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PARTISAN REVIEW
cided with the periods of wealth, power, and energy of their so–
cieties. We have wealth, power, and energy
in
America-perhaps
more than the world has ever seen before-but somehow our litera–
ture and art, some critics hold, aren't quite up to snuff. Mter sub–
tracting
all
other reasons, we come to this: that the consciousness
of our culture takes a different form from that of art, religion,
intuition, and the spirit. When our greatest writer, Faulkner, is cap–
able of the
niaiserie
of
Requiem for a Nun,
we have to suspect
there is some lack of interior wisdom in his culture. The perpetual
adolescence of Hemingway is, of course, a more extreme and striking
illustration of the same thing.
(2) The permeation of our culture by psychiatry and psy–
chiatric ideas seems to me an event of more enduring importance than
the zigzags of the Zeitgeist that gave us social consciousness in the
thirties, literary academicism in the forties, and neo-conservatism
in the fifties. This invasion of our national life by psychiatry repre–
sents a break-through into consciousness of certain complexities of
life itself which our culture had not previously dealt with. Nothing
could be more momentous for the development of the American
mind. Yet as a cultural influence psychiatry has suffered something
of the fate of Marxism, and there has developed here a very rigid
kind of thing known as Orthodox Freudianism, which takes off from
the works of Freud just about as Stalinism does from Marx. Given
its extravert and technological intelligence, perhaps this official adop–
tion of Freudianism by Americans (those, that is, interested in psy–
chiatry at all) was inevitable.
As
inevitable as that, among all the
refugee philosophies that streamed from Europe in the past decades,
Positivism should have been the one we took over. This dominance of
Orthodox Freudianism seems to me to coincide with the general
American weakness, often positive blindness, to the facts of the inner
life before which a good many of the Freudian concepts are simply
helpless. Yet, pernicious or not, the forms of psychiatry we do have
represent a new attempt on the part of Americans to grapple with
life, and something immensely valuable may follow from them.
The great new art form which America has contributed to the
history of civilization is streamlined mass journalism. Europe had
begun this, but we have perfected it beyond Europe's initial dream,
