Jurnal

Psychoanalysis and Liberalism: The Case of Lionel Trilling
Author(s): MARK SHECHNER

Source: Salmagundi , Spring 1978, No. 41, Lionel Trilling (Spring 1978), pp. 3-32
Published by: Skidmore College
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40547113
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Psychoanalysis and Liberalism:
The Case of Lionel Trilling
BY MARK SHECHNER
In time, it may become apparent that Freud

and his doctrine have undergone an inexorable
disciplining by the culture, and that the
exemplary cast of Freud's mind and character
is more enduring than the particulars of his
doctrine. In culture it is always the example
that survives; the person is the immortal idea.
-Philip Rieff
To consider the fate of those writers and intellectuals who started

in the thirties is to call to mind certain paradigms of experienc
ideology that gave shape to their lives and were the hallmarks of th
generational identity: the disillusionment with and retreat fr
progressive politics and the rightward drift of their sentiment
allegiances during the years roughly from 1937 to 1945. We th
naturally of those repentant Communists and fellow-travellers
James Burnham, Sidney Hook, Irving Kristol, Whittaker Cham
John Dos Passos, and Arthur Koestler (who, though not an Amer
became a leading spokesman for American Cold War attitudes in
late forties), whose headlong flights from one political extreme to t
other were symptoms of the desperation and instability of those ye
Of such moment was the experience that it could appear, in later ye
to be the defining feature of the era's moral history: the very cour
the Zeitgeist. By the early 1950s, these ex-leftists, acting out ritual
atonement for sins they had committed in the name of the future, a
as for many they had only imagined, could assume spokesmansh
the spirit of post-war accommodation that went by the name of re
or pragmatism, or pluralism, or, as Daniel Bell phrased it, "the e

3.108.20.246 on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 04:52:39 +00:00
4 MARK SHECHNER
ideology." And as the charg
such veterans of the old left
to remind us, there remain
which one's moral credit is c
which one resigned or fell
right people that one was
But in truth this paradigm
general experience, which se
Not all post-war sentiment a
right, and not everyone w
miners in Harlan County o
From Below later signed u
Freedom or pled the case of
pages of the CIA-subsidized
of the
great disillusionmen
careers,from those of staun
and amazing holdouts for s
psychological converts, who
progressive views by ta
psychoanalysis or whate
revitalization happened to
In reading through the liter
especially to these converts
products of their apostas
particularly rich, and much
the war came down in the
released into their thought
Elsewhere I've characterize
Bellow, Isaac Rosenfeld, an
of socialism, but in genera
around Partisan Review in
modernist line in fiction b
Edmund Wilson, W.H. Aud
Schapiro, George Orwell,
took its departure from th
movements: a fall and a rise
triumph of big business.
For those intellectuals who
of the state's withering awa
and values, one consequenc
hegemony after the war

3.108.20.246 on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 04:52:39 +00:00
Psychoanalysis and Liberalism: The Case of Lionel Trilling 5
irrelevance, as the emergence of an unprecedented consumer economy
at home and the rise of the Cold War abroad undercut their dreams of
egalitarianism, socialism and international cooperation. The great
depression came to an end, but the depression of the intellectuals
lingered on, all the more poignant for being so wholly out of phase with
the new American confidence. Into the emotional gap between the
general elation and the intellectuals' sense of alienation flowed a volatile
mix of ideas and energies that were expressive of such psychic
dissociation. The literary phenomenon we've come to call the Jewish
novel had its origins in the crisis of the intellectuals at a time when terms
like alienation, victimization, and marginality were becoming popular
definitions of Jewish sensibility and the Jew a stand-in for something
known as "the universal homelessness of man." Among the post-war
books to strike the note of isolation and drift were Saul Bellow's first
novels, Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947), Isaac Rosenfeld's
novel, Passage From Home (1946), and his short stories, which were
collected posthumously under the title Alpha and Omega (1966), Lionel
Trilling's The Middle of the Journey {'9 Al), Delmore Schwartz's stories
in The World is a Wedding (1948), Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman
(1949), Paul Goodman's The Breakup of Our Camp (1949), Norman
Mailer's Barbary Shore (1951) and The Deer Park (1955), Bernard
Malamud's The Natural (1952) and The Assistant (1957), and Herbert
Gold's The Man Who Was Not With It (1954).
Listening in upon this experience from the perspective of our own
time, when this outburst of energy-in-anguish has largely exhausted
itself, we may detect undertones of exuberance in the elegaic music* and,
indeed, the real depression of these books shades off readily into the
theatre of despair - as readily as Dangling Man shades off into Herzog.
No one ever celebrated his own predicament more or held a more
inspired view of his own tragic condition than did the forties'
intellectuals at the very nadir of their defeat. If some, like Rosenfeld and
Schwartz, eventually succumbed, unfulfilled, to the exhaustion of their
powers, others found the atmosphere of disillusionment paradoxically
bracing. In the 1940s, it seems, everyone wanted to be Franz Kafka.
It was in such a climate of aggressive malaise that psychoanalysis
moved into the conceptual vacuum left by the retreat of socialism. For
those who could make this shift of theoretical gears, the mental
transformation from Marxist to Freudian was not so taxing as might be
supposed. Marxism, in fact, served this generation as a school for
abstract reasoning by preparing the mind for the rigors of grand theory.
Psychoanalysis shares with Marxism the vanities of a comprehensive
explanatory system, as ready to apply itself to a novel or a whole society

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6 MARK SHECHNER
as to a neurotic sympto
explanation and radica
authentic levels of c
appearances of social li
an ostensible cure that o
the promise of practical
on the dynamics of th
equations of economic e
of necessity; it places th
the individual rather th
strongly to the renegad
Trotskyists, who clust
Review in the 1930s and
unfolding of ineluctable
ukase, but a projection
social brotherhood - a
idealized Gemeinschaft
work. Marxists in name
the libertarian bias of
views of the mind tha
By the mid-forties, w
Goodman had embra
groundrules for their
who found in psychoana
illusions. And a decade
Ginsberg would also be
Reichian modalities. If
that their psychoanalys
signalled an end to con
said that it expressed t
into human predicamen
prospects for moral p
militant, Reichian mode
history than a tactical
outflank the reactionary
those intellectuals who t
of the mind. But, in it
advanced the theme of Civilization and Its Discontents that the tension
between human desires and social constraints is both inevitable and
necessary, and that aggression and guilt are built-in features of human
nature which are not subject to amelioration by social means. The later
work of Freud, with its emphasis on aggression and its Manichaean

