presents the hero as both lover and warrior, the

interest of his situation being that

reconcile his desire for love

and

he finds

very hard to

it

his desire for power.

The

theme has preoccupied not only the dramatic poets and the novelists but the lyric poets

too— it was a

lyric

poet

who put

so large a part of the matter in a nutshell: "I could not love

thee (Deare) so much, / Lov'd

power

I

speak of

is

is

not Honour more," for the

not gross, cruel power (although, in the

context, this cannot be far ideal conception,

I

what

is

from our minds) but

rather, in its

represented by the word honor:

it

the power of cultural achievement, or of cultural commit-

ment. As such,

it

was seen by Freud as pre-eminently a

masculine problem. "The masculine character, the ability to dare and endure, to

know and

world in the face and take

want

to preserve." It

Henry James's

is

heroes,

it

not to fear reality, to look the

for

what

not Freud

I

it is,

am

. . .

this is

what

I

quoting but one of

an American; but Basil Ransom of

The Bostonians says very well what Freud meant. And Freud's concern for the preservation of what James calls "the masculine character," which, like James,

ceived to be under attack, has been

made

Freud con-

a point in the re-

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

•

27

proach directed at Freud that he displayed a masculine chauvinism, and, what

is

more, that, for

all his

overt pre-

occupation with love, he was yet more preoccupied with

power, with aggression and personal force,

or, at

the best,

with achievement. This contributes to a tendency which

is

to be observed of recent years, the tendency to represent

Freud as

and as

really anaesthetic to love

We

tagonistic to

it.

that he has

made

all

know how

it

in

some way an-

has been said of Freud

love out to be nothing but a reaction-

formation against the most

and

selfish

so strange are the surprises of the

hostile impulses.

movement

And

of thought that

Freud, once attacked for the extravagance of his sexual emphasis,

is

now, by people of no

little

seriousness, said to

be

puritanical in his view of sexuality, surrendering to civilization

and

to

achievement in

civilization far

more

of impulse

than there was any need to surrender.

This

is

not a matter that can be argued here.

I

should like

only to turn again to literature and to observe that the tend-

when once

it

has represented the opposi-

between love and power,

is

to conceive of love as a prin-

ency of tion

literature,

ciple of order for the

self,

even as a

discipline,

and as

itself

a

power, a civic and civilizing power. Oedipus, that angry and violent

28

•

man who

pauses in his dying to set the word love at

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

the very heart of experience, saying of himself, as Yeats

"No

translates the speech, loved," life.

living

man

becomes the guardian genius

William Blake,

would have

who envisaged

of the

life

I

have

Athenian

civic

has loved as

in a

way

that

Freud

easily understood, calls in a great voice, "Bring

me my bow of burning gold! Bring me my arrows of desire. Bring me my spear! ." What does he want this libidinal .

.

armament

for?

land's green

Why,

that he

and pleasant

the death of Freud,

"may

land."

build Jerusalem in Eng-

And

in his great

W. H. Auden speaks

"anarchic Aphrodite" and of "Eros, builder of

Freud himself had

poem on

of the grief both of cities."

as a personal trait a very large

measure

He was personally much concerned with cultural commitment and achievement. And he loved fame. To some it may be surprising and even dismaying that I should speak of Freud's love of fame. It may seem that it of the love of honor.

does no credit to Freud to speak of his love of fame, that is

inappropriate that

one,

and that

it is

I

it

should do so on an occasion like this

incongruous to mention

it

in conjunction

with his cultural commitment. For in our culture the love of

fame

is

not considered a virtue, or even an attractive trait

of the personality. of publicity,

We

and thus

are likely to confuse

it

with the love

to be confirmed in our feeling that

it is

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

•

29

not a worthy motive of intellectual commitment. lieve, it is

is,

I be-

considered particularly unbecoming in a scientist But

a trait which confirms our sense of Freud's personal

connection with the tradition of literature, and of

It

it is

meant

my

mention

fame has

as praise. Traditionally the love of

characterized two highly regarded professions, that of arms

and that

of letters.

The

posed to desire fame. license

him

soldier,

however,

is

no longer sup-

And even the poet, although

it

think

we

to entertain the phantasy of his immortal re-

nown, no longer praises fame or says he wants thought

I

it,

as once he

very proper to do. Dante desired above

all

earthly

things to be famous as a poet. Shakespeare believed implicitly in the

of

fame "that

nects

it

permanence

of his fame.

last infirmity of

Milton

calls the love

noble mind," but he thus con-

with mind; and he speaks of it as an ally of the reality

principle:

Fame

is

To scorn

the spur that the clear spirit doth raise delights

Well, there can be

Freud's clear

spirit,

and

live laborious days.

no doubt that fame was the spur

to his desire to

make

clear

to

what was

darkly seen. As a student he stood in the great Aula of the University of Vienna, where were set up the busts of the

30

•

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

1

famous men

when he should be inscription he

Tyrannus,

similarly honored.

