PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERATURE
53
allegiance as it used to, one sees an increasing divergence between
writers, who are concerned with the tradition itself, and therefore
with Freud's classic insights, and those psychoanalysts who, lacking
the needed cultural reference, foolishly and self-indulgently suppose
that they are living in the same world of bourgeois morality which
made Freud grasp the necessary reactions of repression, guilt and
shame. In the last few years, the kind of psychoanalytical comment
on literary works which used to be so arresting and valuable has
come to seem a wholly mechanical jargon. Significantly, it has be–
come the staple of the most pedantic and academic research, unre–
lated to living literature; for as with all things academic, this per–
spective is based on admiration of the static, the enclosed, on the
literary tradition that neatly folds itself up and files itself away.
Equally, the use of psychoanalysis as a kind of pampering to
merely bourgeois tastes and self-delusions, to the lap-dog psychology
of Americans whose only problem is to reduce and to save on income
tax, is in itself a literary scandal. In this connection I would point
to several things. One: the myth of universal "creativity," the
as–
sumption that every idle housewife was meant to be a painter and
that every sexual deviant is really a poet. From this follows the myth
that these unproductive people are "blocked"; whereupon how easy
for the hack and the quack to get together! Second: the use of psy–
choanalytical jargon as a static description of the personality of the
artist. There is no doubt that although neurosis can cripple creative
artistry or hinder it entirely, talent is always quite separate in func–
tion-if not in theme-from the emotional chaos of neurosis, which
provides no clue whatever to the reality of creative life. But perhaps
the theme I have been stressing in this paper-the contemporary use
of psychoanalysis in order to find identity rather than freedom-is
seen here, too, since the more unreal people become to us, the more
we try to pin them down with a descriptive formula, usually gained
these days from psychoanalysis.
If
we approach literature exclusively
by way of the writer's personality, psychoanalytically considered,
we
not only get even farther away from the real experience of literature
than we were before, but we obliterate even the fundamental cultural
respect for the health of the creative self in our eagerness to label
the writer ill.
A recent example of this is the introduction by Mrs. Diana