3.108.20.246 on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 04:52:39 +00:00
biology of Eros and the "death instinct," was explicitly anti-utopian as
well as anti-liberal, and therefore well-suited to the depressive aftermath
of the war, especially for those intellectuals who had been stunned by
their own helplessness in the face of the Nazi slaughter of the Jews and
enraged by the general complicity of "civilization" in the crime. Freud
was the ideal social philosopher for a generation whose initial post-war
task was to come to terms with its own rage and guilt.
In addition to the mood of sober realism it appeared to endorse,
psychoanalysis put forward a crisis model of the mind that suited well
the emotional crisis of the intellectuals. It dispensed with the one-
dimensional, utilitarian psychology shared in common by vulgar
Marxism and American effort optimism in favor of a dialectical
psychology in which doubt, ambivalence, inner struggle, and guilt were
put forward as the very agencies of thought rather than signs of moral
indulgence. Moreover, it cast doubt upon claims of moral certitude by
declaring the inauthenticity, the essential defensiveness, of all organized
self-assurances. Especially for the Jews, who were buffeted by so many
historical and intellectual cross-currents, psychoanalysis was a way of
justifying self-doubt and even raising it to the level of a moral standard.
As so much post-war fiction gave testimony, uncertainty was not only a
by-product of the modern crisis, but the very best way to meet it, so that
John Laskell, the reformed progressive of Lionel Trilling's The Middle
of the Journey, earns points toward maturity and moral realism by
declining to take a stand on anything but his own negative capability.
And Joseph, the paralyzed ex-socialist of Bellow's Dangling Man,
negotiates his way through the thicket of modern ideas by refusing to be
deterred by any of them. At an historical juncture when the
disintegrated consciousness of modern life appeared to have achieved
not only victory but stature among the intellectuals, psychoanalysis
appealed to them as both ideology and cure, as justification and therapy.
But I don't wish to sound overly schematic in this view of the
intellectual life of the forties. Psychoanalysis did not really make its
debut among American writers on VJ Day, nor was its embrace
invariably a sign that social concerns had been happily outgrown. The
history of applied psychoanalysis in America is both long and, from the
social point of view, honorable. We have the criticism of Kenneth Burke
in the thirties, in which the dynamics of class and of the unconscious are
brilliantly fused into a dazzling dialectical system, as evidence of an
early and sophisticated application of psychoanalysis to literature and
testimony too that syntheses could be devised that left the social
conscience intact. More important and certainly more influential than
the maverick voice of Burke, who was, in any case, a literary critic, not a

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g MARK SHECHNER
social theorist, was th

Sozialforschung or Frank
to 1949 were on West 1
The varieties of critical t
in the work of Theodor
Marcuse, featured cred
Marxism into common foc
and society. And, of co
books argued strongly fo
arrangements, and thus f
objects of applied psychia
emotions, or our famil
formula, so we run the
Reichians like Goodman
passion, though their s
remedies that were bey
* * * *
It was in the post

Lionel Trilling cam
moral realism (tha
modulation, and the
pivotal figure amon
became among the
career would be a
Jew, and as a Jew h
of the 1930s, whose
sense of intellect
Arnold, James, Fo
intellectuals he st
modernism and was
ideas and thick text
concern. He shared with the others the view of literature as the
expression of history, politics, class, and the Zeitgeist (though a
Hegelian, he had sufficient appreciation of the material life to invoke
class as an idea of great power), and made a practice of keeping watch
over the trends and wrinkles of what his circle agreed to call the culture,
which consisted largely of the opinions and social habits of the Eastern,
liberal intelligentsia. And, after his fashion, he entered the mid-forties
from the same position of alienation held in common by the intellectuals
of his generation. He didn't call it that; he was, after all, a professor at

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Columbia, not a graduate of the Federal Writers' Project, but the
prevailing mood of his essays in the forties, as well as of his novel, The
Middle of the Journey, was that of deracination and depression.
Though we don't usually think of Trilling as the historian of his own
emotions, we can read the progression of moods he documented and the
positions he defended as contributions to a Romantic autobiography: a
case history of youthful precocity, mid-life emotional crisis, and
eventual revival of the sort the nineteenth century held to be the very
definition of the moral progress of the modern spirit. Mill's
Autobiography comes to mind, as do such classic tales of crisis and
conversion as Wordsworth's The Prelude, Byron's Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, and Tennyson's In Memoriam.
The Middle of the Journey, in its muted way, is such an account of
spiritual death and rebirth, and the cycle of depression and revival in
general is etched deeply into the larger movement of Trilling's work, as it
was into the work of so many of his contemporaries. But what faith
meant to Tennyson, the gospel of work to Carlyle, sentiment to
Wordsworth, and Wordsworth himself to Mill, the entire emotional
vista opened up by both psychoanalysis and modern literature was to
Trilling. Trilling was aware of the precedents; psychoanalysis, as he
understood it, was a codification of the great surge of self-discovery and
self-healing that marked the literature of the nineteenth century. Mill in
particular served him as a model of interior regeneration, and not only
his Autobiography but the essays on Bentham and Coleridge stood
behind the lessons on politics and the emotional life that Trilling himself
delivered to his own generation in The Liberal Imagination.
In fact, what made Trilling's own version of the crisis of feeling so
exemplary and influential a modern episode was his adherence to the
example of Mill - the commitment to thinking the crisis through and
drawing the connections between his own troubled emotions and the
historical dilemma of his generation. Trilling had no difficulty
considering himself a representative case, a "modern self' suffering from
history. Thus he could turn the education of his own feelings through the
exploration of inner conflict and the cultivation of sensibility into an
ideological program: to reform the imagination of the prevailing liberal
culture, or "To recall liberalism to its first essential imagination of
variousness and possibility."
Trilling's case against the liberal imagination as he found it in the
1930s doesn't have to be reviewed here; his estimate of its intellectual
shallowness is well known and generally accepted by now, even if the
general recoil from ideology that liberalism's shortcomings appeared to

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10 MARK SHECHNER
justify is no longer celebr

do want to talk about t
efforts at intellectual revival and the flavor it added to his cultural
politics as well as what it, in turn, derived from them. The dominant
themes of Trilling's political and cultural thought in the forties grew in
tandem with his interest in psychoanalysis; it is clear that his adoption of
Freud was a special feature of those attitudes toward the progressive
culture that were the polemical heart of The Liberal Imagination,
though just how the politics of psychoanalysis shaped Trilling's use of it
or affected those ideas that emerged under its sign is less clear.
The obvious starting point is to observe that psychoanalysis was to be
administered to the intellectual culture at large, along with remedial
doses of literature, as an elixir for weary emotions and an antidote to a
progressivism that, in its instrumental view of reality and crude
behaviorist orientation, "drifts toward a denial of the emotions and the
imagination." Freudian man was a step upwards from liberal man in
complication and mysteriousness, and was, in effect, his contradiction:
he had an unconscious mind whose purposes were not always in accord
with either his conscious will or his class interest; he was given to
entertaining contrary ideas and emotions at the same time and to
tormenting himself with his own ambiguities; he was prone to irrational
fits of melancholy or guilt and to performing unexplained rites of
apology and expiation for crimes he had not committed, and he had a
fondness for self-defeat that made his failures seem more genuine
expressions of will than his successes. How unlike the utilitarian man of
liberalism, who maximizes pleasure at every meager opportunity, and
how much closer to the neurotic hero of contemporary fiction, who
confirms the modern character that Hegel called the "disintegrated
consciousness!" For Trilling, the literary prototype of this version of
psychological man was Rameau's nephew, Diderot's creature of lusts
and deceits in whom he saw an epitome of the modern crisis and a
preview of the psychoanalytic view of human nature: willful, insatiable,
and contradictory. One thing psychoanalysis and contemporary fiction
agree on is the alienation of modern consciousness from the wellsprings
of will and desire, and for Trilling, the sufficient measure of liberalism's
imaginative bankruptcy was its refusal to countenance the irrational
component in human nature and, correspondingly, to gain expression in
a major literature. It failed the tests of both psychoanalysis and fiction.
But that did not amount to a charge of political bankruptcy, for
though Trilling despaired of liberalism's capacity to ameliorate the
material conditions of life, nowhere did he venture an estimate of its
political ideas or programs comparable in scope or trenchancy to his
assessment of its imagination. Coming from a writer whose reputation