He knew

wanted on the pedestal, a

"Who

line

of the

day

exactly what

from Oedipus

divined the riddle of the Sphinx and was a

man most mighty"— the he turned pale, as birthday, he

and he dreamed

of the University,

if

story

is

told

by

his biographer that

he had seen a ghost, when, on his

was presented by

fiftieth

and admirers with

his friends

a medallion on which these very words were inscribed.

And

if

we ask what moves

the poets to their love of fame,

what made the dying Keats say whose name

is

writ in water,"

in despair,

and then again

be among the English poets," the answer cult to

come

by.

The

thing

it

fame

one

in hope, "I shall

not so very

diffi-

is

of the self

denned by the

makes, which is conceived to be everlasting precisely

because of

self,

lies

the intense ex-

poets' idea of

pression of the sense of the

is

"Here

it

was once a new

thing, a thing

added

to the spirit

man.

My attempt to suggest the connection of Freud's thought with the tradition of literature must end here.

inadequate

is

the comparison

I

I

have drawn, and how merely

random must seem the points of similarity I have perhaps

I

know how

have said enough to lead you to

Freud and the

chosen. Yet

recall, possibly in

Crisis of our Culture

•

3

a

new way, what you have always known,

tion

between Freud and

perhaps too connection believe I

I

literature

an integral kind. And

of

is

that the connec-

have said enough to lead you to of

is

more than curious

infer that the

interest, that

as I

it is,

to be, of practical interest.

it

have undertaken to speak of Freud

in relation to our

culture, and, at that, in relation to a crisis in our culture. If I

have given

much time to

this

tion to literature, that

is

speaking

because

I

terms of his

affinity

of

Freud

in rela-

believe that the complex

may

accuracy of Freud's view of culture in

first

best be spoken of

with the tradition of literary hu-

manism. Literature offers

Of these not the

itself to

least

our understanding in

important

many ways.

that which takes litera-

is

ture to be an intellectual discipline having to do with appear-

ance and

reality,

literature to

munication the its

self,

the truth of the

is

self

has

self,

and

its

existence

is

mode

of

com-

also the truth about

existence, its survival,

literature, as for

its

especially expect

multifarious

its

prime object of attention and

curiosity,

we

truth

about the conditions of

which the

•

The

convey to us by

development. For

first

32

with truth.

Freud, the

solicitude.

The

self is

the

culture in

a matter of the liveliest

but in a secondary way, as an essential condition of

Freud and the

Crisis of

our Culture

the

self,

as a chief object of the self's energies, or as represent-

ing the aggregation of selves.

the test of the culture

way

other

around.

is

The

mutations, has been to

But

for literature, as for

always the individual

not the

function of literature, through

make

all its

us aware of the particularity of

and the high authority of the

selves,

self,

Freud,

self in its

quarrel with

society

and

This

not to say that the general culture does not have

is

own kind

its

of

culture. Literature

awareness of the

is

self. It

its

in that sense subversive.

does;

it

its

must— and when

we judge a culture we inevitably adduce the way it conceives of the

self,

the value and honor

it

gives to the

self.

But

it

can

sometimes happen that a culture intent upon giving the very highest value and honor to the selves that comprise

proceed on

its

in our

own

is,

or

what self

culture at this time. It

by the conditions self,

self

knowledge about the

erous culture, and in

to the

can

generous enterprise without an accurate

awareness of what the of accurate

it

of

its

it

may

it is

is,

Such a

loss

possible to observe

I believe,

conscious thought

life

be.

it

a very gen-

sets great store

which are manifestly appropriate

the conditions of freedom and respect Yet

would seem that

this generosity of intention

clude a misapprehension of the nature of the

it

does not pre-

self,

and

of the

right relation of the self to the culture. This progressive de-

Freud and the

Crisis of

our Culture

•

33

terioration of accurate

relation

between the

knowledge

self

and

of the self

and the culture

of the right

constitutes

what

I

am calling a crisis in our culture. To the theories and formulas which serve to rationalize

this deterioration Freud's

thought

about the self and the culture stands as a challenge and a controversion. It

is

go on to speak

The

life

certain

and controversion that

new

modern sense

idea. It represents a

in society

new ways

of the word,

is

a

of thinking about

which developed concommitantly with

may be

self.

Indeed, our

thought of as a

hood bestowed upon the whole is

way

of conceiving of the

ern idea of culture

as a person

I shall

of.

idea of culture, in the

relatively

our

this challenge

of society.

not new, but there

is

new

The idea of society

much

that

is

new about

the kind of personalization of society which began to be

some two hundred years ago.

mod-

sort of self-

Society, in this

new

made

selfhood,

is

thought of as having a certain organic unity, an autonomous character and personality which it

does;

only in its

•

its

conceived to have a

expresses in everything

style,

which

conscious, intentional activities, in

philosophy, and so on, but also in

ities,

34

it is

it

in its unexpressed

its

is

manifest not

its

architecture,

unconscious activ-

assumptions— the unconscious of

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

society

may

be said to have been imagined before the un-

And

in the degree that society

was personalized by the concept

of culture, the individual

conscious of the individual.

was seen

to be far

ever before. This

is

more deeply implicated not an idea which

torian or to the social scientists; in the

mind

of every literate

it is

is

confined to the his-

an idea which

life

in the world.

