The Wound and the Bow
CHASE, RICHARD
The Wound and the Bow Art and Psychoanalysis. Reviewed by Richard Chase Ed. by William Phillips. Visiting professor of criticism Criterion. 552 pp. $8.50. Indiana University This book comes at...
...From essays like Rosenzweig's it must finally be apparent, to any who still doubt or who doubt anew, that the Freudian study of writers and of literature is a creative form of criticism, an accredited part of modern thought...
...And Phillips is right to see his book as an obstacle in the perennial stream of opinion which believes the importance of art to be its "wholesomeness" and "healthful-ness" and which seeks merely for "personal tranquility and social adjustment," and so regards psychoanalysis and its approach to literature as dangerously disruptive...
...Not that any of the writers whose essays are collected in this book has finally determined the relation of art and neurosis...
...Whatever may be the truth in these difficult matters, the most illuminating criticism has been written on the assumption that the artist's power issues in some sense from his neurosis and that this neurosis either is, or he makes it, unique...
...Second, we seem, under the pressure of political and moral challenges, to be now passing out of a fairly extended period when alert readers and writers were by nature amateur psychiatrists and sociologists, among other things...
...In speaking of Swift and Kafka, he suggests that "their neurotic impressions of the world coincided with impressions that were not neurotic and served to organize and energize the latter...
...The one or two factual mistakes he makes in speaking of the James canon do not at all affect the validity of his argument...
...Rosenzweig's essay on Henry James strikes one on rereading as a model of critical writing in every way...
...Phillips's book serves to remind us that we have not got "beyond" psychoanalysis...
...Phillips's own formulation makes a good starting point...
...Of course, many people have still not got to it...
...Although this change is all to the good, it already begins to involve a new and sometimes thoughtless devaluation of psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic study of art and literature...
...As Anatole Shub observed in an article called "Withdrawal and Return" (NL, June 17), we have been through a period of introspection and concentrated investigation during which we intensely "read the text"—of literature and, as it were, of the self, of the family, and of the community...
...He gives us a true and coherent portrait of the writer and his works...
...Indiana University This book comes at an opportune moment, in two senses...
...First, the literature bearing on the relation of art and neurosis is by now a large one and William Phillips has had no trouble in selecting from this body of writing by psychoanalyists and literary critics 26 essays almost all of which are of great interest...
...He is not, like Geoffrey Gorer in "The Myth of Jane Austen," merely abstract and superficial...
...This essay avoids the rather gruesome jargon and pedantic English that creep into some of the other pieces...
...nor does he go in for the exhaustively literal reading of dream symbols that we find in Marie Bonaparte's "Poe and the Function of Literature," which reminds one so much of the excesses of medieval and Alexandrian allegorizers...
...There is a tendency nowadays, perhaps only dimly discernible hut truly heralding a change of attitude, to take again the large view, to think of life in terms of politics, cultural ideology and history...
...Rosenzweig always seems to know how deeply and literally to apply the Freudian analysis to James in order to come up with the most illuminating and convincing results...
...The question to what extent the artist's neurosis is the source of his genius and the question of whether we can distinguish between the neurosis of the artist and that of the businessman or engineer are raised and differing answers suggested by several of the literary critics whose essays are reprinted in this volume— see "Art and Neurosis" by Lionel Trilling, "Art and Anxiety" by R. G. Davis, and "Writers and Madness" by William Barrett...
...See Edmund Wilson's "Philoctetes: The Wound and the Bow," Fritz Wittels's "Heinrich von Kleist," Phyllis Greenacre's "Jonathan Swift," Freud's "Dostoyevsky and Parricide," and Saul Rosenzweig's "The Ghost of Henry James...
...And Dr...
...But there are interesting speculative pieces on this general problem by analysts such as Ernst Kris, Henry Lowenfeld and Franz Alexander...
...Art and Psychoanalysis contains other pieces on this and related problems by Selma Fraiberg, Erich Fromm, Ernest Jones, Theodor Reik, William Empson, Simon 0. Lesser, Nathan Leites, Otto Rank, Geza Roheim, Thomas Mann, Kenneth Burke, Leslie Fiedler and Stanley Edgar Hyman...
Vol. 40 • December 1957 • No. 49
