Tragedy
Lionel Trilling deduces, “We cannot convince ourselves that the two Oedipus tragedies teach us anything, or show the hero as learning anything. It is true that tragedies are often about knowing and not knowing, and they range themselves on the side of knowing. But this partisanship must be approached warily lest we find ourselves in the unhappy situation of those critics who tell us that Lear and Gloucester suffered to good purpose because their pain 'educated' them before they died. When, as with Oedipus Rex, a great tragedy is made to yield such conclusions as that fate is inscrutable and that it is a wise child who knows his own father, or, as with King Lear, that the universe is uncomfortable and its governance morally in.”
The references to standard tragedies call forth the imageries of the heroes’ anguish which bid discerning lessons regarding morality. Besides, based on the imagery, a reader can visualize fatal culminations for characters such as ‘Lear and Gloucester.’ Moreover, fate is a foremost sponsor of the quandaries which the heroes submit to; the heroes are principally stranded; hence , submit to the prescriptions of fate.
‘Psychoanalysis Procedure'
Lionel Trilling confirms, “The clinical procedure of psychoanalysis is well known. The therapeutic method is based on the belief that when once the conscious part of the mind learns to interpret the difficult symbolism of the repressed drives of the unconscious and by this means brings to light what it feared and thrust out of sight, the ego will be able to confront the drives of the id in all their literalness and thus be relieved of the pain that their symbolic expression causes. The patient, the analysand, by various means-by retrieving his childhood experience, by reporting his dreams and interpreting them with the analyst's help, by articulating his fantasies and his fugitive thoughts, of which some will be trivial and silly, others shameful-will learn to identify the subversive devices of the banished impulses and come to terms with them as appropriate elements of his nature, thus depriving them of their power over him.”
Trilling’s imagery of psychoanalysis sketches the strategic emphasis of the practice whose emphasis is on ‘the conscious and unconscious.’ The objective of the process is to exploit the subject past knowledge which is stockpiled in the two regions specified above. Accordingly, a psychoanalyst who focus on other zones other than the standard ones, who not accomplish the predictable ends of psychoanalysis. The imagery renders the technique scientific which means that it should be austerely followed to produce psychoanalytic conclusions. Individuals undergoing psychoanalysis are anticipated to perceive imageries of their childhoods which they have gathered in their individual unconscious.
