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PARTIS AN REVIEW
delusion ; for the "cultural schools" have either overlooked or concealed
the fact that their deviations involved, not a rediscovery, but a reinter–
pretation of culture. It was a reinterpretation of the meaning of culture,
the nature of man, the function of religion, and the place of morality
along traditional and inspirational lines.
Dissent and defection, therefore, always involved what Stanley
Edgar Hyman calls "philosophic disagreement" ("Freud and the Climate
of Tragedy," PR, Spring 1956). Freud himself saw this and said so
in response to the first modifications of the libido theory by C. G. Jung.
As in the case of any scientific system, it is only natural to expect that
the basic concepts of psychoanalysis will be revised in the light of logical
adequacy and experimental tests; and many workers in the field are
constantly engaged in this task of improving the scientific status and
validity of psychoanalytic theory. I suspect, however, that, despite these
improvements, the final judgment about psychoanalysis will not be
rendered on scientific grounds alone; for as a system of ideas about
man's fate and history, psychoanalysis is more than a scientific system.
A response to such a system depends, not only upon the logical status
and experimental ,-!!rification of its theoretical concepts, but also upon
one's personal estimate of the philosophical, moral, and social implica–
tions of the system. In short, one's total response includes an ineluctably
subjective element: cognitive and emotive factors, reason and char–
acter are jointly engaged in the process of verification. And that, for
better or worse, is philosophy-not in the academic sense of making a
living, but in the old-fashioned sense of providing a
W eltanschauung.
Ambiguity, I believe, is an essential category in the philosophy
of psychoanalysis. It refers to what Ernest Jones, in the second volume
of his new biography, has called Freud's "constant proclivity to dualistic
ideas-the interaction of opposites, the synthesis and dissolution of
antithetical concepts"; but this "obstinate dualism" is of a dynamic
kind; it is, as Hartmann says, "a very characteristic kind of dialectical
thinking." The "interaction of opposite powers" involves a constant,
dynamic process. And any resolution of this dynamic interactien in
history and in man is always temporary, tentative, and precarious; in
short, ambiguous.
Riesman has analyzed the dialectical ambiguity of work and play,
freedom and authority, heroism and weakness "in the structure of
Freud's thought"
(Selected Essays from Individualism R econsidered).
Trilling's essay, mentioned above, is a literary commentary upon "the
