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self-interest, to discuss Trilling's position here as merely the predictable out–
come of the conventional family romance in which, in this case, Freud as the
representative of the tragic law of life has replaced David Trilling as the
failed rabbinical student and irresponsible father, so that the anxious son,
whose identity is ever on the verge of disintegration, may assimilate his
adopted precursor's disabling weakness entirely into his native culture in the
form ofa hell of mirrors to which it is completely condemned." This would
mean that nobody would take Trilling's criticism of "this new personality
type" seriously.
"It
could be seen as just his own psychopathology writ large
in the most New York Intellectual of styles." But, O'Hara adds, Trilling's
criticism of Laing and his disciples demonstrates an "impersonal power" that
demands we take the argument seriously.
There is an ironic pathos - the pathos of an age O'Hara himself tags as
one of "revisionary madness" - in the overt recognition on O'Hara's part of
his own magnanimity in having chosen not to pillory Trilling as a psychopath,
when in doing so he would have ingratiated himself with his revolutionary
contemporaries. Yet although he shares with them a desire for a new order
that must come through the deconstruction of the old order, he does not share
with the present-day revolutionists the blind will to obliterate all the struc–
tures of the past. In the creation of an "empowering dialectic of imaginative
development toward an exemplary achievement of nobility in personal
style," O'Hara sees the resolution of the present "paralyzing impasse be–
tween the revolutionary principle and the conservative instinct." Cautious
about what he deems to be the "severe limitations and self-deceptions" of the
magnanimous mind as typified by Trilling - Trilling's calculated mispresenta–
tion of Freud, for instance, or in general his disposition to intellectual elitism -
O'Hara nonetheless finds that Trilling still preeminently represents the
"impersonal power" of the life of the mind, a power that "should not be lost
sight of or mocked" in the struggle of his own generation "to carve out a ca–
reer and make the world ready for revolution."
Implied in O'Hara's tortuous effort to come to terms with Trilling and
the increasingly austere body ofliterary and cultural criticism he wrote in the
years of the Cold War, the Vietnam conflict, and the rise of the counterculture
movement, is, one may say, the whole history of the humane, secular mind.
Always presuming itself to be rational in its motives, the humane or
humanistic mind had found its chiefagency in the autonomous, administrative
self it had liberated in the revisionary process of secularizing what it ostensi–
bly had rejected: the corporate, spiritual society of myth, icon, and tradition
that had provided the model of mind in the Middle Ages. In the process of
the secularization of the spiritual - which reversed the roles of society and
mind and made the mind the model of society - there developed the com-
