nw Saturday Review ofjliterature
19-^6
Freud and the Future
W
HEN I began to o c -
cupy myself with
the Uterature of
psychoanalysis I recognized,
arrayed in the ideas and the
language of scientific exacti-
tude, m u c h that had long been
familiar to m e through my
youthful mental experiences.
More t h a n once, and in many
places, I h a v e confessed to t h e
profound, even shattering i m -
pression made upon me as a
young m a n b y contact with t h e
philosophy of A r t h u r Schopen-
hauer, to which then a m o n u -
ment was erected in the pages
of "Buddenbrooks." Here first,
in t h e pessimism of a m e t a -
physics already very strongly
equipped on the n a t u r a l - s c i -
ence side, I encountered the
dauntless zeal for t r u t h which
stands for t h e moral aspect of
the psychology of the u n c o n -
scious. This metaphysics, in o b -
scure revolt against centuries-
old beliefs, preached t h e p r i -
macy of the instinct over mind
and reason; it recognized the
will as the core and t h e essen-
tial foundation of the world, in
m a n as in all other created beings; and
the intellect as secondary and acciden-
tal, servant of the will and its pale illumi-
nant. This it preached not in malice, not
in the a n t i - h u m a n spirit of the m i n d -
hostile doctrines of today; b u t in the
s t e m love of t r u t h characteristic of the
century which combated idealism out of
love for t h e ideal. It was so sincere, that
nineteenth century, that—^through the
m o u t h of Ibsen—it pronounced the lie,
the lies of life, to be indispensable. Clear-
ly t h e r e is a vast difference w h e t h e r one
assents to a lie out of sheer h a t r e d of
t r u t h and the spirit, or for t h e sake of
that spirit, in bitter irony and anguished
pessimism! Yet the distinction is not clear
to everybody today.
Now Freud, the psychologist of the u n -
conscious, is a true son of t h e century
of Schopenhauer and Ibsen—he was
born in the middle of it. How closely r e -
lated is his revelation to Schopenhauer's,
not only in its content b u t also in its
moral attitude! His discovery of t h e great
role played by t h e unconscious, the Id,
in t h e soul life of man, challenged and
challenges classical psychology, to which
BY THOMAS MANN
THOMAS MANN
the consciousness and the psyche are
one and the same, as offensively as once
Schopenhauer's doctrine of the will chal-
lenged philosophical belief in reason and
the intellect. Certainly the early devotee
of "The World as Will and Idea" is at
home in Freud's admirable essay, "The
Anatomy of the Mental Personality." It
describes t h e soul-world of the u n c o n -
scious, t h e Id, in language as strong, and
at the same time in as coolly intellec-
tual, objective, a n d professional a tone
as Schopenhauer might have used to d e -
scribe his sinister kingdom of the will.
"The domain of the Id" he says, "is the
dark, inaccessible part of our personal-
ity; the little that we know of it we have
learned through the study of dreams and
of the formation of neurotic symptoms."
He depicts it as a chaos, a melting-pot
of seething excitations. The Id, he thinks,
is, so to speak, open towards the somatic,
and receives thence into itself compul-
sions which there find psychic e x p r e s -
sion—in what s u b s t r a t u m is unknown.
From these impulses it receives its
energy; but it is not organized, produces
no collective will, merely the striving to
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achieve satisfaction for t h e i m -
pulsive needs operating u n d e r
the pleasure-principle. In it n o
laws of thought a r e valid, a n d
certainly not the law of o p p o -
sites. "Contradictory stimuli e x -
ist alongside each other w i t h -
out cancelling each other out
or even detracting from each
other; at most they unite in
compromise forms u n d e r t h e
compulsion of t h e controlling
economy for the release of
energy." You perceive t h a t this
is a situation which, in the h i s -
torical experience of our own
day, can take the u p p e r hand
with the Ego, with a whole
mass-Ego, thanks to a m o r a l
devastation which is produced
by worship of t h e unconscious,
the glorification of its dynamic
as the only life-promoting force,
the systematic glorification of
t h e primitive and irrational. F o r
the unconscious, the Id, is p r i m -
itive and irrational, is p u r e
dynamic. It knows no values,
no good or evil, no morality. It
even knows no time, no t e m -
poral flow, n o r any effect of
time upon its psychic process.