At some point

say, for convenience, at the

is

work

at

and conscious person

and estimates the chances

thinks of his

than

in society

as

he

of his living well

in the history of the

West— let us

time of Rousseau— men began to

think of their fates as being lived out not in relation to God, or to the individual persons

who

are their neighbors, or to

material circumstance, but to the ideas and assumptions and

manners

of a large social totality.

be found in our

literature, in its

The evidence

of this

is

to

preoccupation with newly

discovered alien cultures which, in one regard or another, serve to criticize our own. Walter Scott could not have delighted the world with his representation in Waverley of the loyalty, sincerity,

and simplicity

not the world learned to think of it

of the life

in

Highland clans had terms of culture, had

not learned to wonder whether some inscrutable bad prin-

ciple in its present culture all

men

to be as loyal

was not making

it

impossible for

and sincere and simple as they

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

•

35

should be. In the dissemination of the idea of culture, Freud has no

doubt had a chief

part.

tions about culture

hear It

is

The

status of Freud's actual formula-

now somewhat ambiguous. We

seems to me, in

theory, that this

before they culture.

my ignorance of the refinements of cultural is

make

often said

by

writers on the subject just

use of some one of Freud's ideas about

But whatever we may conclude about the

lectual value of Freud's formulations,

that

it

great

often

said that Freud's theories of culture are inadequate.

it

intel-

we cannot fail to know

was Freud who made the idea

of culture real for a

many of us. Whatever he may mean to the people who

deal professionally with the idea of culture— and in point of fact

he means a great deal— for the layman Freud

is

likely to

be the chief proponent of the whole cultural concept he who made culture

we

and subtlety ual,

it

apparent to us

all are.

how

It

was

entirely implicated in

By what he said or suggested of the

of the influence of the family

upon the

depth

individ-

he made plain how the culture suffuses the remotest

parts of the individual mind, being taken in almost literally

with the mother's milk. His psychology involves culture in its

very essence— it

established in the

36

•

Freud and the

tells

mind

Crisis of

us that the surrogates of culture are itself,

that the development of the

our Culture

individual

mind

recapitulates the development of culture.

Generally speaking, the word "culture" orific sense.

straction

When we

is

used

in

an hon-

look at a people in the degree of ab-

which the idea

we cannot but

of culture implies,

be touched and impressed by what we

see,

we cannot

help

being awed by something mysterious at work, some creative

power which seems or quality that

may

to transcend

any particular act or habit

be observed. To make a coherent

life,

to

confront the terrors of the inner and the outer world, to establish the ritual

make

possible the

and

life

art,

of the

the pieties and duties which

group and the individual— these

are culture, and to contemplate these efforts of culture inevitably moving. And, indeed, without this

admiration a culture

is

a closed book to the student, for the

scientific attitude requisite for the

on a very

study of cultures

lively subjectivity. It is not

of culture

is

sympathy and

must make a

is

based

merely that the student

willing suspension of disbelief in

the assumptions of cultures other than his own; he must go

even further and tion

is

somehow

feel that

the culture he has under examina-

justified, that it is as it

should be.

This methodological sympathy, as we might

to

call

it,

devel-

of principle of cultural

autonomy, according

which cultures were to be thought

of as self-contained

oped into a kind

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

•

37

systems not open to criticism from without; and this principle

was taken from the anthropologists by

analysts. In this

The

culture

was not

to be judged "bad" or "neurotic";

who was

the individual

We

versely;

by the

to be judged

culture. This view, I believe, force.

certain psycho-

view a culture became a kind of absolute. it

was

criteria of the

no longer obtains

in its old

are no longer forbidden to judge cultures ad-

we may now speak

of

them

as inadequate cultures,

And

even as downright neurotic

cultures.

the absoluteness of culture

still persists. It

served in our responses to the cultures

we

yet the feeling for

may

best be ob-

think of as having

a "folk" character and in our tendency to suppose that when

an individual

happy and

is

to be a useful

in a

we make

of the idea of culture:

we

take

it

and powerful support to the idea of community,

what we respond to

seem

is

desirable state of existence. This will suggest the

unconscious use

for

at one with a culture of this sort he

in a folk culture is

to see, of the unity

members, the absence

what we

and coherence of

its

see, or

individual

of conflict, the sense of the wholeness

of the group.

But Freud's him, too, there

But

38

•

at the

attitude to culture is

same

is

different

an honorific tonality time, as

we cannot

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

from

this.

For

in the use of the word.

fail

to hear, there is in

what he says about culture an unfailing note

and

resistance. Freud's relation to culture

of exasperation

must be described

as an ambivalent one.

