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as a kind of poetry-making machine, so that it constitutes almost a
science of tropes. Insofar as literary or artistic form and dream form
are the products of similar devices, and operations analogous to con–
densation, displacement, and the rest shape the poem, Freud has
given us one of the great critical tools for literary analysis. Where the
revisionists deny genetic and dynamic factors and insist on "the cur–
rent life situation," here as everywhere they repudiate insight and
hobble art. Burke has written in
The Philosophy of Literary Form
that the poem consists of three aspects: dream, prayer, and chart.
The neo-Freudian poem has for its dream, The validation of all com–
ponents of personal worth; for its prayer, Help me to stop making
excessive demands on the environment; for its chart, To thine own
self-interest be true.
Perhaps a good measure of the fault lies in our country itself.
In, a paper, "Freud in America: Some Observations," read at the
1954 meeting of the American Psychological Association, Joseph
Adelson discussed the resistance to Freud in terms of the deeply en–
trenched American idea of "the indefinite perfectibility of man"
that Tocqueville noted as early as 1835. Adelson writes:
American feeling is animated by a zest for freedom; it cries out against
constraint. While men may vary in what they achieve, their destinies
are open and infinite. We may fall into error or failure, yet we do so,
not because of an inner taint, but through circumstance ; and circum–
stance, the American feels, can be rectified. Original sin, even in its
most secular versions, has not attracted our thought. In changing the
external, in modifying situations, men, we feel, can make and re-make
themselves. It is in the idea of man's perfectibility and in the vision
of a tractable world that Americans find their way to life's meaning.
Throughout its history American feeling has struggled against the con–
cept of limitation and has been held by the attitudes of hope and
optimism.
Adelson summarizes Freud's contrary vision of human life, and adds:
The American mood is substantially different. We experiment en–
thusiastically, trying this and that, all of our efforts informed by a
vigorous faith in the endless plasticity of the human organism.
It
is
my impression that we tend to disregard the dark and archaic com–
ponents of the personality; at the very least we deprive them, rhe–
torically, of their vigor. Think of how Freud expressed the intensity of
