PARTISAN REVIEW
PSYCHOTHERAPY:
THEORY, RESEARCH
AND PRACTICE
The Quarterly Journal of the
Psychotherapy Division of the
American Psychological
Association
EUGENE T. GENDLlN, Editor
BEGINNING OUR
NINTH YEAR!
PUBLISHING aUARTERLY
ARTICLES RELEVANT
TO PSYCHOTHERAPY
PSYCHOTHERAPY
is not limited to research only, but
also specializes in direct descriptions
of cases, with emphasis on the ther–
apist describing the problems and
choices he was up against.
PSYCHOTHERAPY
is open to all the very different view–
points in the field, and therefore
presents the pretty strong arguments
between these views_
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635
deep down beneath the familiar
one, a sigh of resignation, a giving
up, a surrender of something more
than her body." ) In any case this
can hardly be the incident Baldwin
is referring to when he says of Big–
ger that "his fear drives him to
murder and his hatred to rape."
Bigger feels no hatred for Bessie:
on the contrary, he's described as
"feeling acutely sorry for her" as
he takes her. In his urge to indict
Bigger Baldwin has either distorted
the Bessie incident or wildly mis–
remembered the Mary Dalton epi–
sode, where Wright does repeated–
ly use the word rape, but only to
characterize (1) the white world's
sexual fantasies about Bigger; and
(2 ) Bigger's daily condition, poi–
soned by hatred and described met–
aphorically as a continuous process
of rape (Signet edition, pp. 213-
14 ). That Baldwin turns this into
a literal rape, and that Mr. Reed
defends Baldwin's Bigger against
Wright's, is of no small significance.
Mr. Reed's letter does unwit–
tingly raise a larger issue, for
d~spite its geniality it's a pure speCl–
men of the sort of racialist think–
ing that black writers have been
indulging in so freely of late. This
is evident in the way he garbles
and dismisses any suggestion of
mutual influence (or even anal–
ogy) between contemporary black
and white writing, and in the way
he feels free to ignore most of my
specific points by attributing every–
thing in the essay to my all-im–
portant Jewishness. My own sub–
ject was a body of literature that
had been written by blacks, as
blacks, but also as different persons
of different generations ; his letter
is about putative Hebrew racial
traits, among which he seems to
number criticism, moral serious-