Recently, in another connection, self as

characterized by

its

I

spoke of the modern

and adverse imagination

intense

being,

and by certain powers

of indignant perception which, turned

upon the unconscious

of the culture in

which

it

had

its

made

it

thought. Freud's view of culture

is

portions of culture, have

accessible to conscious

marked by

awareness, by this indignant perception. the self as formed by

its

culture.

But he

He

first

reluctant to enter

it.

adverse

does indeed see

also sees the self as

set against the culture, struggling against

from the

this

it,

having been

Freud would have under-

stood what Hegel meant by speaking of the "terrible principle of culture." This resistance, this tragic regret over the

necessary involvement with culture, or even the ject.

is

obviously not the sole

dominant element in Freud's thought on the sub-

Freud was, as he said

serving, mind.

The aim

of himself a conservative, a con-

of all his effort

is

the service of cul-

ture—he speaks of the work of psychoanalysis as "the draining of the to

it

Zuyder Zee," the building

that where id

of the dyke, the seeing

was ego should be. Yet at the same time

adverse attitude to culture

is

his

very strong, his indignation

is

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

•

39

very intense. It

can of course be said that the indignation which an

upon

dividual directs tioned. Culture

may

Bokhara to escape Yet the

is

its

an

culturally condi-

is itself

be thought of as Kismet— we decrees, only to

illusion, if that is

one's culture has

which

his culture

effect

what

it

fulfill

them

flee

in

from

Samara.

be, of separateness

upon conduct, and upon

from

culture,

as decisive as the effects of the illusion of free will.

For Freud

this separateness

was a necessary

possible to stand

beyond the reach

formulation of the death-instinct

is

of culture. to

He

belief.

needed to believe that there was some point at which

it

was

Perhaps his

be interpreted as the

expression of this need. "Death destroys a man," says E. Forster, "but the idea of death saves him." Saves

what? From the entire submission life

in-

M.

him from

of himself— of his self— to

in culture.

At that

this point

you

will

perhaps be wondering

why

I said

Freud so greatly influenced our present-day idea

of

thought— his

re-

culture, for certainly this aspect of Freud's

sistance to culture— is not reflected in the thought of our

present-day, educated, enlightened, progressive middle class.

That

class sets so

because, as I say,

40

•

much it

store

sets so

by the idea

much

of

man

in culture

store (and rightly)

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

by the

idea of

man

in

But the idea

community. The two ideas are not the same.

of man-in-culture provides, as

it

were, the meta-

physic, the mystique, of our ideas of man-in-community. It

gives us a

way

of speaking

more profoundly about com-

munity, for talking about souls, about destiny, about the

ground and sanctions of morality; about

fate, free will,

and immortality.

It is

our

close to the idea of Providence. I of course

we

more

ation.

he

is if

man

we

Indeed, nothing

is

humane

liberal

utter,

is

is

we

express our

human

only

in accord with the best

not specifically a Freudian

centuries.

But although

it

was not

its

business for

in the first instance

confirmed by the tendency of cer-

it is

tain Freudian ideas.

And

of the

on which the tradition

thought has gone about

derived from Freud,

ground

of its cultural situ-

in accord with his cultural environment, and, also,

the cultural environment

idea. It is the idea, or the assumption,

two

middle class do

can be truly himself and fully

tendencies in himself. This idea

of

is.

and inadequacies

Yet in every criticism that

belief that if

actually

way of coming

characteristic of this class than its readiness to observe

certain obvious failings

only

it

of talking

do not mean that

of the educated, enlightened, progressive

not criticize our culture as

way

our

it is

it

may

be said to constitute the

Freudianism of the American educated middle

Freud and the

Crisis of our Culture

•

41

class,

expressed in that

rearing, morality,

But

if

and

we speak

cated middle

class,

class's theories of education, child-

social action.

of the

Freudianism of the American edu-

we must also speak

ism of the American educated middle attitude toward Freudianism

be even healthy. But

I

is

of the anti-Freudianclass.

An

ambivalent

perhaps inevitable and may-

do not have

in

mind what might be

called the normal ambivalence of response to Freud's ideas.

Rather, I speak of the particular resentment— for such

be called— of Freud's theories of the ture.

can

self in its relation to cul-

What I have described of Freud's tragic sense of culture,

of his apparent wish to establish the self of culture, will suggest the fact

it

is

that

ground

beyond the reach

for this hostility.

Freud challenges our sense

of

how the

For the

self relates

should relate to culture.

He

shakes

us most uncomfortably in those very ideas which

we

believe

to culture

we have

and

of

how

it

learned from him.

