2M
LESLIE EPSTEIN
But [there is a] distressing trend which, for several years, has tended
to transform the psychoanalytic system from a body of scientific
hypotheses that are experimentally verifiable in certain specific and
limited cases into a kind of diffuse mythology interpenetrating
the
consciousness of the group • . . (This group consciousness
is
an
objective phenomenon, which the psychologist expresses through a
subjective tendency to extend to normal thought a system of
in·
terpretations conceived for pathological thought and
to
apply
to
facts of collective psychology a method adapted solely
to
the study
\)f individual psychology.) When this happens - and perhaps it
already has in certain countries - the value of the system will no
longer be based upon real cures from which certain individuals can
benefit, but on the sense of security that the group receives from
the myth underlying the cure and from the popular system upon
which the group's universe is reconstructed. . . . By continuously
expanding the recruitment of its patients, who begin as clearly
characterized abnormal individuals and gradually become repre–
sentative of the group, psychoanalysis transforms its treatments into
conversions.
We arrive, in Levi-Strauss' words, at a magico-social system, or, if you
will, at a new ritual of Dionysus, whose sole purpose now, as then,
is
to demonstrate "the coherence of the psychic universe," to provide a
system of thought in which all "contradictory elements can be inte–
grated" - in short, to reduce the difficulties of the many to the sim·
plicity of the one,
to
deny the distinction, first between sanity and
madness, then between mind and matter itself, and then, familiarly,
to render the very concept of distinction absurd, so that the worshipper
dances in a universe without dissent, but shot through with divinity.
It is a totalitarianism that the revolutionaries in Union Square would
not wish
to
espouse any more than Freud would wish
to
practice, yet
the irony of that audience is that, whether committed
to
radical action
or to dropping from the culture altogether, they in fact acquiesce and
participate in ways they never dream. For, as the followers of Dionysus
were at one with hills and stream, these fresh Bacchae are profoundly
attuned to the rhythms of their square - the stunted trees and yellow
grass, the buzz and
wink
of daytime neon, the curl of fumes on a
poisoned breeze, the honk and whine and screech and blare - and
that, as their spokesman became what he intended to satirize (and
as
the patient becomes what he dares to expose) so, too, they swoon
to
a
world they mean to change.