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owed so much to the climate of contemporary politics and who was so
widely accepted as a political intellectual, Trilling's books yield
surprisingly little concrete political thought. Trilling departed from the
example of his English mentors: Coleridge, Arnold, and Mill, in
proff erring no social ideas of his own, only social sentiments and tastes
which did not add up to an alternative liberalism or, for that matter, an
alternative conservatism. His revitalized versions of the liberal
imagination could never be put to any political tests but only aesthetic
ones, for only in relation to literature and literary styles of
representation could their validation be assured. By finessing all talk of
policies, power, and institutions, except at levels of the highest
abstraction, Trilling could chastise liberalism for its shallowness
without having to confront on his own the world in which that
shallowness had taken root. For what Trilling usually meant by politics
was ideology, those large ideas of broad currency that frame reality,
justify politics, and both constitute the rules of intellectual culture and
regulate the very lives and emotions of the intellectuals. Only his view of
ideology was not what a sociologist might see, a system of ideas serving
to legitimate power or wealth or vested interest, but what a critic of
literature might see, a Weltanschauung or aesthetics of vision, a
principle of taste. In effect, Trilling left the dissection of liberal politics
to others. The context of his ideas in the forties, after all, was the
dismemberment of the left from all quarters, when everyone, the old
Trotskyists in particular, wanted a piece of the corpse.
This deflection of attention from the world to the intellectuals and
their perception of it was Trilling's way of detaching himself from the
liberal mainstream to become its critic. And while such a politics of ideas
could be vulgarized into a politics of opinions, which is what it
commonly amounts to in the literary journalism of what used to be
called the "little magazines," at its most acute it was a politics of vision
and an epistemology. Trilling's finest essays were snapshots of the
contemporary intellectuals in the act of observing and defining reality.
His essays in The Liberal Imagination on Dreiser ("Reality in America")
and the Kinsey Report are superb definitions of American and liberal
styles of social knowledge, and if one learns little from them about the
actualities of reality in America, one learns a great deal about the
ideology of social perception in a society founded upon rationalized
optimism. One also learns from Trilling something about the emotional
impact of ideas and programs, what they feel like and what qualities of
life they purvey. What he would recall most vividly of the thirties were its
ideological failures and their devastating consequences for those who
had committed their lives to its prevailing myths. In his introduction to

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12 MARK SHECHNER
Tess Slesinger's The Unpo

deadness that lay at the he
had brought to the fo
temperament." Yet such sen
was upon a belief in the pr
as elsewhere, Trilling supp
progressive realism playe
vicious labor battles, the a
general desperation. It w
breadlines were only a fan
proletarian art that could
vision. What comes into view when the camera dissolves from Harlan
County to rural Connecticut is a movie of the 1930s featuring the self-
deceived and self-destroying intellectuals themselves, and consequently
dominated by its ideas of itself rather than the circumstances that had
brought those ideas into prominence.
Both the strengths and limitations of Trilling's approach to the
politics of culture are evident in The Middle of the Journey, his sole
effort at yoking political thought to literary views in order to illuminate
politics, rather than to venerate literature. That book was an attempt to
bring to the politics of contemporary culture a sort of synthetic
Victorian sensibility, an impasto of attitudes that Trilling had concocted
for himself out of Mill, Arnold, Forster, Freud, and Keats, and to
disclose the deadness at the core of liberalism by demonstrating how
paradoxically stultifying was the embrace of its unremitting optimism
upon the human heart. It was, as that may sound, a vote for the British
nineteenth century over the American twentieth; Trilling's Anglophilia
was always a moral preference first and foremost.
In later years Trilling himself observed that his intention had been to
write a book about death, and about the refusal of intellectuals schooled
in the liberal tradition to countenance it, because it lay outside the
domain of their progressive fantasies. Or, as he would ask rhetorically in
pointing up the way all things are politicized when dogma commands
the imagination, "Was there not a sense in which death might be called
reactionary?" John Laskell, Trilling's somewhat retiring spokesman in
The Middle of the Journey, has recently lost the woman he loved to a
sudden illness and has himself just recovered from a dangerous attack of
scarlet fever. In his convalescence he visits the rustic Connecticut home
of Arthur and Nancy Croom, vigorous, cheerful, and enlightened
progressives who can scarcely pronounce the word death let alone draw
tragic lessons from the presence of this walking memento mori in their
midst. Arthur Croom is protected from depression by what Laskell calls

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"the armor of idealism." Laskell, however, needing to talk about his
brush with death and to explore the meaning of that experience, finds
that he is isolated from his friends and their sprightly intelligence, for he
has looked into the abyss and seen there the end of ideology. He is joined
at the Crooms' by another apostate from the Left, Gifford Maxim, a
repentant Communist, indeed, secret agent turned staunch
necessitarian or law-and-order man, whose political views have shifted
radically to the right without surrendering an ounce of their millenarian
zeal. Laskell thinks of him as "the man of the far future, the bloody,
moral apocalyptic future that was sure to come." As we now know,
Maxim is modelled upon Whittaker Chambers, whose transformation
from espionage agent to prosecution witness won him a starring role in
the soap opera of America's post- War revulsion against Communism.
Though the plot of The Middle of the Journey is full of turns, including
another sudden death, which supposedly puts to the test everyone's
ideas about class, character, and "reality," the book is essentially a
conversation piece; the moral element that Trilling was so intent upon
pushing is contained in the by-play among these four, the Socratic
dialectics of competing ideas whose overall purpose is to cast all ideas
into doubt.
The Middle of the Journey just coruscates with intelligence and
dialectical sparkle, and it remains the most illuminating document we
have of the recoil of the political imagination from dogma under the
pressure of the chastened realism of the late thirties and early forties -
that fall into the quotidian that was the new era's particular form of
disillusionment. Maxim, Laskell, and the Crooms are sharply drawn
representative figures who stand for political positions and processes
that engaged, and ruined, so many intellectuals in the thirties. But the
book is first of all about the imagination under the sway of social ideas,
or, as Trilling would entitle a monograph later in his career, about
"mind in the modern world." It is a book about the mind and about
those parts of it that take their cue from and find expression in political
ideas. It is especially about that region of mind that is given neither to
pure will nor pure idea, where the historical sense intersects the return of
the repressed, and richly "overdetermined" motives take shape as
political views. The politics of The Middle of the Journey is largely a
politics of the mind and of character; the book's historical dimension is
drastically foreshortened, and the context of actual events and
circumstances so generalized as to be unimportant. The reader can
scarcely fix the moment; only fleeting references to Spain and the
Moscow Trials locate the novel in the late 1930s. Ideology, then, is not a
theory of history but a matter of character, posture, and attitude. The

