What is the relationship between Freud and literature according to Trilling?

The Psychoanalytical theory of Freud has had a great
effect upon literature. Yet the relationship is reciprocal, and the effect of Freud upon
literature has been no greater than the effect of literature upon Freud. When on the
occasion of the celebration of his seventieth birthday, Freud was greeted as the
‘discoverer of the unconscious’, he corrected the speaker and disclaimed the title. ‘The
poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious’, he said. ‘What I
discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be
studied.’

There are some philosophers before Freud who
clearly anticipate many of Freud’s ideas. These are Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. In fact,
the particular literary influence on Freud is not the question here. The question here
is to get the Spirit of the time [Zeitgeist]. And the time is the
Romanticist literature of earlier 19th century. The literature of this period is full of
Psychological insights and passionately devoted to a research into the
self.

While showing the connection between Freud and this
Romanticist tradition, it is difficult to decide where to begin with. But it might be
apt to start, as far back as 1762, with Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew.
Many literary critics and philosophers praised this brilliant little work for its
peculiar importance. Goethe, Marx, Hegel, Shaw, and Freud himself read it with great
pleasure and full agreement.

There are two characters in
Rameau’s Nephew ― Diderot himself and a nephew of the famous
composer Rameau. The junior Rameau is a despised, outcast, shameless fellow who breaks
down all the normal social values. He is a protagonist of the piece. As for Diderot, he
is reasonable, decent, and dull. He is the deuteragonist of the piece. However, it is
quite clear that author doesn’t dislike his Rameau and does not mean us to dislike him.
Rameau is presented as lustful and greedy, arrogant and wrong, like a child. And Diderot
seems to be giving the fellow a kind of superiority over himself. Rameau represents the
elements which lie beneath the reasonable decorum of social life. These elements are
dangerous but wholly necessary. Here Rameau represents Freud’s id and Diderot Freud’s
ego.

Nevertheless it is of course true that Freud’s
influence on literature has been very great. If we look for a writer who shows the
maximum Freudian influence, Proust would come to mind as readily as anyone else. The
very title of his novel in French suggests an enterprise of psychoanalysis – the
investigation of sleep, of sexual deviation, the ways of free association. The other
writer who was influenced by Freud is T.S. Eliot who in his The Waste
Land presents the psychoanalytic interpretation of a dream. The names of the
creative writers who have been more or less Freudian in tone or assumption would of
course be large in number. Only a relatively small number, however, have made serious
use of Freudian ideas. Kafka has explored the Freudian conception of guilt and
punishment, of the dreams, and of the fear of the father. Thomas Mann has been
influenced by Freudian anthropology finding a special charm in the theories of myths and
magical practices. James Joyce has his interest in the numerous states of receding
consciousness.