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LEO BERSANI
swvive. The rebellious children of middle-class American society ter–
rify Feuer. They terrify
him
because they really
are
his father, and
their self-destruction may be
his
destruction.
America, the gentle, decent home in which, Feuer incredibly
writes, ". . . the System is so economically stable that it provides
jobs and opportunities for the willing and capable." Original
sin
in
Lewis Feuer's universe occurs not when that economy brutalizes peo–
ple, but rather when
it
stops admiring itself.
If
the rich of Amer–
ica no longer love themselves, what was the use of
all
those im–
migrant sons struggling so hard to make it in the American Home?
These young affluent fools must be made to love themselves again–
and here we see the usehlness of creating an unconscious for them
which they can get rid of. For not everyone has an unconscious in
Feuer: it is the despicable luxury of those who have never known
what it is to work hard just to have a room and a meal. "The hero–
ism of miners, pioneers, seamen, railwaymen, builders is of a different
order [from the hero of the youthful unconscious]; the struggle with
the material environment, with a hostile nature, for the sake of one's
survival, livelihood, or the advancement of human knowledge,
call
on all one's resources, and make obsolete and irrelevant one's con–
flicts with one's father." Wouldn't that be nice. I don't know
if
constant struggle with one's environment eliminates the unconscious;
I thought it was common knowledge that ghettos produce some
awful psychological problems. But Feuer is of course talking about
our nineteenth-century myths rather than our twentieth-century real–
ities, and the therapeutic "struggle for existence" which he recom–
mends as a cure for the unconscious is a peculiar Utopia in which
not just the unconscious but thought itself would have ceased to
function.
The Conflict of Generations
is a terrible, moving testimony to
the tenacity of the American dream. It suggests that for many of us
the dream has been so seductive and so powerful that
it
has left no
space in which to experiment with identities external to it. To lose
America would be to lose ourselves. Strangely enough, Feuer's hos–
tility to the young who threaten to destroy
his
father in themselves
is not unlike the violent nihilism of those whose only response to
America is to throw bombs at it. They, like him, are possessed by
the enemy they hate. Total love or total hate; in both cases, total
