456
ALVIN C. KIBEL
II
Freudian insights into the nature of the literary process have not
been assimilated by criticism with either pleasure or regularity. No one
can doubt that Freud's respect for the creative artist was real and in–
tense; and yet, both in his general and his specific observations, Freud
seems to deny art any cognitive function, any role in the business of
coming to terms with reality. The situation is all the more remarkable
when we reflect that, of all modem thinkers, Freud had come closest to
justifying the autonomy of the artistic imagination. The existence of
unconscious thoughts, of a second, "hidden" set of psychic con–
tents ranged against those long familiar to empirical psychology, led
Freud to argue the existence of a second psychic mechanism for the
working-up of these thoughts to expression--one that corresponded to
the rational faculty in the conscious sphere but operated upon principles
distinct from those of grammar and logic. (Freud's epistemology is inno–
cent of the current, vexed dispute concerning the propriety of distinguish–
ing between a primary content or
datum
and its elaboration in a medium
of expression.) The burden of Freud's
Traumdeutung
was to trace the
workings of this second mechanism in its major instances, particularly in
THE LIFE AND WORK OF
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