154
PARTISAN
~EVIEW
against might not be removed in the ordinary course of education.
This heightening of consciousness that you ask for-is
it
not the
expected accompaniment of what we usually call intellectual culture
and education?
H: No; it would be a great mistake to imagine that banality
is a characteristic only
of
the man of the masses. We find a banality
among the ·learned, particularly in the academic profession. (Espe–
cially, I am told, in America, where the professors are caught in the
common aspiration to a suburban, middle-class, comfortable exis–
tence.) They live securely in their academic niche, journey to their
professional congresses, compete in their genteel way for academic
advancement. They feel no fundamental anxiety toward the universe,
for they make no passionate demands of it. Enough if it offers them
some tiny fragments of rationality, on which they may write their
papers, which they read at congresses; and then they sit back to wait
for their promotion with a self-confident sense of achievement.
F: What means do you hold out to the individual for attain–
ing authenticity?
H: Just what I have said: the conscious grasp of
his own
death as a possibility of his being at every moment; and his
resolute–
ness
in the face of this.
F: Excuse me, I do not find those means at all sufficient. V.'
r
analysts are accustomed to find other and very much more obscure
obstacles to a patient's really becoming himself-as you would put it.
In fact, as an analyst, I think I have to invert your notion altogether:
when the consciousness of death appears all too developed in the
. patient, it is usually a clue to something else that is hindering his
functioning. At the moment, indeed, I am thinking of a particular
patient of mine: a man of considerable intelligence and philosophic
training, who was given to much subtle and highly conscious philoso–
phizing about death. He faced the prospect of death with consid–
erable Stoicism; in fact, with an eagerness which made me
wry
suspicious quite early in the analysis. Now (to return to your terms ) ,
here was resoluteness in the .face of death, yet-
H: He was not living authentically? He was not living his
own life?
F: Precisely. No one who knew him would have had an idea
of the person he was capable of becoming.
H: What did you find out?
F: His trouble was something at once more simple and more
obscure. (However, professional ethics does not permit me at this
