ART AND ANALYSIS
873
Schneider is benign, aesthetically conventional, and deeply respect–
ful of the creative insights of what he considers healthy artists. Bergler
is
full of aggressive scorn, makes art an inferior rival to psychoanalysis,
and finds writers without exception contemptible neurotics, a "depressed,
pitiful and sordid lot." Whom is the literary reader to believe? More
seriously and perhaps disastrously, how is the patient to decide
in
whose hands he can safely put the cure of his soul, when what claims
to be science offers such contradictions? For what these books chiefly
demonstrate-especially Bergler's, since it is the more extravagant,
doctrinaire, and self-revealing-is the extremely autistic character of
psychoanalytic thinking.
Bleuler, who coined the term "autistic," noticed how often
in
medical reports unconscious errors resulted from the desire to demon–
strate a cure, and how often in hospital staff conferences the desire to
make an acute diagnosis favored the rare diseases above the common
ones. Even in apparently controlled laboratory work, the choice of
experimental techniques and the neglect of contrary evidence is un–
consciously determined by the desire to have the experiment come out
the right way. What goes on in private therapy like Bergler's, without
objective controls and with unlimited opportunities for suggestion
and selection, is evident enough from the obsessive character of his liter–
ary interpretations.
It
is no surprise that his writers, after a year and
a half of analysis, turn up uniformly with the same kind of passive
masochism, with the same five layers--or "cellars"--of defense against
the sadistic mother.
If
a character in a story, in a moment of crisis, thinks
of the golden cross which his mother wore on her blouse, "undoubtedly
this was an unconscious allusion to the two organs beneath the blouse–
the two great disappointers!"
The writer, according to Bergler, is a perpetual defendant before
the high tribunal of his unconscious conscience, with a malignant "Dai–
momon" as his judge. This inner
guilt
has nothing to do with the oedipus
complex, which has become trite now, and "is not decisive for writers."
What the writer denies is: "I wish to be mistreated by Mother"-that
phantasmal mother whom he conceived in his "septet of infantile fears"
as intending to starve, devour, poison, choke, drain and castrate him,
and chop him into pieces. The guilty wish is hidden by a series of de–
fenses and defenses against defenses, by alibis, disguises, and deceptions
of all sorts. The wish alone is real; everything rising above it in the
conscious or unconscious self is false. Aggression is pseudo-aggression,
love is pseudo-love, errors are pseudo-errors. Bergler describes this
psychic underworld of dishonesties with metaphors drawn from the