"Wish stimuli," says Freud, "which have
never overpassed the Id, and impressions
which have been repressed into its
depths, are virtually indestructible, t h e y
survive decade after decade as though
they had just happened. They can only
be recognized as belonging to t h e past,
devalued and robbed of their charge of
energy, by becoming conscious through
the analytic procedure." A n d he adds
that therein lies preeminently t h e h e a l -
ing effect of analytic treatment. We p e r -
ceive accordingly how antipathetic deep
analysis must be to an Ego which is i n -
toxicated by a worship of the u n c o n -
scious to the point of being in a condi-
tion of subterranean dynamic. It is only
'iNhd^
MAXIM GORKY
By MANYA GORDON
DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK
By WALTER D. EDMONDS
Reviewed by Allan Nevins

"ioo clear and understandable that such
an Ego is deaf to analysis a n d t h a t t h e
n a m e of F r e u d must not be mentioned
in its hearing.
As for t h e Ego itself, its situation is
pathetic, well-nigh alarming. It is a n
alert, prominent, and enlightened little
p a r t of the Id—much as Europe is a small
and lively province of the greater Asia.
The Ego is that part of the Id which b e -
came modified by contact with t h e outer
world; equipped for the reception and
preservation of stimuli; comparable to
the integument with which any piece of
living matter s u r r o u n d s itself. A very
perspicuous biological picture. F r e u d
writes indeed a v e r y perspicuous prose,
he is an artist of thought, like Schopen-
hauer, and like h i m a writer of E u r o -
pean rank. The relation with the outer
world is, h e says, decisive for the Ego, it
is the Ego's task to represent the world
to t h e Id—for its good! For without r e -
gard for t h e superior power of the outer
world, the Id, in its blind striving t o -
wards t h e satisfaction of its instincts,
would not escape destruction. The Ego
takes cognizance of t h e outer world, it
is mindful, it honorably tries to distin-
guish the objectively real from whatever
is an accretion from its inward sources
of stimulation. It is entrusted by the Id
with the lever of action; b u t between the
impulse and the action it has interposed
the delay of the thought process, during
which it summons experience to its aid
and t h u s possesses a certain regulative
superiority over t h e pleasure principle
which rules supreme in the unconscious;
correcting it b y means of the principle
of reality. B u t even so, h o w feeble it
is? H e m m e d in between the unconscious,
the outer world, and w h a t F r e u d calls
the super-Ego, it leads a pretty nervous
a n d anguished existence. Its owm dynamic
is r a t h e r weak. It derives its energy from
the Id and in general h a s to carry out
t h e latter's behests. It is fain to regard it-
self as t h e rider and the unconscious as
t h e horse. B u t m a n y a time it is ridden
by t h e unconscious; a n d I take leave to
add what Freud's rational morality p r e -
vents him from saying, that u n d e r some
circumstances it m a k e s more progress by
this illegitimate means.
After a sojourn in the world of Freud,
how differently, in the light of one's n e w
knowledge, does one r e - r e a d t h e reflec-
tions of Schopenhauer, for instance his
great essay "Transcendent Speculations
on Apparent Design in the Fate of the
Individual"? A n d h e r e I am about to
touch upon the most profound and m y s -
terious point of contact between Freud's
natural-scientific world a n d Schopen-
hauer's philosophic one. For the essay
I h a v e named, a marvel of profundity
and penetration, constitutes this point of
contact. The pregnant and mysterious
idea there developed by Schopenhauer
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is briefly this: that preciselj- as in a
d r e a m it is our ovim will which u n c o n -
sciously appears as inexorable objective
destiny, everything in it proceeding out
of ourselves and each of u s being the
secret t h e a t r e - m a n a g e r of our own
dreams; so also in reality, the great dream
which a single essence, the will itself,
dreams with us all, our fate, m a y be the
product of our inmost selves, of our wills,
and w e are actually ourselves bringing
about what seems to be happening to us.
