A Note on Art and Neurosis
LIONEL TRILLING
T
HIS
NOTE is written to take issue with a single point of Dr. Ro–
senzweig's essay on Henry James
in
the last PARTISAN REVIEW. The
point in question is what Dr. Rosenzweig calls "the sacrificial roots
of [literary
J
power" and "the unhappy sources of [James's] genius."
To suggest a wider application of his study of James, Dr. Rosenzweig
refers to Edmund Wilson's
The Wound and the Bow
in
which Wil–
son takes as the type of genius the hero Philoctetes with his unerring
bow and incurable wound, suggesting that the power of genius is
inextricably linked with disability; and Dr. Rosenzweig says of his
own investigation of James that it "reveals the aptness of the Philoc–
tetes pattern." This conception of genius--more particularly artistic
genius-is one of the most characteristic assumptions of our culture
and I should like to question it.
But first I should like to say that the point is not integral to
Dr. Rosenzweig's essay and does not invalidate it. The essay is ad–
mirable and its virtues of manner and matter do credit not only to
its author but also to the present state of psychoanalytical culture.
The accuracy, delicacy and respect for the object which Dr. Rosenz–
weig shows did not always mark the psychoanalytical method in its
dealings with literature. From the very start, it was recognized that
psychoanalysis was likely to have important things to say about art.
Freud himself thought so, yet when he first addressed. himself direct–
ly
to
art and the artist he said many clumsy and misleading things.
I have elsewhere and at length tried to separate the useful from
the useless (and even dangerous) statements about art that Freud
has made
(Kenyon Review,
Spring, 1940). To put it briefly here,
Freud has had some illuminating and ·even beautiful inSights into
particular works of art, especially those that are complex ?-Ud have
an element of myth. Without explicitly undertaking to do so, his
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
offers a brilliant and comprehensive
explanation of our interest in tragedy. And what is of course most
important of all, the whole tendency of the Freudian psychology es–
tablishes the naturalness and validity of artistic thinking. It is there-
