Simulacrum of Freud

A recent little essay by Lionel Trilling (Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture, Beacon Press, $1.00) reflects with a rare clarity the pathos of the Liberal intellectual mind at its best and gentlest, its least smug and arrogant. Although the essay is based upon a lecture delivered as the Freud Anniversary Lecture of 1955, it is not for any light that Mr. Trilling throws on Freud that it is of interest. That tormented Promethean had for ill or good a stature far beyond the comfortable ken of Morningside Heights. He was one of those “terrible simplifiers” who, with sword or word, from time to time appear in history to end one epoch and begin another. A Napoleon of the intellect, he left nothing as he found it. Although his vision of man’s being is of a Stygian blackness unrelieved by grace or spirit, he shattered with a single blow the prettification of man and the materialist vision of him as the potential creator of Utopia.

After Freud, it is still possible to deny the spiritual essence in man; what it is no longer possible todoisto screen with the smiling image of omnipotent and beneficent man the dark void that denial leaves. Not possible to do—I should say not possible for the searching mind, willing to bear reality, to do. And reality being a hard thing to bear, Freud’s bleak prophetic vision has been transformed by his followers into a melioristic instrument called Freudianism; or it has been adapted by such epigonoi as Karen Horney and Erich Fromm out of all recognition, to hide the agony of man’s alienation from God in the busy task of overcoming man’s “alienation from society” by changing the material world.

FS

About the Author

Frank S. Meyer

Frank S. Meyer was a senior editor of National Review.

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A recent little essay by Lionel Trilling (Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture, Beacon Press, $1.00) reflects with a rare clarity the pathos of the Liberal intellectual mind at its best and gentlest, its least smug and arrogant. Although the essay is based upon a lecture delivered as the Freud Anniversary Lecture of 1955, it is not for any light that Mr. Trilling throws on Freud that it is of interest. That tormented Promethean had for ill or good a stature far beyond the comfortable ken of Morningside Heights. He was one of those “terrible simplifiers” who, with sword or word, from time to time appear in history to end one epoch and begin another. A Napoleon of the intellect, he left nothing as he found it. Although his vision of man’s being is of a Stygian blackness unrelieved by grace or spirit, he shattered with a single blow the prettification of man and the materialist vision of him as the potential creator of Utopia.

After Freud, it is still possible to deny the spiritual essence in man; what it is no longer possible todoisto screen with the smiling image of omnipotent and beneficent man the dark void that denial leaves. Not possible to do—I should say not possible for the searching mind, willing to bear reality, to do. And reality being a hard thing to bear, Freud’s bleak prophetic vision has been transformed by his followers into a melioristic instrument called Freudianism; or it has been adapted by such epigonoi as Karen Horney and Erich Fromm out of all recognition, to hide the agony of man’s alienation from God in the busy task of overcoming man’s “alienation from society” by changing the material world.