I repeat that I see in the mystery of the
unity of the Ego and the world, of being
and happening, in t h e perception of the
apparently objective and accidental as a
matter of t h e soul's own contriving, the
innermost core of psycho-analytic theory.
In Genesis w e h a v e talk of t h e bond
(covenant) between God and man, the
psychological basis of which I have a t -
tempted to give in
t h e mythological
novel "Joseph and
His Brethren."
Perhaps m y r e a d -
ers will be in-
dulgent if I speak
a little about m y
own work. It is
strange—and p e r -
haps strange not
only to me—that
in this work there
o b t a i n s precisely
t h e psychological
theology that "the
giver of all given
conditions resides
in ourselves." This
A b r a m is in a
sense the father of
SIGMUND
God. He perceived
and brought Him forth; His mighty q u a l i -
ties, ascribed to Him b y Abram, were
probably His original possession. Abram
was not their inventor, yet in a sense he
was, by virtue of his recognizing them
and therewith, by taking thought, making
them real. God's mighty qualities—and
thus God Himself—are indeed something
objective, exterior to Abram; b u t at the
same time they are in him and of him as
well; the power of his own soul is at m o -
ments scarcely to be distinguished from
them, it consciously interpenetrates and
fuses with them—and such is the origin of
the bond which then t h e Lord strikes with
Abram, as the explicit confirmation of an
inward fact. The bond, it is stated, is
made to the interest of both, to the end
of their common sanctification. Need h u -
man and need divine here entwine until
it is h a r d to say w h e t h e r it was t h e h u -
m a n or the divine t h a t took the initia-
tive. In any case the a r r a n g e m e n t shows
that the holiness of m a n and the holi-
ness of God constituted a twofold p r o c -
ess, one part being most intimately bound
up with the other. Wherefore else, one
The Satundap Review
asks, should there b e a bond at all?
T h e soul as "giver of t h e given"—yes,
I am well aware that in the novel this
conception reaches an ironic pitch which
is not authorized either in oriental w i s -
dom or in psychological perception. B u t
t h e r e is something thrilling about the
imconscious and only later discovered
harmony. Shall I call it the power of
suggestion? B u t sympathy would b e a
better word: a kind of intellectual af-
finity, of which naturally psychoanalysis
v/as earlier aware than was I, and which
proceeded out of those literary apprecia-
tions which I owed to it at an earlier
stage. The latest of these was an offprint
of an article which appeared in Imago,
written by a Viennese scholar of the
F r e u d i a n school, u n d e r t h e title "On t h e
Psychology of the Older School of Biog-
raphy." The r a t h e r d r y title gives no
indication of t h e
remarkable c o n -
tents. The writer
^^ shows how the
older a n d simpler
type of biography
* ' ' a n d in particular
the vwitten Lives
St •' of artists, n o u r -
ished and con-
ditioned b y p o p u -
lar legend a n d t r a -
dition, assimilate,
as it were, the life
of the subject to
the conventional-
ized stock-in-
trade of biography
in general, t h u s
imparting a sort
of sanction to their
FREUD
own performance
and establishing its genuineness; making
it authentic in the sense of "as it always
was" and "as it has been written." For
man sets store by recognition, h e likes to
find the old in the new, the typical in the
individual. F r o m that recognition he
draws a sense of the familiar in life,
whereas if it painted itself as entirely
new, singular in time a n d space, without
any possibility of resting upon the known,
it could only bewilder and alarm. The
question, then, which is raised by the
essay, is this: can a n y line b e sharply
and unequivocally d r a w n between the
formal s t o c k - i n - t r a d e of legendary biog-
raphy and the characteristics of t h e sin-
gle personality—in other words, between
the typical and the individual? A q u e s -
tion negatived by its v e r y statement. F o r
the t r u t h is, that life is a mingling of the
individual elements and the formal stock-
i n - t r a d e ; a mingling in which the indi-
vidual as it were only lifts his head
above the formal and impersonal e l e -
ments. Much t h a t is extra-personal,
much unconscious identification, much
(Continmd on page 14)
lULY 25, 1936
The Art of Wodehouse
A R T H U R D.
