Sail On?

Discussing Dr. Ernest Jones's biography of Psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (see BOOKS), Critic Lionel Trilling, writing in the New York Times this week, expressed a thought for Columbus Day. Said Trilling: "[Freud] lived by the inner light; he saw life under the aspect of personal heroism and believed that virtue consisted in making truth prevail against the resistance of society . . . Such a personality makes but a limited appeal to our increasingly 'other-directed' society with its ideal of blandness and cooperation and its suspiciousness of personal preeminence and self-assertion . . . A few years ago, a hostile biographer . . . made it a chief part of her indictment of Freud that he actually believed that his ideas were right, that he sought to make them prevail, that he did not gracefully compound his differences with the men who modified his theories. Our culture would seem to have changed since the days when schoolchildren were taught that for Columbus to say, 'Sail on! Sail on!' was brave and fine, not ill-natured and undemocratic."

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