Othello

Psychoanalysis can go far in the interpretation of literary art, but only so far, at least so long as it remains a doctrine bounded by a psychology of the individual. The reason for the limit, as Freud himself intuited, is that art is basically a social formation. Literature uses the individual as a representation of his time. It reveals no timeless, universal man, but a man caught up in history. If we recognize ourselves in the great figures of past literature, it is because we have the past in ourselves, not because psychological relations are invariant.

The artist confronts his opportunity in the gap between that which has endured in the human condition and that which is changing as a result of the material evolution of society. Men are always sheared between their desire—stemming from that heritage we variously call nature, biology, or the id—and the ceaseless provision of new objects by history. Times arise when the conjunction of forces infuses energy into culture while the alteration of objects renders previous forms of symbolic representation obsolete. Into this vacuole steps the artist. His synthesis reunites time with the timeless; and insofar as psychoanalysis comprehends the timeless—that is to say, those human categories that have coalesced into the unconscious—it will remain perennially useful in the understanding of art.

The question arises whether psychoanalysis can go further. Might it not be possible for psychoanalysis to grasp the indwelling mark of historical objects upon psychology? We should call such a psychoanalysis “dialectical” or “critical,” in recognition of its debt to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School.* The distinguishing marks of a critical psychoanalysis would be a fidelity to Freud's depth psychology along with a sensitivity to the mediations of historical structures. Because the tensions between the individual and society, or nature and history, are seen as the ultimate determinants of the psyche, a critical psychoanalysis i