I
F Plato has been called the Master
of those who think, a n d Aristotle t h e Scholars h a v e observed how yEneas
Master of those who know, then how
can Wodehouse fail to be the Master of
those w h o laugh? What is the secret of
this charm, so widely and so deeply felt?
Some elements in the success of W o d e -
house are easily seen. He blends English
and American slang in so
happy a w a y t h a t he is as a
humorist equally intelligible
on both sides of the Atlantic;
and his ambidexterity in this
respect is not merely linguis-
tic. J a n e Opal and young
Packy a r e as t r u e to life as
the sympathetic and deeply
moving portrait of Galahad BERTIE
Threepwood. F u r t h e r , all
writing intended to amuse must, if it is
to have more than the most transitory of
appeals, possess a kind of formal perfec-
tion. Comic verse has to be very sound
metrically; only a man of the very h i g h -
est moral purpose can m a k e Chablis and
Rabelais rhyme. In amusing prose the
appearance of spontaneity is the result
of a self-discipline which the literary
critic does not need to apply. The h u -
morist loses his reader at once if the
wheels are h e a r d to creak; he
is like a m a n telling a funny
story after dinner who fum-
bles for words. Wodehouse
never fails us in this:
Others abide our question:
thou art Jeeves.
This perfection of technique
is important; le style, c'est
I'homme meme. But the fun-
damental underlying difficulty
lies in the n a t u r e of h u m o r
itself. I once heard it said JEEVES
of a man: "He is the worst
kind of a bore—^he is an interesting bore."
The angels in heaven weep for the m a n
who is just continuously facetious. Plato
has observed that pleasure and pain
spring from the same root; the best clowns
—Crock in the past and J i m m y D u r a n t e
and J i m m y Savo today—have sad faces,
and the wistfulness of Charlie Chaplin
is an essential component of his u n i v e r -
sal appeal. Most men t u r n to literature
for a certain kind of escape. Wodehouse
gives it to us. In the ordinary round of
small occupations and worries we t u r n
to the Drones' Club; we think of its bar,
filled with Eggs, Beans, and Crumpets;
and a strange peace descends upon us
in this beautiful and most wisely foolish
world of Bertie Wooster and T u p p y
Glossop.
Through the whole story as so far u n -
rolled of B e r t r a m Wooster (and m a y its cessor of Trollope; it will give a se-
volumes ultimately surpass in n u m b e r
those of the Comedie Humaine and Zola's
series) there r u n s a development of p e r - cru?) of the incomparable vignettes of
NOCK
sonality. It is parallel to the iEneid.
grows; h e starts as somewhat of a poop-
stick, pious, with correct attitudes t o -
w a r d s his father a n d the rather over-
stressed Trojan household gods, b u t no
head in a storm, a n d a lamentable igno-
rance of the gnomic observations, later
given classic statement by
Mr. Weller, on t h e dangerous
n a t u r e of widows; he n e x t
presides at singularly ill-con-
ducted athletic sports in
which no regard is paid to
fouls and t h e r e a r e plenty.