There was recently held a conference the purpose of considering the

effect

of psychiatrists for

upon the psychic health

of the nation of a certain cultural tendency of obvious im-

portance, the tendency represented loyalty,

by putting people under

into the ideas

42

•

and

attitudes

by

requiring oaths of

surveillance,

by inquiring

and pasts and associations

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

of

men and women

holding civic positions. 1 This tendency of

suspiciousness and repressiveness cultures; in

American culture

manifest in dramatic ways;

came

to call

it

its

has periodically

it

was

was met to consider

health of the nation.

effect

in all itself

this that the psychi-

as a factor in the psychic

The consensus

that the tendency of repressiveness

bad

made

most recent manifestation we

McCarthyism, and

atric conference

no doubt latent

is

at the conference

was

must inevitably have a

upon our national psychic

health. It

was not

merely said that individuals would be made the prey of tense anxiety.

and

likely to

The harm was

be perpetuated in the culture. For the ego

aspect of the

mind that

deals with the object-world,

of its important functions

of the idea of adventure.

closed off

by

checked by a ego it

is

was

interdiction,

is

in-

said to be of a far deeper kind is

the

and one

the pleasurable entertainment

But

if

part of the object- world

is

and

if

the impulse to adventure

is

restrictive culture, the free functioning of the

impaired.

No

less subject to injury is the

said at the conference that "a

super-ego-

mature super-ego can

optimally develop only in a free and democratic society." ^'Considerations Regarding the Loyalty Oath as a Manifestation of Current Social Tension and Anxiety: A Statement Formulated by the Committee on Social Issues of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry and a Panel Discussion." G.A.P. Symposium No. 1, Topeka, Kansas, October 1954.

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

•

43

Now

obviously there

What

agree with. psychiatry,

man, he

we

will

all

is

much

in this that

no one

will dis-

the conference says in the language of

say in our

own

language. If you enslave a

develop the psychology of a slave.

If

clude a

man from

human

quality will be materially diminished. All

you

ex-

free access to the benefits of society, his

good intention are

likely to say

something of

this

men

of

kind as

they think of social betterment.

And

yet

if

we

look critically at these ideas, they will be

seen not to go so far along the think.

political situation in

his

to truth as at

this in the first

I shall

writer

my

draw

volume

tells

us something

of his biography of Freud, but

whom Freud particularly admired. Mark Twain lived

Vienna at the time Freud was formulating

Parliament of

many

his theory of

of the sessions of the

1897 and he described some

of them.

One

event, which especially horrified him,

was the Parliament's

own

invited a militarized

surrender of

its

police force to

march

authority, for into the

House

it

itself to

remove

unruly members. Mark Twain certainly had no high

•

we

answer from the report of an American

psychoanalysis; he attended

44

first

which Freud's thought developed, and

ego and his super-ego too? Dr. Jones

about

in

way

What, to take a relevant example, was the cultural and

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

certain

opinion

manners

of the

of

American

by what he observed

in the

legislators,

but he was appalled

Viennese Parliament, the show

of personal violence, the personal invective of the rudest

most obscene he

sort.

"As to the make-up of the House

said, "it is this: the deputies

and from

life

all

come from

and

itself,"

the walks of

all

the grades of society. There are princes,

counts, barons, priests, mechanics, laborers, lawyers, physicians, professors,

religious

merchants, bankers, shopkeepers.

men, they are earnest,

sincere, devoted,

They

are

and they

hate the Jews." This was the one point of unity in a Parlia-

ment which was the battleground and

cultural jealousies.

meant the strength ruled

by

And

of the fiercest nationalistic

the weakness of Parliament

of the monarchical government,

police methods; censorship

inefficiency kept

it

was

in force,

which

and only

from being something graver than a

nuisance.

No

one, of course, will conclude that

oppression in the society of his Vienna.

Freud

Still, it

lived under

was anything

but a free and democratic society as the conference of psychiatrists,

society,

his

or most of us,

would define a

free

and Freud was not an enfranchised

middle years. His having been reared

surely goes far to explain

why some

and democratic citizen of

in

it

until

such a society

of his views of culture

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

•

45

are tragic or skeptical, and very far toward explaining why-

he conceived of the eral culture.

self as

But the

standing in opposition to the gen-

cultural circumstance in

reared did not, so far as

I

can make

out,

which he was

impair the function-

ing of his ego or his super-ego.

Why did it not?

Well, certain things in his particular cul-

tural situation intervened his society.

between him and the influence of

His family situation,

for

one thing: the family

the conduit of cultural influences, but

it is

also a

is

bulwark

against cultural influences. His ethnic situation for another thing: he

was a Jew, and enough

of the Jewish sub-culture

reached him to make a countervailing force against the general culture.

Then

his education:

self-respect, in the ability to

who can

move

say what part in

to a point

beyond the

reach of the surrounding dominant culture, has been played

by the old

classical education,

with

its

image of the other

culture, the ideal culture, that wonderful

of the ancient world

masters, scholars,

imagined culture

which no one but schoolboys, school-

and poets believed in? The schoolboy who

kept his diary in Greek, as Freud did, was not submitting his

ego or his super-ego to the debilitating influences of a strictive society.

