ART AND ANXIETY
311
scheme can find no place for those negative destructive feelings which
were not only organized and a part of his developing personality, but
very difficult to separate from his inner sense of the parents.
As
a
result, by processes now familiar to us, these feelings get repressed or
detached. But since they still have meaning in terms of the real social
situation, they remain active, and cause anxiety and a sense of guilt.
What a relief to an anxious child the thought of a wolf can be!
It was not, after all, the parental image to which that uncomfortable
complex of rage and fear had been attached, but a wolf
in
the grand–
mother's guise. Although
it
is inconceivable that a child should want
to kill its grandmother, it is in the nature of a wolf to do so, and
hence bears thinking about. And if the wolf ate up the beloved
grandmother to whom the propitiatory child was carrying a basket
of goodies, how much more appropriate to fear and hate it, although
for a healthy child the thought of a wolf is not really very frightening
except when the wolf is also one's grandmother. But even the wolf,
insofar as he is frightening, is killed and disposed of, not by the child,
but by a kindly woodcutter, who is, like the parental figures, a pro–
tector against
just
such dangers as the wolf represents.
The importance of this kind of analysis, which I shall return to
later on, is not to show that an emotionally satisfactory story satisfies
emotional needs, some of them unconscious, and that these uncon–
scious elements are much more clearly understood as a result of
Freudian techniques. Most critics would agree to this. What they
question is the value of Freudian techniques in the positive and dis–
criminating judgment of art as art.
As
Lionel Trilling pointed out
in a recent number of the
PARTISAN REVIEW,
the acts of every per–
son are influenced by the unconscious, and
if
the writer is often
neurotic so is the scientist or business man. What is important about
the writer is his "power of controlling his neuroticism. He shapes his
fantasies, he gives them social reference." The ""riter "works in the
raw material we all have" and what is significant is what he does
with it, and that in turn depends on his artistic gifts. The artist,
unlike the dreamer, dominates his illusion, and makes it serve the
purpose.::; of closer and truer relation with reality. And in an earlier
article in the
Kenyon Review
Mr. Trilling had said that Freudian psy–
chology, by its founder's own admission, "can do nothing toward
elucidation of the nature of the artistic gift, nor can it explain the
means by which the artist works----:artistic technique."
Actually, in recent years, as a result of innumerable case studies,
a good deal of light has been thrown on the differing unconscious
determinants of such different professional interests-when they
