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POETRY AND THE FREUDIAN AESTHETIC CHARLES L GLICKSBERG SIGMUND ~REUD began with the unconscious, the seat of the. neuroses, but it was not long before he made a nimble jump and concluded that·the mental processes in the neurotic are substantially the same as those i.n "normal" people. He went even further, maintaining that everything mental is unc"onscious. On the .basis of his knowledge of the unconscious, he boldly attempted to prov1de the crucial psychological clue to the understanding of the creative process. In an essay included in his Collect~d Papers, Freud argues that the artist is one who "turns from reality because he cannot come to terms with the demand for the renunciation of instinctual satisfactions as it is first made, and who then in phantasy-life allows full play to his erotic and ambitious wishes. But he finds a way of return from this world of phantasy back to reality; with his special gtfts he moulds his phantasies into a new kind of reality, and men concede them a justification as valuable reflections of actual "life." By means of his imagination, the artist, without actually reshaping reality, achievc;s the role he dreams of; . people admire his creations because they are troubled by the same instinctual frustrations he feels. For all human heings are poets at heart in that they tend to day-dream, creating elaborate phantasies to compensate them for the lack of gratification in reality. This early formulation of the Freudian aesthetic ha,s remained virtually unchanged through the years, though it has heen carried to· fantastic lengths by some of Freud·s disciples. The functional relation of psycho-analysis to aesthetics will have to be critically re-examined and radicaJly revised. The initial mistake was to allow the crude and dogmatic theories of the psycho.-analysts to pass unchallenged . Men trained in literature and .the humanities, men of quivering sensibility and profound intuition> offered only token resistance, a mild or scornful remonstrance. Aesthetics lay defenceless before the invasion of the pseudo-scienti.fic Freudians, and they had pretty much their own way. Psycho.-analysis has done aesthetics, and particularly poetry, a great disservice by 'constantly emphasizing the pathological aspects of genius. In the first flush of fanatical enthusiasm, disciples of Freud embraced the belief that genius was decidedly an abnormal manifestation. The creative instinct could be analysed in the same way as the pathogenic states of paranoia and hysteria, .since they were essen tially similar p henom ena. Liter~ture, in short, was a forest in which psycho-analysts hunted the hare of neurotic symptoms. This was the vulgar bias which led s0 many of them) including a. band of converted literary critics, astray. Extremists were prepared to demonstrate on "scientific" grounds that poetry was but a sublimation of s1nister psychopathic desires. 121 122 - THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY There is nothing wrong in bringing _to light the pathological element in literature, wherever it happens to_ exist. Many men of genius clearly betray signs' of mental aberration or personality maladjustment. There is no harm in attempting to trace, as Mario Praz does convincingly in The Romantic Agony, the relation between the~r .work and their constructive abnormality. But psyche-analysts refused to limit their field of operation ; they insisted on formulating universally valid "laws" of the creative life> and that is how the devil's mischief started. Freud led the way with his study of Leonardo da Vinci, and he was ~foliowed by a host of ingenious disciples hot on the scent of Oedipus complex, oral-anal eroticism, sadism and masochism, paranoia, and dementia praecox. Otto Rank completed an impressive scholarly work on the incest motive in mythology and poetry. Pfister undertook to psyd10-analyse the productions of ar:t. Jung, of(on a .·mystical tangent of his own, discovered the collective unconscious. There is little w~rran t for the assumption that the artist is p~thological by nature. It is the monistic stress on this phase of literature anq art which has done so much to awaken a profound distrust of the psychoanalytic method in aesthetics. Of late some psycho-analysts~ becoming aware at last of the overwhelming complexity of...

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