Then

the culture of another nation inter-

vened between him and what was bad

46

•

Freud and the

Crisis of

re-

our Culture

in his

own

culture:

Freud's early love of England must be counted defenses.

own

Then he found

culture,

bad

as

it

among

his

strength in certain aspects of his

may have been by

our standards of

freedom and democracy: he loved the language and thus

made

it

And

his friend,

and he loved

science.

then beyond these cultural interpositions there was

This sense of himself

his sense of himself as a biological fact.

as a biological fact

was

of course supported

and confirmed by

the various accidents of Freud's cultural fate, but

begin with, a given, a donnee—a tity

and a particular quality

of

gift. It

it

was, to

was a particular quan-

human

energy, and

its

name

was Sigmund Freud.

The

place of biology in Freud's system of thought has

often been

commented

often spoken of as

Freud's thought. of a

man

culture,

if

on,

it

and generally adversely.

represents a reactionary part of

The argument

takes this form:

as being conditioned not so

we can

It is

much by

if

we

think

biology as

by

the more easily envisage a beneficent ma-

nipulation of his condition;

the wide differences

if

we keep

our eyes fixed upon

among cultures which may be

observed,

and if we repudiate Freud's naive belief that there is a human given in

all

persons and

all cultures,

then

we

are indeed

encouraged to think that we can do what we wish with our-

Freud and the

Crisis of

our Culture

•

47

with mankind— there

selves,

culture, there

no revision

is

no beneficent mutation

is

of the nature of

of

man, that we

cannot hope to bring about.

Now Freud may be right or he may be wrong in the place he gives to biology in human

fate,

to consider whether this emphasis rect or incorrect,

that

it is

culture of

is

human

is

but

I

think

we must

stop

on biology, whether cor-

not so far from being a reactionary idea

actually a liberating idea. It proposes to us that

not all-powerful.

It

suggests that there

is

a residue

quality beyond the reach of cultural control, and

that this residue of

human

quality, elemental as

serves to bring culture itself under criticism

it

may

be,

and keeps

it

from being absolute. This consideration at this

moment

Freud's

tainly not

I believe, of

in our history.

own cultural

some degree

is,

great importance to us

The argument

situation in

boyhood was,

I

made from

as I know, in

unfair, for the society of Vienna, although cer-

what we would

call free

and democratic, was ap-

parently such a mess of a society that one might, without difficulty,

escape whatever bad intentions

tolerance of mess

may

it

lead us to conclude that

genial intentions of freedom.

had; and it

Nowadays, however,

societies

are less likely to be messes; they are likely to be

48

•

Freud and the Crisis oi our Culture

its

had certain

all

too

efficient,

whether by coerciveness or seductiveness. In a

ety like ours, which, despite

some appearances

soci-

to

the

contrary, tends to be seductive rather than coercive, the individual's old defenses against the domination of the culture

become weaker and weaker. The deteriorates

The

and

is

influence of the family

replaced by the influence of the school.

small separatist group set apart by religious or ethnic

difference loses

its

authority, or uses

support the general culture.

what authority

The image

of

the other culture, the idealized past of

Greece, or

Rome,

or England,

is

what

is

first

it is

nation,

dismissed from education at is

worth not-

time in history, the pedagogue

believed to have a sense of reality.

understand that

has to

have called

some other

the behest of the pedagogic sense of reality— it ing that, for perhaps the

I

it

And we have come

to

not a low Philistine impulse that leads

us to scrutinize with anxiety our children's success in their social

life;

it is

rather a frank, free, generous, democratic,

progressive awareness of the charms of Group-Living, an

engaging trust— only the least is

little bit ironic,

and the irony

easily suppressed— of the natural happiness of man-in-

culture, or child-in-culture, so long as that culture

is

not

overtly hostile.

One does

not need to have a very profound quarrel with

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

•

49

American culture to feel uneasy because our defenses against it,

our modes of escape from

One may even have

American

culture, as I do,

ness of the self against

Our

culture

is

a very lively admiration for

and yet

culture

greater

There

momentous

social peace. It

any question grain to do

cause for alarm.

and

greater

socialization,

are, to

be observed which go counter to

toward

is

of revision in a

direction, in the direction of greater

greater reasonableness.

I believe, so

feel that this defenseless-

in process of revision,

very good and right openness,

its

are becoming less and less

it,

adequate.

as the

be

cooperativeness,

sure, tendencies to

this one,

but they are not,

development

must always seem

of the

ill-natured to raise

at all about this tendency. It goes against the

so.

Yet at least one question has already been

raised within, as

it

were, the ranks of the good, and

as well take advantage of this opportunity to be

out being disagreeable.

I said that

time in history, the pedagogue reality; the idea of a

•

for the first

presumed to have a sense

pedagogic sense of reality

That

pedagogic theory of our time

is

is

is

Freud and the

Crisis oi

of

not thought

because the dominant

the expression of the ideal

community by which the educated American middle

sets such store. Yet at the

50

is

we may

critical with-

now, perhaps

of as a contradiction in terms.

of

tendency

moment

our Culture

a great

many

of us

class

have

come

to feel that our ideal of

effect

community as

it

expresses

itself

theory and practice of pedagogy has had a very bad

in the

on our educational system.