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14 MARK SHECHNER
Middle of the Journey

personal bearing and wh
I don't want to oversell t
thematic depth than I
document than a realized
historical moment and of
out of which came no
reconstituted aesthetics a
much to art as it did to a
not only the triumph of
in modulation over the lo
prop and modernism ov
I want to emphasize this
take John Laskell to be a
they have also taken him
for a moral standard by
failing to observe, at th
character he really is. T
character to speak of, onl
or definition, but there
strange one. The "disinteg
attribute to the modern
relatively benign form.
man, having neither pare
thirty-three he has never
woman; he has no child
anyway from the very as
ideas, though he holds th
intellectual, he is suppose
as a man, he is a blea
encompasses more than
the political moment in T
book is in other respects
much to the point that L
for though we are told t
know that he has really b
the past. We know that t
apparent antagonists, ar
lives in search of second
from the same disease - s
Maxim, afflicted by the
atonement, Laskell just

3.108.20.246 on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 04:52:39 +00:00
politics of penance whose motive force is guilt, while Laskell's are the
politics of convalescence: abstinence and moderation. The first law of
recuperation is not to push yourself.
For all its apparent interiority and concern with the self, The Middle
of the Journey can't be taken for a psychological novel. Except for
Laskell's, and Trilling's, appreciation for ambivalence as a positive
attitude, that is, as a precondition of moral realism, and the mystique of
easeful death, for which Keats is as much responsible as Freud, there is
scarcely a Freudian idea in the book, nor is there a fictional technique
whose provenance might be traced to the climate of modern
introspection. The Middle of the Journey is very much about the
dilemmas of consciousness; the forces in contest are ideas, not instincts,
and the inner dynamics of character are simple and shallow. It is also a
conventional novel, indeed, almost deliberately unfashionable in its
methods; its technical resources derive mainly from the line of
philosophical humanism that runs from Austen and George Eliot to
Forster and James. Against the claims of the more ideological brands of
naturalism and realism that held sway in the thirties, it poses not the
radical subjectivity of Joyce or Proust but the sensibility of the
nineteenth century novel of thought.
The Middle of the Journey's link to psychoanalysis, then, lies neither
in its ideas nor in its aesthetic strategies but in the deeper rhythm of
experience that plots its moral curve; the rhythm of illness and recovery,
or crisis and conversion that sets us to talking about ideological
movements and revolutions in the language of disease and health.
Laskell, Maxim, and the Crooms all suffer from ideas - they are literally
sick with modern thought.
In the grim early forties, history could scarcely seem anything other
than a disease, nor recovery anything less than the most pressing
business at hand. The "Wasteland outlook," now so much bemoaned by
Saul Bellow, seemed only common sense to an age that had seen the
future collapse into barbarism. Trilling was not alone in pondering the
ubiquity of neurosis and the cultural import of the Freudian dictum,
"We are all ill." "Now," Trilling observed in his gloomy essay, "Art and
Fortune," "the old margin [for doubt] no longer exists; the facade is
down; society's resistance to the discovery of depravity has ceased; now
everyone knows that Thackeray was wrong, Swift right." Note that it is
not, say, Spengler or Hobbes who are called upon here in witness to the
disintegration of culture but novelists, Thackeray and Swift. For the
novel was, for Trilling, the definitive cultural document, the very
measure of the Zeitgeist, and he was open to the thought that the
contemporary decline of novelistic passion and the breakup of the

3.108.20.246 on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 04:52:39 +00:00
16 MARK SHECHNER
synthesis of philosophy
might well betoken noth
West.
The novel is a kind of s

which is perhaps why w
of any other form of t
most devoted to the c
will; and the will of o
religious will, the polit
each is dying of its ow
Where Trilling stood a

bleak diagnosis - even an
so unique - but in the pr
from both the Reichians
and the liberals and unreconstructed Marxists in his vote for
psychoanalysis and the novel as correctives to the general malaise. Of
course, it was not exactly relief that Trilling was after, not in the sense of
either catharsis or adjustment to conditions, but a deeper level of
rapprochement with the dilemma. Freudian that he was, he did not
court a remission of symptoms so much as a reconstruction of his own
character in ways that would allow him to face up to and survive the
tragic situation on its terms. He was out to form, as he would put it, a
"modern self," a resilient ego that would be equal to the demands of the
age, and he attempted the transformation by immersing himself in
literature and assimilating the exemplary monuments of unaging
intellect. Though the formation of a reinvigorated but durable self was a
personal quest, Trilling always treated it as the project of his generation
through the neat rhetorical gambit of turning the experiencing "I" into a
"we," thus both disguising the personal stakes involved and playing up
the shared aspects of the crisis. The essays in The Liberal Imagination
can be read both as chapters in a moral autobiography and showcases
for the acculturated ego in the process of its self-reconstruction.
It seems an odd choice to seek emotional renewal for oneself, let
alone for one's culture, through the agency of, of all things, the novel.
Given the depths of the crisis, one would have thought such remedy
beyond the powers of mere literature. But it was not so odd to Trilling,
who had so high an estimation of the novel's capacity for social
intelligence, and credited it, above all other expressions of human
imagination, with representing the mind in its subtlest and most
complex operations. For Trilling, after all, the modern crisis was not

3.108.20.246 on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 04:52:39 +00:00
primarily a crisis of conditions, however awful they might be, but of
emotions and imagination; it was to the impoverished inner life that the
lessons in The Liberal Imagination were addressed. And it was in the
novel, especially the great nineteenth century novels that are the richest
examples ofthat genre, that Trilling saw the modern social imagination
working at its highest pitch. Flaubert, Stendhal, Austen, James,
Forster, and Tolstoy were for him not only exemplary artists but
instances of civilized intelligence in full bloom; they were the flowering
of a particular phase of Western social self-consciousness that had
begun with the Enlightenment and reached its apogee in the middle of
the nineteenth century.
But we should keep in mind that Trilling was almost always talking
about himself, and that the essay in which his most exalted claims for the
novel are made, "Art and Forture," is also a spiritual autobiography in
miniature, done according to the Romantic paradigm. Ostensibly a
meditation on the death of the novel, it is really about the death and
rebirth of "the will," and there can hardly be any doubt about whose will
is at issue. Moreover, in claiming for the novel the power to renovate the
will, Trilling seems to have had in mind not only his own intimate
relation to books but the example of Mill, whose youthful bout with
depression was cured by the reading of Marmontel's Mémoires and
whose convalescence and emotional re-education were abetted by
therapeutic doses of Wordsworth. To reflect back upon The Middle of
the Journey after reading The Liberal Imagination is to perceive the
central weakness of Trilling's novel, which is his allowing John Laskell
to speak for his convictions without giving Laskell the benefit of his vital
experiences, that is to say, his reading. LaskelFs recovery from liberal
ideas, unmediated by anything but his post-operative meditation upon a
bedside rose, rather than something more substantial, like The Red and
the Black, is never credible. By contrast, Gifford Maxim's
metamorphosis, motivated by a fierce and well-earned attack of
remorse, is so much more real than LaskelFs conversion to modulation
and sensibility, which seems both unmotivated and intellectually flimsy.
Laskell displays the sort of character that might be formed under the
influence of the great moral themes of literature, for he is every inch the
English teacher, but his convictions, lacking intellectual support, hardly
rise above the level of genteel mannerisms.
Indeed, the problem of abstraction is general throughout the book,
and is not just a flaw in the characterization of Laskell. By removing the
action from some natural arena of conflict to a house in rural
Connecticut- that is, to a world apart - Trilling was able to write a sort
of moral pastoral whose characters are largely representative

