JESTING AT SCARS
93
stead of basely submitting to the father, the initiate bravely identifies
with the mother; circumcision "clearly occurs because of the people's
desire for it, not because of pressure from above"; "society may thus
have been founded not on the association of homicidal brothers (pos–
tulated by Freud) but on a joint effort of men to master a common
problem." Finally, Bettelheim asks rhetorically: "Under which frame
of reference can human behavior best be understood, that of inner free–
dom and human autonomy, or that of coercion by blind instinctual forces
or by the insensible powers of custom and tradition?" His answer, of
course, is the former, since the latter does "injury to men's inherent
dignity."
Unfortunately, such authorities on "man's inherent dignity" as the
great tragic writers from Aeschylus to Joyce and the great stoic philos–
ophers from Socrates to Freud himself seem consistently to have dis–
agreed. What this is, as terms like "integrate," "joint effort," "inner
freedom and human autonomy," and so forth make clear, is the same
inspirational revision of Freud that Fromm, Horney, and the neo–
Freudians have been purveying over the years. Bowdlerize libido, deny
id, replace the Oedipus complex with something like Bettelheim's Chris–
tine complex, and heal and be healed by
caritas.
Bettelheim, whose
former title,
Love Is Not Enough,
suggests that he should know better,
trots out as usual "the child treated with love and tolerance," or finds
"severe oral deprivation" traumatic for the newborn child, "particularly
when accompanied by cold and indifferent handling." "Important en–
terprises of human beings," he concludes, "and certainly those that have
continued for centuries to give satisfaction, must serve positive rather
than negative ends." Accentuate the positive is the slogan; love every–
body or you will be left out of all the nice games. What Freud, to whose
memory the book is dedicated, would have made of all this treacle can
readily be imagined.
On examination, "ego psychology" looks suspiciously like old–
fashioned rationalism. A pyromaniac boy who set fires at the Ortho–
genic School out of urethral obsession was "rehabilitated" (ah, that word
from the Bowery Missions) by "being permitted to set small, safe fires
under supervision and to extinguish them by throwing jets of water
from a hand fire pump." When he turned the stream of water through
the window of his motherly counselor's room, that speeded up the re–
habilitation. Bettelheim speaks of "the rather unusual custom of eat–
ing part of the female genitalia," or remarks cheerily, "Female pubic
hair is a matter of great interest to modern children." His basic meta–
phor for primitive initiation is teaching or learning (where it is not