We

carefully dissociate ourselves

from the reactionary

elements that attack modern modes of education, and

we come more and more

still

to believe that the elaborate ideol-

ogy of "integration with the group," of "cooperation," of "whole development," or "social studies" and "communication arts"

tion of

is

in effect the highly intellectualized rationaliza-

some deep-seated

anti-intellectualism.

the conscious intention of this pedagogy

and democracy and good it is

hostile to distinction,

thought, and at a

moment

and mind, and accuracy

Devoted self

as this

may

But

it

it is

firm in

to foster equality

to perceive that

is

when

distinction,

were never more needed.

to the ideal of integrating the

we come increasingly to

far

believe

from being what we hope the

be.

always easy to mock pedagogical theory. Let us

try something harder. is

is

is

we begin

in our history

of thought

pedagogy

conceives

but

and to mind, and to accuracy of

with society and culture,

that the self self

will,

We know that

its

The American educated middle

admiration of non-conformity and dissent.

right to be non-conformist, the right to dissent,

is

class

The

part of our

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

•

51

conception of community. Everybody says

so: in

monthly, quarterly magazines and in The

New

the weekly,

York Times,

at the cocktail party, at the conference of psychiatrists, at

the conference of teachers.

And

yet,

How

when we examine

conformity,

good

this

is,

and how

we must be dismayed

at the smallness of the

concrete actuality this very large idea contains. is

as sincere as

it is

right!

the content of our idea of non-

capacious, yet

The

rhetoric

we must sometimes wonder

whether what is being praised and defended is anything more than the right to have had some sympathetic connection with

Communism

ten or twenty years ago.

opposed reactionary tendencies

in

Men of principle have

our society and some have

taken risks in their opposition, but

for

most

of us our settled

antagonism to that instance of reactionary tendency we

Our imagina-

McCarthyism

is

tion of dissent

from our culture can scarcely go beyond

We

simply the badge of our

class.

cannot really imagine non-conformity at

call

all,

this.

not in

art,

not in moral or social theory, certainly not in the personal life— it

is

probably true that there never was a culture which

required so entire an eradication of personal differentiation, so bland a uniformity of manner. Admiring non-conformity

and loving community, we have decided that we are conformists together.

52

•

all

non-

We assert the right of our egos to court

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

adventure without danger and of our super-egos to be conscientious without in

many ways

imagine what

make an

strain.

We

it

means

I

think,

we

is

really cannot

have a

real intellectual

to read our novels to understand

a growing sense of the cooperative virtues

We

a diminishing sense of the self that cooperates. a class, agreed on the right or anger, that

what

to take an intellectual chance, or to

You have but

we have

make,

a very attractive culture, but

intellectual mistake, or to

difference.

that

undue

amount

and

have, as

of disaffected criticism,

we shall direct against our culture, and we have

agreed upon the aspects of our culture which are to be the

and anger. Having determined the

objects of our criticism

inoculating dose that assures the health of our self-respect,

we

are likely to be thrown into a panic

tampers with it— we fear

all

by anyone who

modulating ideas as

if

they were

the negation of the reality of our existence.

We the

how open and available to general culture the individual has become, how little promust,

tected he

is

I think,

by countervailing cultural forces, how unified and

demanding our nize this,

recognize

free culture has

we can begin

to see

become.

And

why we may

emphasis on biology as being a liberating

if

we do

recog-

think of Freud's

idea. It is a resist-

ance to and a modification of the cultural omnipotence.

We

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

•

53

reflect that

there

is

somewhere

in the child,

somewhere

in the adult,

a hard, irreducible, stubborn core of biological

urgency, and biological necessity, and biological reason,

which culture cannot reach and which reserves the which sooner or

and

resist

it

and revise

become aware and how

later

of

it.

will exercise, to It

seems to

me

that whenever

how entirely we are involved in

entirely controlled

by

it

we

our culture

it,

there must

of

come

when we remember our

biological selves. In her Anniversary Lecture of 1954,

Freud spoke

we

believe ourselves to be,

destined and fated and foreordained by to us a certain sense of liberation

right,

judge the culture

what she called the period

of

Anna

optimism in

the psychoanalytical thought about the rearing of children,

a period when, as she says, "almost the whole blame

for the

neurotic development of the child was laid on parental actions"

and when

"it

was hoped that the modification

these parental attitudes would do

of

away with infantile anxiety

and, consequently, abolish the infantile neuroses."

And Miss

Freud went on to speak of the following "period of pessimism,

when

the origin of neurosis was recognized to be due not to

environmental influences but to inevitable factors of various kinds." Pessimistic

thought

54

•

may

this

be; yet

new

when we

period of psychoanalytical think of the growing power

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

of culture to control us

by seduction

or coercion,

we must

be glad and not sorry that some part of our fate comes from outside the culture.