3.108.20.246 on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 04:52:39 +00:00
18 MARK SHECHNER
abstractions. Laskell
learning that you don't
you get the general drif
for the better, to be sur
the family, in which i
weight and complexity.
for the seminar room, a
acquaintances who gath
ideas, for nothing dra
dramatic action upon th
is both to play up thei
political value.
♦ * * *
Seeing nothi
hanging in th
he saw it thre
left or by th
psychoanalysis
gratifications
deeply connec
essential heal
and the Bow,
Philoctetes, th
neurosis. For i
neurosis, as a
point of appea
its own excess
Liberal Imagi
The cornersto
health of art,
essays as obje
dictum that t
He is not poss
under the sh
original sin, t
over his confl
successful obje
available to o
struggle." Reg
writing, what

3.108.20.246 on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 04:52:39 +00:00
gives him the power to conceive, to play, to work, and to bring his work
to a conclusion."
But if literature was the cornerstone of a moral system, the morality of
the mind was in turn the sought-after feature of literature. What Trilling
always called attention to was the pedagogical example, and his most
influential books, like The Liberal Imagination and The Opposing Self
are books of exemplary lives, exemplary minds, really, intellectual and
therefore moral models whose ways of balancing pressures and
reconciling tensions shine forth as salutary cases. James, Keats, Austen,
Forster, Arnold, Mill, Orwell, and, especially, Freud, to rename the
central figures in the pantheon, are heroes of thought, whose heroism
consists of a judicious balancing of claims, a skeptical adherence to the
cultural donnée, and a qualified acceptance of the conditioned nature of
social existence. They are, in a phrase, mature adversaries of culture.
Such virtues of mind sound oxymoronic, as they are supposed to,
though Trilling thought of them as dialectical. He was a believer in
chastened and wary rebellions that combined radical criticism of the
existing order with tragic acceptance, and he admired, indeed, exalted
the career of Sigmund Freud as the very paradigm of such a rebellion.
Psychoanalysis, to the extent that it entered the moral system, did so as a
principle of approbation rather than a tool of radical analysis - as an
endorsement of certain civilized and modulated styles of managing
pressure or doubt or despair. It was pressed into service as an ethical
posture and a statement, in the idiom of a science, of the moral life of
Sigmund Freud.
Which, in some measure, it is. As Phillip Rieff has shown in great
detail, psychoanalysis is a moral psychology whose values are closely
bound up with the character of Freud himself, with his skepticism, his
intellectual restlessness, his militant rationalism, and his subjection of
his own motives and dreams, as well as those of his patients, to rigorous
scrutiny. Its very object is the moral character of the patient, the
complex reticulation of habits and beliefs that constitutes his identity,
and it was the most radical and enduring of Freud's discoveries that his
neurotic patients were suffering from ideas rather than from
neurological disorders, and that treatment had to start with an
interpretation of the ideas themselves. Thus the interpretive tactics of
psychoanalysis take their departure from values, and the very principle
of treatment is to challenge the patient's moral system in an effort to peel
away the film of bad faith and illusion that constitutes his illness. The
aspects of mind that are now the hallmarks of the psychoanalytic view:
repression, the dynamic unconscious, the belief that all manifestations
of consciousness mask a latent and more significant level of meaning in

3.108.20.246 on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 04:52:39 +00:00
20 MARK SHECHNER
which stunning, infantile m

portray ordinary conscio
psychoanalysis to be a sci
Trilling's admiration for
science is a matter of recor
Freud was for him somethin
personal character and con
and independence, his sense
or figured as models for
person and tried to fulfil
Trilling's ardent declarations of admiration and intellectual
indebtedness, perhaps nothing is so remarkable about him as the dis-
crepancy between his zeal for Freud and his use of him. While many of
Trilling's essays on literature and culture over the years may be read
as applied Freud, they are largely applications of his character and his
outlook rather than his ideas about the constitution of the mind. Indeed,
the reader who has been struck by the discrepancy might feel justified in
wondering whether such lionizing of Freud was not done at the expense
of psychoanalysis as such, for it is plain that the figure of the man in
Trilling's thought greatly overshadowed the method. I'm not thinking
only of the shifts in emphasis from Trilling's early and detailed critiques
of psychoanalysis in The Liberal Imagination ("Freud and Literature,"
"Art and Neurosis") to the later speculations on Freud's cultural
thought, notably the essay, "Freud: Within and Beyond Culture" in
Beyond Culture, but also of the general tenor of his criticism in which
psychoanalytic gestures are often begun but never carried to
completion. For Trilling's relation to psychoanalysis was characterized
by his shyness about its explanatory conventions and his penchant for
leavening his insights with large doses of rhetorical tact.
In part, this reflected Trilling's allegiance to intellectual modulation,
the conviction that too strenuous a pursuit of radical ideas violated the
delicate textures of complex thought and betrayed the ambiguities of
social or literary situations. Trilling's exposure in the twenties and
thirties to Marxist criticism, in which what passed for methodological
precision was often just moral bullying and aesthetic obtuseness, turned
him against systematic analysis and attempts to regiment the free play of
thought. Though he, like other disenchanted left intellectuals in the
1940s, turned to Freud and cultivated innerness out of a disaffection
from progressive ideology, his very style of embracing psychoanalysis
reflected the scruples and habits of skepticism that constituted his new,
circumspect style of liberalism. Nowhere in his long bibliography of
literary studies do we find an instance of relentless psychoanalytic

3.108.20.246 on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 04:52:39 +00:00
pursuit of latent meanings or a reaching after those distressing
conclusions about infantile needs and irrational drives that are the
special province of psychoanalysis as an interpretive system. He
followed Freud himself in proclaiming the helplessness of the
psychoanalyst before the mysteries of the creative gift and creative
technique, and joined his mentor in disparaging the application of
coarse clinical language to art. Nor did he believe that psychoanalysis
could explain the artist's "unconscious intention as it exists apart from
the work itself."
This reticence about, or, if you like, despair of, the analytic abilities of
psychoanalysis in the face of literature may be one reason why Trilling
gave short shrift to the early analytical books in Freud's oeuvre and
concentrated his attention instead on the work of the later, speculative
years when, starting with Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920, Freud
turned his attention to cultural, social, and metaphysical questions and
produced such adventures in analysis-at-a-distance as Group
Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, The Future of an Illusion, and
Civilization and Its Discontents. This last was the indispensable book
for Trilling, who considered it a milepost in the cultural history of the
West for its conclusion that discontent was built into the condition of
man in culture and therefore inevitable, and much of what passes for
Freudian thought in Trilling's writing is really applied Civilization and
its Discontents.
It is curious to contemplate this exaggerated emphasis on
psychoanalysis at its most speculative and at its greatest remove from
the clinic by such a rationalist whose initial defense of psychoanalysis, in
the essay, "Freud and Literature," was to call attention to its elements of
empiricism and reason. Yet a reading of Trilling's interpretations and
uses of Freud turns up next to nothing of those great early books in
which psychoanalysis tendered its strongest credentials to be taken as an
empirical science. We hear almost nothing of The Interpretation of
Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Jokes and Their
Relation to the Unconscious, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,
and the major case histories in which Freud's clinical practices and
interpretive strategies were most fully set forth. To be fair, I should add
that many of Freud's early ideas are digested and assimilated in those
essays that appear in The Liberal Imagination, but even with that in
mind I find it difficult not to feel that much of psychoanalysis has been
intentionally dismissed, if not evaded.
We may even come to view Trilling's psychoanalysis as largely a habit
of dialectical thought that has been purged of its specific contents and
elevated into a sort of Hegelianism in the head, a phenomenology of

