ARGUMENTATIVES

Southland Times, Issue 18963, 9 June 1923, Page 9 (Supplement)

ARGUMENTATIVES

FREUD’S LITERARY DAGGER.

(By

“Inquisitor”).

It is perhaps not extraordinary, the human mind being constructed as it is, that man is always seeking a new formula in which to reconstruct the world as he sees it. This curious predilection, upon which after all intellectual progress is only possible, nevertheless has to be carefully taken into consideration before we give credence to those with some brand new “truth” which we are expected to swallow because others find it nice and palatable. The inherent love of novelty, as long as it doesn’t seriously upset our digestion, always assures the fakir, with a new variety of religion or the individual who has discovered on page 893 of “Das Kapital” a new recipe fcturning the world into a gigantic Garden ot Eden, an enthusiastic welcome from vast multitudes. The vast multitudes can hardly be blamed for this. The world is a drab old place and life no doubt would be intolerable if J;he’ supply of delusions were to suddenly run out. Humans would sooner go without bread than be denied them; hence the high social positions occupied by the fakir fraternity and the supreme contempt, if they are even noticed at all, for those who keep to the bumpy path of reason. Bearing this in mind one can be forgiven if one approaches the latest craze of the intellectusd world with some diffidence. Psycho-Analysis is the newest pastime of the dilettanti and the intelligenzia, alike. A few years ago it was Bergson, then it was futurism; then it was Aubrey Beardsley and the decadents and just prior to that again Science and the “Religion of Reason,” held high carnival at the expense of theologians and other like-minded personages. Psycho-Analysis has the floor at present and judging by the enormous mass of the literature that it has inspired, it seems a pretty serious malady. It cannot be gainsaid but that the new study is one of the most promising crazes that has ever wormed its way into the intellectual world. That can hardly be questioned when it is realised that the great bulk of the modem scientific and medical authorities are prepared to admit that there is “something in it,” and then they go and write a book with references to “libido,” “Freudian wish,” “repressions,” “censors” and other extraordinary jargon. From these tomes one gathers that nobody, except the inventor and a few stalwart disciples are altogether satisfied with the extraordinary theorems propounded many years ago by the Vienna doctor, Freud, but, nevertheless, there is something so alluring about it that their criticism of fundamentals loses much of its sting before half their disquisitions are completed.

Freud set out to prove that the whole mental life of man is largely the product of the Unconscious mind. Our motives are determined by factors which are therefore, largely outside our control. “The combined mental and physical organism is in a large degree under the control of the Unconscious; my conscious acts are controlled by my unconscious life, your waking behaviour by the Unknown Titan slumbering within you; everyman’s visible activities by the archaic past which in him still lives in the present.” The Unconscious is essentially primitive; in it is the whole gamut of our impulses, passions and desires in their crudest form, dominated completely by the incessant urge of sex. Civilisation does largely modify, or at leasts sets a control over the lower psychical forces but notwithstanding, it- remains the great dynamic fores and even the most sublime mind cannot altogether escape from its coercing and accelerating influences. According to the gospel of the Freudians, the Unconscious I for all of us in the arena on which is staged the never-ceasing battle between the savage and infantile cravings and the more evolved psyche which we call Reason. Civilisation demands that the individual should be able to conquer the lower elements in his mental machinery and those who fail to do so earn the displeasure of society in ostracism or segregation in prisons or lunatic asylums. The individual that has been able to so adjust his life that the grosser forces are made to pay tribute to the higher and produce thereby a condition of comparative harmony, has moved a long way to that goal of Happiness and spiritual strength which all religious in their trurer manifestations seek to attain. The constant repression and the diversion of sex energies, for this is the Freduian view of the Unconscious, sets up what Freud terms a “Censorship,” a barrier between the Unconscious and the conscious. Its functions consist in inhibiting or in some way, transforming all those thoughts, wishes and desires which are found to be incomfatible with the ethical codes of modern life. These may be prevented altogether from invading consciousness, but it frequently happens that they are abte to elude the resistance offered and make themselves manifest in the form of dream symbolism or in psycho-neurotic symptoms. The dream to psycho-analysts is the magic key that unlocks the arcana of the unconscious, interpreting both the social and the racial desires and wishes of the psyche. But there are other avenues of entry. Slips of the tongue, the forgetting of' words with unpleasant associations, wit and we shall see later, much literary and* artistic expression, also give a clue to the gigantic hidden reservoir whose upwellings provide the chief motive forces of human action. If this hypothesis is true, and there appears to be a great deal in its favour, we live, even the most straightforward and ingenuous of us, in a world of prodigious deceit where truth itself is hidden in an almost impenetrable fog. Our real reasons for thinking and acting in the way we do, are on analysis, mere pretexts, a process of self-deception, that makes it possible for us to meet the our neighbour as the good, moral, truthloving and faithful citizen that we feel sure we are. > But the craving to return to the primitive non-moral state of our animal ancestors cannot always be subliminated in a way that meets the need of the psyche and in that case other outlets must be found which result in hysteria and obsessions. Sublimination is the keynote to the whole, process of evolution, it is the transforming of the baser into the higher—the “philosopher’s stone,” of the mental world.. It is this process which Freud contend®, results in much of the artistic expression, either in books, painting or music.

“A literary work,” says Albert McNeil in “The Erotic Motive In Literature,” “is no longer regarded as a sort of objective product unrelated to its creator, written only by compliance with certain rules. It is a personal expression and represents the whole man behind it. His present and past have gone into the making of it and it records his secret aspirations and most intimate feelings; it is the outcropping of his struggles and disappointments. It is the outlet of his emotions, freely flowing forth even though he has sought to stem their flux. It dates from his apparently forgotten infantile life.” By a study of the literary creations, for removed from what is popularly termed the erotic it is possible to catch many glimpses of the inner mental life of the author. Was it an accident that Poe was predominately doie/ul and wallowed : n the tragic of the unspeakably horrible.

that Maupassant portrayed sexual aberrations to the point of nausea, that James Thomson lived perpetually in the “City of Dreadful Night,” and that Swinburne and Dowson always sang so divinely of the love that was never theirs or that George Gissing was so morose, or Lewis Carrol Pucklike? Those outside the psycho-analysts will no doubt consider such quest : ~zjings as futile as asking why Shakespeare didn’t

write ‘The Fall of the House of Usher” and Poe “The Twelfth Night.” But to the Freudians one line of a lyric may give a clue to deep and dark mysteries that might otherwise have never been thrust into the light of the world. It is as much an expression of the Unconscious as a dream is disguised and as objective as ever so much as it might be. .(Jo bo