ABSTRACT
In Principles of Literary Criticism I. A. Richards puts paid to the ‘phantom of the aesthetic state’ by proposing what looks like a thoroughly democratic theory of pleasure and value. Dahlias have nothing to lose but their sticks, as Practical Criticism begins to put right the damage done by psychoanalysis in the garden of value. In 1930 William Empson adds a timely literary codicil to S. Freud’s thesis. ‘Herbert’, he concludes, ‘deals in this poem, on the scale and by the methods necessary to it, with the most complicated and deeply-rooted notion of the human mind.’ In a much earlier discussion in The Psychoanalysis of Children, Melanie Klein footnotes Freud to support her claims, central to her entire theory, about the importance of internal destructive impulses in the formation of the super-ego. Richards’ apparent continuum between disorganized appetencies and aversions, and their development towards equipoise and organization, quickly hardens into an opposition between good and bad art.