3.108.20.246 on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 04:52:39 +00:00
22 MARK SHECHNER
mind. Consider what is not
absent, though Trilling never
human depravity and the hea
with modern fiction. The dy
with it the characteristic rhy
repressed that for Freud was
neuroses. Dreams themselv
fantasy life of the artist, an
between manifest and late
inventory of aesthetic tran
We find only rare, and som
sexuality and its bodily sta
though sex of any sort had
moral imagination. As for
psychology of jokes or that o
Trilling makes no mention.
With so many vital ingredie
reasonably ask whether T
Freudianism, and whether M
has been pulling our leg. Tha
is a rich and diverse body o
and grand theories, and eve
residue of concepts possess
largely the structural or
intrapsychic dynamism of
indecision, and self-torment t
He also adopted the cultural d
niche for itself between in
Civilization and its Discon
attitudes and personal gest
strengthening the distressed
and his stands against the del
wary and grudging appro
disappointment, resistance
interfere with his work, and
capacity for love and work
Freud's gloom, "the quality
characteristic of Freud's syst
such an endorsement identif
as opposed to the Freud of in
been won at the cost of se
psychology.

3.108.20.246 on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 04:52:39 +00:00
This weakness for the grim poetry of the Freudian outlook shows up
in Trilling's thought as something quite distinct from psychoanalysis,
and Trilling sometimes followed it to conclusions that look less like
reasoned assessments of arguments and situations than assumptions of
a grave and tragic posture. Certain of Freud's ideas, including the
biological ubiquity of the death instinct, were valued for their reflection
of his exemplary character and therefore as moral touchstones for
modern man's self-evaluation, rather than for their philosophical
cogency or correspondence to known evidence about the mind. Most
readers of Trilling's work are familiar with his observation, in "The Fate
of Pleasure" (in Beyond Culture), that Dostoevsky's underground man
is no ordinary neurotic but modern man epitomized, who, disdaining
the conditioned and predictable life of the middle-class, "has arranged
his own misery - arranged it in the interests of his dignity, which is to
say, of his freedom." Less well known, though, is the same formula
brought to the defense of Freud's conception of the death instinct, which
Freud proposed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and which continued
to occupy a place, though an uneasy one, in his writing thereafter. In a
review of the third volume of Ernest Jones's biography of Freud,
Trilling offered the surprising observation that the death instinct "may
be understood as the intellectual expression of Freud's pride, of his
passion for autonomy."
The theory certainly would seem to be in the interests of human

autonomy - if we accept it, we must see that it is no more absurd to
say that a man wills to die than to say that he wills to eat or to
copulate.
We may balk at this logic, since any idea we accept ceases instantly to
be absurd, but what I want to emphasize here is not the logic but the
detachment of a portion of Freud's psychology from the findings that
support it and the consequences of its application, that is, from the
science or craft of psychoanalysis, and its attachment to the character of
the scientist. The validity and theoretical sufficiency of the death instinct
is dispensed with in favor of its philosophical elegance and moral
reference, what Freud called elsewhere "its grandeur, its ultimate tragic
courage in acquiescence to fate? In other words, if the death instinct can't
be entirely believed it may nonetheless, like the mind that conceived it,
be admired.
Psychoanalysis itself, however, was not uniformly compelling for
Trilling, and if he neglected to apply it with all the rigor and zeal that has
been demonstrated by more recent practitioners, it is not because he

3.108.20.246 on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 04:52:39 +00:00
24 MARK SHECHNER
misunderstood its in
enthusiasm for the dia
perceptions. As a part
psychoanalytic practice
among the infantile, th
levelsof being. If the bas
every adult harbors a ba
preferences led him in ju
writer for the adult batt
pleasure and reality pri
therefore moral, equili
toward the artist's moral
Thus, the fantasy life o
ordinary sorts pays at
thought, which put a pr
and his commitment to r
Keats, Austen, Orwell,
quality of realization an
nature of existence and
attention and intellectua
There is admirable san

psychoanalytic critic
psychoanalysis when b
criticism displays little e
either the richness a
psychoanalysis promises,
that only a full view of
feel that its collapsing o
nuances of literary exp
impoverishes the languag
is not so different from
was familiar with in the
imported formalisms t
power and influence as
values literature can hop
in such an academic environment as our own, with its bleak
oversubscription to theories and methods and its mistaking of specialty
for depth, to endorse Trilling's modulation of ideas, his transformation
of psychoanalysis into a general dialectics that dispenses with its
infantile programs, and his tendency to view life and art at the level of
morality and "sensibility" rather than instinct.

3.108.20.246 on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 04:52:39 +00:00
But to commend Trilling's good sense by comparing him to the
current ethos does not dispose of the question of whether his way of
befriending art by denying the imagination's more turbulent recesses or
by ignoring the patent fact that modern poets are often men, and
women, in deep mental difficulty was not a weakening of the claims of
art. Applying rhetorical etiquette is not the same thing as defending
complex and subtle ideas against reductionism, and what passes in
Trilling for balance or negative capability or a full and judicious view of
situations is sometimes just a pulling of punches. Even a passing
familiarity with psychoanalysis and its explanatory capabilities makes it
relatively plain that Trilling was often guilty of turning away from his
insights and finessing conclusions about the inner dimensions of fiction
that the logic of inquiry entitled him to draw.
Only once did Trilling take the wraps off his psychoanalytic curiosity
and allow himself the freedom of his insights. That was in the essay,
"The Poet as Hero: Keats in his Letters" (in The Opposing Self), in
which he brought to bear the authority of Freudian ideas to argue for
Keats's geniality, his passion, and his courage. Not incidentally, the
Keats essay is, in my judgment, Trilling's most splendid essay on a single
author and his work. Certainly it is central to any appraisal of how
Trilling felt about and handled psychoanalysis, not just because it
contains the one straightforward demonstration of analytic reasoning in
all his writing, but also because it advanced psychoanalytic
interpretation in the spirit of Freudian moralism, placing its findings at
the disposal of conceptions of maturity and responsibility that Freud
recommended and Trilling labored to promote. As a critic armed with
psychoanalysis was bound to see, Keats is the most voluptuous of the
English poets, a man for whom "the sensory, the sensuous, and the
sensual were all one" and the openness and vigor of appetite and taste
tied overtly to an actively erotic imagination. "He is possibly unique
among poets in the extensiveness of his reference to eating and drinking
and to its pleasurable and distasteful sensations." But, having said that,
Trilling felt obliged to enter the caveat that the characterization of Keats
as an "oral" character, since that is what the diagnostic side of
psychoanalysis recommends, would imply an unseemly passivity, an
emphasis on appetites that ought to have been subordinated to more
"manly" concerns, and a lingering emotional dependence upon a mother
whose importance is everywhere implied, but, curiously, nowhere
mentioned in any of her son's letters. (Indeed, Trilling admits to
knowing almost nothing about her save a remark on her maternal
solicitude by George Keats and an innuendo of questionable reliability
upon her own generosity of appetite by Keats's guardian, Mr. Abbey.)

