312
PARTISAN
REVIEW
have a strong and successful drive behind them-as those of the in–
ventor, the surgeon, the promoter, the merchant, the banker and the
scholar. The early lives of these types h::we as different "profiles"
as those outlined in psycho-somatic medicine for typical sufferers
from diabetes or asthma or angina. And these careers do not result
from the direction given by inborn talents or interests to instinctual
drives we all have in common.
If
enough of the individual past can
be recovered, talents can be traced to emotional attachments and -in–
hibitions resulting from very specific conditions and events of child–
hood. Studies of wolf-boys and of neglected children show that intel–
ligence itself is a social product, a result of the child's treatment dur–
ing the first two years. The idiot is a "private" person.
Brill's essay on poetry as an oral outlet, though doctrinaire and
literarily naive, is not baseless. Though the imaginative writer's
interests are no more determined by unconscious elements than those
of the scientist and merchant, they do not find expression as soon or
so directly in the world of fact and practical affairs. But if we are
learning much more about the artist's nature and about the rather
special way by which he reaches "reality" and deals with it, this is
not, as Mr. Trilling rightly contends, the important question in the
evaluation of art. In the orthodox Freudian journals art has been
treated symptomatically as dreams have been, although in the case
of works of art it is seldom possible to practise the prolonged free–
associational examination which the "deep" a11.alysis of a dream re–
quires. The emphasis has been on the artist rather than the work of
art, as it so often is in academic scholarship, and the effect is reduc–
tive, as it is in the simpler Marxist criticism, making the particular
qualities of a work of art effect-signs of the psychic or social condi–
tions under which it was produced, of the Oedipal conflict or the
contradictions of capitalism.
An
artist's changing relations with those who bring him up,
never free from conflicts, determine his character and show in his
work. Nor can his work fail to reflect, directly or indirectly, the social
conflicts of his time. But it is not primarily to find indications of these
inner and outer conflicts that people read books and look at paintings.
That is why psychiatrists study dreams, but dreams are private, and
they have-according to Freud--only one condition to satisfy, that
they should permit the sleeper to go on sleeping. But though the artist
creates primarily to please himself, his work is art to the extent that
it is communal, that it has social meaning, and for this there are many
conditions to fulfill, and many kinds and degrees of success in ful–
filling them, though we may note that in doing this art uses many