We

must not permit ourselves to be

terrible all

that

pendulum

we have

of thought

at the

mercy

and begin now

of the

to discredit

learned about cultural influence or conclude

that parents have been suddenly relieved of all responsibility for their children's psychic destinies.

of

Yet this new emphasis,

which Miss Freud speaks, upon the non-cultural part of

our destiny

may well serve to renovate and freshen our mode

of thinking about ourselves.

The is

interaction of biology

not a matter which

to now, entranced

and culture

we have

in the fate of

man

yet begun to understand.

Up

by all that the idea of culture and the study

of culture can tell us about the nature of

man, we have been

inclined to assign to culture an almost exclusive part in man's fate. If

the culture goes awry,

dual goes

awry— his ego and

we

say, inevitably the indivi-

his super-ego suffer serious

impairment. But history does not always support this view.

Sometimes

it

does, but not always. It

is

sometimes to be

observed that a whole people will degenerate because of a drastic

change in

cultural situation.

its

economic and

But then

too,

it

political

and thus

of its

sometimes happens that

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

•

55

a people living under imposed conditions of a very bad kind, the opposite of the conditions of that free and democratic society which the ego for health

will

and maturity,

living, indeed,

to

need

under persecution,

develop egos and super-egos of an amazing health and

strength. for

and the super-ego are said

Whether

maturity

difficult,

also of maturity I will not venture to say,

a difficult word to comprehend and

is

when once we comprehend

it,

to carry

its

it is

very

meaning

from one culture to another: but strength and health they certainly have, level.

enough to make for survival on a high cultural

They have their

psychic casualties, their psychic scars

are manifest, but they survive in sufficient dignity.

we ask why they thus survived,

the answer

And

if

may be that they

conceived of their egos and super-egos as not being culturally conditioned and dependent but as being virtually biological facts,

and immutable. And often they put

this conception

of their psyches to the ultimate biological test— they died for the

immutability of their egos and super-egos.

What, uals,

or

to shift our

made

it

possible for a Giordano Bruno, or a Socrates,

any other martyr

was

ground from the group to the individ-

of the intellect, to face his death? It

not, I think, that a free

and democratic society had

successfully nurtured the maturity of his super-ego.

56

•

Freud and the

Crisis of

our Culture

How

very strange

is

the super-ego! For

we say

of

that

it

surrogate of society, or of the culture, but one of

seems to be to lead us to imagine that there

beyond the culture

may

culture

is

that

it

culture, that there

it

we

it

that

much

who

harder to escape

is

in the face of culture,

if

we impose

wholly dependent upon the culture

energy and health.

"Suppose,"

I

heard a student on

other day, "Suppose a right

tioned, he

man

is

insanity.

paranoid— that

would have owned to a

and everybody

else

lively

at the

He

is,

he thinks

did not really, ques-

and reasoned admira-

men who thought they were

was wrong, he would have happily

that this isolation in belief

But

campus say the

mean what he said— had he been

tion for the long tradition of the

admitted

my own

and other people are wrong."

or he did not wholly,

right

happens that

cut off the possibility of those triumphs of

mind that are won

is

It often

being so judged and rejected,

But we make

the idea of a self that

he

the

a sanction

is

gives the highest reminiscent honors to those

the culture,

for its

for

it is

functions

a place from which the

be judged and rejected.

very grateful

have escaped

the

is

its

was not only a

moment at which he made

sign of

his utterance

he was speaking with the voice of the tendency of his culture.

He was not one of the group of my own students who, a short

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

•

57

me

time ago, read with tents,

Freud's Civilization and Its Discon-

but he was kin to them, for they told

had presented a paranoid version

me

that

Freud

of the relation of the self

to culture: he conceived of the self submitting to culture

being yet in opposition to

it;

he conceived of the

self as

and

being

not wholly continuous with culture, as being not wholly created by culture, as maintaining a standing quarrel with its

great benefactor. I

need scarcely remind you that in respect of

noia"

Freud

literature

is

is

quite at one with literature. In

concerned with the

self;

this "paraits

essence

and the particular con-

cern of the literature of the last two centuries has been with the self in tion the

its

We cannot men-

name of any great writer of the modern period whose

work has not explicit

standing quarrel with culture.

in

some way, and usually

way, insisted on this quarrel,

in a passionate

who

has not expressed

the bitterness of his discontent with civilization, said that the self

made

greater legitimate

and

who has

not

demands than any

culture could hope to satisfy. This intense conviction of the

existence of the self apart from culture

knows, present

its

is,

as culture well

noblest and most generous achievement At the

moment

it

must be thought

of as a liberating idea

without which our developing ideal of community

58

•

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

is

bound

to defeat

itself.

We can speak no greater praise of Freud than

to say that he placed this idea at the very center of his

thought.

Freud and the Crisis of our Culture

•

59

Nai

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MID-CENTURY ESSAYS