Then he visits t h e u n d e r -
world, and emerges a Man of
Destiny and a Good Thing. So
is it with Bertram. At the b e -
ginning we may even be tempted to think
of him as in the n a t u r e of a lay figure
who exists only to show the dexterity of
Jeeves and the futile wickedness of
aunts; a character no nobler than the
mantis of Bushman folklore. Jeeves p a -
tronizes; he does not merely disapprove
of certain divagations from his own
Pharisaic standard of w h a t the well
dressed man will wear, but he hardly
conceals a contempt for his master,
as though B e r t r a m were no
better than that other young
hero in the Mulliner Saga, of
whom it was said that if his
brains were of silk there
would not be enough to make
a pair of cami-knickers for a
gnat. He is all but the prey
of young females with beet-
ling brows who t r y to m a k e
something of him and even
cause him to attempt to read
Schopenhauer; he has a con-
fidence trick played on him
which but for Jeeves would have
resulted in serious pecuniary loss; he is
subjected to the rough horseplay cf
T u p p y Glossop in t h e bath of the Drones'
Club. F r o m time to time he
uses his brains or what as
even kind A u n t Dahlia would
say he calls his brains; and
always he fails.
Some day there will be
composed a "Beauties of
Wodehouse," like the now
forgotten work entitled "The
Beauties of Shakespeare." It
will include m u c h of rare
charm which lies in other MR. MULLINER
parts of the Master's work.
It will represent adequately all that
portrayal of clerical life in which Wode-
house is the lineal and only suc-
lection (and w h a t a tantalizing task its
making will be, w h e r e all is premiere
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life as it is lived elsewhere, in an e d i -
tor's office, b y an estate agent, by t h e
keeper of a village drugstore, b y p e d -
dlers of stock in nonexistent oil com-
panies, b y film actors, b y members of
t h e J u n i o r Lipstick and t h e Senior
Bloodstain Clubs and if t h e r e b e any
other clubs. It m a y d r a w on the U k r i d -
giana and the golfing stories, which, a l -
though m y admiration can hardly be d e -
scribed as this side of idolatry I person-
ally group with "Much Ado About Noth-
ing" and "Timon of A t h e n s " as parallels
to Homer's alleged tendency to nod. But
the center of t h e stage m u s t always be
occupied b y the figure of Bertie Woos-
ter, t h e Till Eulenspiegel of our time.
Arthur D. Nock is a distinguished his-
torian of the Early Christian period.
The Drones' Club
YOUNG MEN IN SPATS. By P. G.
Wodehouse. New York: Doubleday,
Doran & Co. 1936. $2.
R e v i e w e d by ROBERT STRUNSKY
G. WODEHOUSE is fifty-five
P. years old a n d has w r i t t e n forty-
two books. When he graduated
from Dulwich College he was going to
be a banker. In 1902 he wrote a book
called "The Pothunters." It passed u n -
noticed, so that nobody now living has
any notion what it was all about, includ-
ing t h e author. His first success came
with t h e Psmith stories, the first of which
was published in 1910.
The real point to be remembered about
Wodehouse is that he is t h e only E n g -
lishman who can m a k e an American
laugh at a joke about America. Most
British jokes about America have been
sour ever since Oscar Wilde and Bernard
Shaw. They are either too clever, and
therefore fraudulent, or too stupid, and
therefore fraudulent. They either p r e -
tend to more than they know, or palpably
know nothing. But with Wodehouse it
is different. He, clearly, has caught the
drift. This may be due to the amount
of time he has spent here,
and the amount of money he
has taken away. Both d o u b t -
less have something to do
with it. Yet the secret of his
success in making jokes about
America is that he really
likes Americans. He knows
them and understands them.
That is w h y his jokes about
them are funnier for being
valid. And the best of all his
jokes about t h e m is the w a y
h e stole their idea of the t y p i -
cal Englishman, and simply raised the
ante, by making him more fantastically
ridiculous than Americans ever thought
he was. He made him into Tuppy Glos-
sop and Freddie Widgeon and Archibald
Mulliner, and Albert Peasemarch, and