3.108.20.246 on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 04:52:39 +00:00
26 MARK SHECHNER
Yet, as everything in Keats'
celebrate the cool gush of a ne
in his great "Ode to a Nighting
With beaded bubbles winki
emotional invalid whose
disproportion but an independ
self-accepting man, the sort
agree to call an adult. Tril
reconcile the indulgence of the
letters, and to account for th
gluttony in the poetry of s
banished from his memory, t
metaphors as, 'The heart is th
sucks identity."
There may have been some c
in Trilling but not for the di
Of the mother, to be sure,
contradiction; her apparent
intimate letters to his brothe
that "there was much, it wou
son's vigor and self-accept
George's praise of her taken
reason to question, there is in
and indulgent nature- wh
Clearly, such a line of investi
Keats- is a dead end. But not
and mature good sense, of d
manhood. This blending
developmental logic of the pa
already have evidence of th
violent child of five who arm
on guard at the door and refu
story in this form is given by
apt, in the stories he tells; ano
the sword to keep anyone fro
ill." Such Oedipal sergeant
prelude to the next stage of t
fortitude, or energy, or negat
that the indulgence of his c
remarkable firmness of chara
quality." The contradictions
phases of a natural growth in

3.108.20.246 on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 04:52:39 +00:00
aside but assimilated and built upon, the whole man becoming the sum
of all his biological potentials.
The figure thus drawn is the most familiar of all Trillingesque heroes,
the opposing self or artist in contradiction, though in Keats's particular
case the contradictions are happily resolved in the interests of energy,
self-acceptance, and self-love. Still, despite the successfully resolved
dialectic, the exercise is fraught with discomfort, and the ingenious
developmental argument reads as though it was brought into play not
just to save the critic from contradiction but to deliver the artist from the
subversive charge of psychoanalysis itself. Trilling's strenuous defense
of Keats's maturity and good sense is, of course, primarily an attempt to
rescue him from the Romantic and popular view that he was a languid
spokesman for sleep and poetry and a frail victim of the world's
cruelties, who died, not of tuberculosis, but of reviews. But
psychoanalysis endorses the Romantic impulse by looking upon the
creative imagination as analogous to daydreaming and a continuation
of child's play, and by showing a heightened regard for evidence of
weakness, debility, yearning and dependence, in its relentless search for
pathology.
Little wonder, then, that we find Trilling calling upon
psychoanalysis here largely in an effort to get beyond it. For though
"The Poet as Hero" is Trilling's one clearcut venture into Freudian
interpretation (though the essay on Wordsworth's Immortality Ode in
The Liberal Imagination contains some fragmentary psychoanalytic
suggestions), psychoanalysis plays a small part in this essay which is
devoted largely to a celebration of Keats's energy and moral realism.
How far this is from the bias of psychoanalysis, which is to search for the
wellsprings of imagination in regressed emotions, and to find meaning
in the poet's unconscious symbolism. The Keats essay registers the strain
between the subversiveness of psychoanalysis as a diagnostic art and the
balance and tragic poise of the Freudian ethic, and thus explains
Trilling's own choice of views. Henceforth, psychoanalysis would take a
back seat to Freud, and the dynamics of creativity to the parameters of
the "modern self' in the modern world.
This absorption in Keats's letters and character rather than his poetry
was, like the elevation of Freud's Weltanschauung over his methods, a
shying away from the asocial element in poetry itself. If psychoanalysis
is laid to rest and Keats's "Ode to Indolence" judged less credible a guide
to the cast of Keats's mind than his letters to his brother George, his
spiritedness may be admired without extenuation. To rescue Keats from
the distortions of the Romantic view is also to isolate him neatly from
the driven and vulnerable parts of his own personality and thus from the

3.108.20.246 on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 04:52:39 +00:00
28 MARK SHECHNER
very pressures and fears that
a body of great poetry before
may have been a friend of lite
writing demonstrates amply t
and examinations of character
intuitions far better than did
isolation and its traffic in th
below "character," that is, bel
the social instincts.
After the Keats essay, not
applied psychoanalysis -
Civilization and its Discontent
That side of the self that poe
not the side that Trilling care
James and Austen bulked larg
the vanishing point. We hea
poets, even such relatively s
Tennyson, let alone bardic
century shapes up in Trillin
great novelists.
Here, then, was a circumsp
the depths, really, which ex
much actual play. Trilling was
much as he was by the id
Hegelianized psychoanalys
politics: to refine out the cru
Morris Dickstein has characte
useful way to conceptualize h
that the radical element was l
imagining ever more subt
uncovering irreducible mot
customary modern forms call
in order to lay bare the br
experience or class interest
brand of radicalism was just t
vapors of thought into their
Much can be said for such
reduces to paradigms rather th
styles, a way of precipita
incidentals. And high-minded
used to seeing it applied so
(however minimally) side of

3.108.20.246 on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 04:52:39 +00:00
mindedness was influenced, and thus compromised, by his
fastidiousness, which made his brand of negative capability sound on
occasion like pure avoidance, and his dialectics like mere habits of
fussiness. In reading Trilling, one often feels that he is holding too much
at bay, as though his first consideration were to deny extremes.
Certainly the habits of balance, skepticism, and irony that stood him in
good stead during a decade of dogma and intellectual vulgarity also
served to cut short lines of inquiry to which he was committed in
principle but unwilling to put into practice. His first priority was to
defend "mind" against whatever forces threatened to overwhelm it, even
when those forces were not ideological or moral orthodoxy or unreason,
but the mind's own natural propensity to explore. What passes, from
one point of view, for negative capability or the ability to rest content
with contradiction, may look like protective irony from another.
I certainly don't mean by this to derogate Trilling's work and make it
sound any less vital than it was, but to point out that in his writing, as in
the writing of anyone, even a literary critic, who manages to capture
popular attention, obscure personal agendas are at work that manifest
themselves as forms of intellectual insistence. To see one pressure behind
Trilling's criticism as the attempt to fashion a moral self out of parts
collected from books should not necessarily undercut his judgments but
rather bring them into sharper relief. Once we grasp the idea, for
example, that such self-construction was a work of deliberate and
skillful artifice and that the adopted literary elements could become the
very scaffolding of the ego, we can more plainly recognize the basic
emotional premise of a book like Sincerity and Authenticity: that the
culture of authenticity that took hold in the sixties posed a vital threat to
those, like Trilling, who had assembled their social egos at other times
according to different rules. We might say that the mask, once firmly in
position, could not be put down, since it had become the face. How else
to explain Trilling's misrepresentation of that culture by interpreting it
through its parodists: R.D. Laing and David Cooper?
Trilling, we know, had little nostalgia for his Jewish origins and went
so far as to observe, not incorrectly, that efforts made by Jewish-
American writers of his generation to reclaim their roots were of no avail
to their writing. Though he had begun publishing in 1925 in Elliot
Cohen and Henry Hurwitz's Menorah Journal, the monthly publication
of the Menorah Society, whose broad purpose was to form a non-
sectarian, humanist, and progressive Jewish consciousness in America,
he readily deserted that enterprise and its efforts at "cultivated"
Jewishness in 1930 for the riptides of the intellectual mainstream, which
meant largely The Nation and The New Republic, but included a brief

