Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture

In his Masks of Love and Life, Hanns Sachs makes use of the image of a frightened child locked in a room, all of whose doors are open. Dr. Sachs viewed Freudian analysis as one way to walk manly through those doors. In Lionel Trilling's exciting Fifth Anniversary Lecture of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, this important critic has attested that even at this congested mid-century, when the secrets beyond the door to the future hold more terror than ever, when it has become routine to begin analysis with the disavowal of miracle—even now sinister, the doors to life swing greedily open.

Those who have been in analysis well remember the freedom which comes when antique anxieties are lanced, the liberation which ensues from dipping into the interdicted corridors of time—in the growing awareness that memory can be ally as well as curse: that to live with the past is the best way not to live within the past. In our time of security, it is to be expected that any burst of freedom should be met with reaction. Thus we have the sad anomaly of the “beat” generation obsessed with the goals of status, safety, tenure. In his essay, Mr. Trilling scores these siren songs of security, and in his own Burke's-eye view, indicates that it is now the “terrible principal of culture” which corrupts. The controversial young hero of Tea and Sympathy can be, as Mr. Eric Bentley has pointed out, any progressively courageous thing he chooses, and he can be as different as he likes: in short, he can be anything, so long as he is not really homosexual, and is given the wonderful chance to make abundantly clear