SIGMUND FREUD: 1856-1956
213
the instincts or of the supcrego-"oceanic," "surging," "raging." Ameri–
can psychology uses much blander adjectives. We tend to emphasize
the ego's resources, its ability, somehow, to drive its way to health. In
fact, the systems of Rogers, Horney, and Sullivan have in common the
explicit assumption that the organism autonomously moves forward to
growth. We incline to see the therapeutic task, then, as involving the
strengthening of ego capacities. A friend of mine puts it this way: "We
don't try to kill the weeds ; we feed the clover and hope that
it
will
kill the weeds."
If
Freud,
in conjunction with
other intellectual and social forces,
succeeded in denting this Emersonian optimism in the period be–
tween the two World Wars, many of his most articulate followers
have since labored to hammer it back into shape. No one can say
that any given work of art
is
affected by any given body of ideas,
but we must assume in general that ideas have consequences.
It
is
instructive to note how many important contemporary writers have
followed their earlier tragic work with later mellowings. Hemingway
is a classic example. Where
The Sun Also Rises
and
A Farewell to
Arms,
if not masterpieces, are authentically tragic, moving from Pur–
pose through Passion to Perception, such later novels as
For Whom
the Bell Tolls
and
Across the River and into the Trees
are merely
bathetic, and if Robert Jordan or Colonel Cantwell commits
hybris,
the author seems no longer aware of it. Where "The Undefeated"
was a truly cathartic work of art, its recent rewriting as
The Old
Man and the Sea
is almost a Frommian parody
("If
I am not for
myself, who will be for me?" ) . Faulkner has moved similarly from
a fiction of ritual tragedy in
The Sound and the Fury
and
Light in
August
to optimistic comedy or fairytale, as have Steinbeck, Cald–
well, and so many others. Such dissimilar poets as Frost and Eliot
traveled the same route from earlier bleak stoicism to such later
chatty affirmations as
A Masque of Mercy
and
The Confidential
Clerk,
and if on the whole our poets have been less affected by the
retreat from tragic insight, it is perhaps only that, like our dramatists,
not many of them were ever there to begin with.
We would all enthusiastically welcome the psychoanalytic good
society, where every psyche was well and whole, and no one had
impulses that could not or should not be gratified. To the extent that
a good part of our literature depends on our being deeply and
ir-