3.108.20.246 on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 04:52:39 +00:00
30 MARK SHECHNER
and gingerly debut as a leftist in V.F. Calverton's Modern

Quarterly / Modern Monthly. In 1944, reflecting on the depth and
import of his Jewishness, he refused to waste any sentiment on his
youthful torments over his Jewish identity, with which the better part of
his Menor ah Journal stories and essays were concerned, or to recognize
any redeeming grace in the parochialism of organized Jewish life. "As
the Jewish community now exists," he observed, "it can give no
sustenance to the American artist or intellectual who is born a Jew. And
so far as I am aware, it has not done so in the past. I know of writers who
have used their Jewish experience as the subject of excellent work: I
know of no writer in English who has added a micromillimetre to his
stature by 'realizing his Jewishness', although I know of some who have
curtailed their promise by trying to heighten their Jewish
consciousness." Subsequently, he declined Elliot Cohen's invitation to
join the editorial board of Commentary when it was being formed, and it
is symptomatic of the chill that settled over his relations with that most
forward looking of Jewish enterprises in the forties and fifties that
Commentary neglected to review either The Middle of the Journey or
The Liberal Imagination upon their publication. It is as difficult now for
us to imagine Trilling a Jew as it was, apparently, for Trilling himself.
The simulated English manner that was so integral a part of his bearing
and voice was not just a literary taste or professional affectation; it was
an identity.
Again, I don't intend here to call Trilling's integrity into question with
an accusation of ethnic duplicity; I hold no particular brief for cultural
uniformity or for the currently popular view of genealogy as a form of
salvation. All the same, I think it worth noting that Trilling's break with
the Jewish past, which apparently accompanied his break with The
Menorah Journal, was more thoroughgoing and permanent than was
the rule among second generation Jewish intellectuals. Trilling was no
self-conscious rebel like Irving Howe, taking flight from his father's
world in youth only to bow to its authority (which had now become its
charm) in middle age. Nor was he an accomplished funambulist like
Alfred Kazin, making an original synthesis for himself out of Winesburg
and Williamsburg by wrapping his American dreams in folds of Russian
melancholy. That, by the way, was the main line of imaginative
assimilation, and the intellectuals who pursued it, including Kazin, Saul
Bellow, Isaac Rosenfeld, Delmore Schwartz, and Philip Rahv, were
adventurers in synthesis. Even Trilling's Freudian gloom and feel for the
exigency of circumstances figure as a revamped racial melancholy. But
Trilling was different in that new cultural blends and combinations did
not appeal to him, and he shunned the exotic possibilities of the

3.108.20.246 on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 04:52:39 +00:00
hyphenated identity. He was a refiner whose sensibility was established
upon dissociation, upon cutting away parts of the self and suppressing
the past. Jewishness was eclipsed, old associations kept at bay, the
instincts soft-peddled, the unconscious squelched, "authenticity" taken
to task, and a curriculum of reading taken on as a prosthetic identity.
We shouldn't wonder that John Laskell has only a vestigial past, for
memory is too great a risk. He is one of those born-again leftists whose
new life is predicated upon amnesia. His watchword, if his existence
could be reduced to a tag line, would be the credo of the self-estranged
man: "Je est un autre.".
This sort of thing either matters or it doesn't, according to what we're
looking for. If we want to find some consistency in Trilling's slant on
psychoanalysis, that is, in the substitution of the Freudian character and
Weltanschauung for the main points of doctrine, then the denial of
Jewishness would appear to run true to form, corroborating our
impression of Trilling's overall fastidiousness about the past. It also
suggests something about how literature affected Trilling's moral
equipoise, and why so much passion was invested in the literary
imagination. For the moral drama of the novel, having been
incorporated into the self, into the ego, may become indistinguishable
from one's own, and the defense of the novel a surrogate defense of the
self. And that drama, as Trilling would observe time and again, though
most cogently in his essay, "Manners, Morals, and the Novel," is the
drama of social mobility, of "the movement from one class to another."
But it was characteristic of Trilling that while the advance from the
ghetto to the middle-class was the great Jewish experience of his
generation, he could approach the ubiquitous apprehensions about
money, status, appearance, and manners that haunted the Jews in their
campaign to become Americans only by way of the general idea, and
that only through its literary sublimations, preferably in European
literature. Thus, "Every situation in Dostoevski, no matter how
spiritual, starts with a point of social pride and a certain number of
rubles." The theme is one that would appeal naturally to a son of the
ghetto, though the exact formulation comes from the Columbia
professor. But, if you substitute Brooklyn for Dostoevski and dollars for
rubles, you get something like the latent content of the formula. To look
behind the figures of Julian Sorel, Tom Jones, Rastignac, Pip, Hyacinth
Robinson, or any of the ambitious young provincials who bulk so large
in Trilling's view of the novel is to discover the ungainly figure of David
Levinsky, the rough beast from Zhitomir seeking his fortune in the
garment district, his hour come round at last, slouching toward
Gimbel's with his Fall line. It is appropriate that it should be a student of

3.108.20.246 on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 04:52:39 +00:00
32 MARK SHECHNER
Trilling's to finally remove
ambition and exhibit it as a p
who brought social striving
masks, and money out from b
the advantages of status, en
sometimes appears, is Trilling
sounded like had his career be
ironies and baroque indirectio
the civilized sublimations for which we value Trilling; his
circumlocutions were his power.
* * * *
But Trilling is elu

his ambiguities and
to what he would ca
post-War redefiniti
intellectuals who tr
one of social progre
while tidying up
embarrassing, chil
pointed the way f
politics of quantitie
good for the grea
personal self-develo
Trilling's brands
criticism; the range
gave him a grasp an
But such intellectua
of psychoanalysis an
usually to the radic
was asked to surren
to forego its pro
deepening, and enri
its historical mission: the amelioration of the conditions of life. And
without a world to reform, liberalism found itself in the 1950s on the
sidelines with nothing to do. Disenchanted with economics,
disillusioned with "reality in America," ready at long last to embrace the
basic structural supports of American society, and only casually
interested in those elements of the self that can least tolerate the
constraints of culture, liberalism set the conditions for its own demise in
the 1960s, when its ideas in modulation would be asked, in their turn,
how relevant they were to an unmodulated world.

3.108.20.246 on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 04:52:39 +00:00

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Psychoanalysis and Liberalism: The Case of Lionel Trilling

Author(s): MARK SHECHNER

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40547113

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