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113
differently of their scholarly responsibilities in the future. Though
neither Schatzman nor Berke has come out mindlessly in polemical rage
against institutions like the family, their books do strongly point to
defects and snares that would seem almost impossible to work through
for most ordinary people. Now I happen to think that such an account
of the family is misleading, but that is not the thrust of my argument
with these men. What I most object to
i~
their indulgence in speculation
of a most willful and teasing sort, speculation that always falls short of
the most important and interesting questions. Is this a matter of over·
sight? I think not. To the contrary, both Schatzman and Berke under–
stand as well as anyone the very special nature of the work they have
done, the limitations of what may legitimately be concluded on the basis
of their experiences. Yet their books suggest, time after time, that they
are really into something quite sweeping, something that may change the
way most of us think about our lives, our families, our ills. Nowhere does
either man come right out and say as much, but the suggestion is ever
present.
Schatzman's book, which has already generated considerable in–
terest in clinical circles, I find particularly irritating in this regard, though
it is provocative and, to a point, illuminating. The book takes as its sub–
ject the dysfunction clinically known as paranoia, but it presumes to dis–
cover what may be a paradigm for much mental illness. Taken strictly as
a revision of traditional views of paranoia, the book is surely to be wel–
comed, as indeed it has been by therapists like Nathan Ackerman and
Otto Will. According to Freud, "What lies at the core of the conflict in
cases of paranoia among males is a homosexual wishful phantasy of
loving a man .
. .."
Since the phantasy is generally unacceptable to the
person who experiences it, the love is turned into hate: " '1 do not
love
him
--
I hate him.
'This contradiction, which must have run thus in the
unconscious, cannot, however, become conscious to a paranoic in this
form. The mechanism of symptom-formation in paranoia requires that
internal perceptions -- feelings -- shall be replaced by external per–
ceptions. Consequently the proposition 'I hate him' becomes trans–
formed by projection into another one
'He hates
(persecutes)
me,
which
will
justify me in hating him!' " Schatzman's response to Freud follows
the argument of Karl Menninger and others who have addressed them–
selves to the theory of paranoia, but the implications of Schatzman's
argument are much more resonant, even political. From a reevaluation of
the Schreber case, which was the basis of Freud's original theories of
paranoia, Schatzman concludes that "a mind can use the same sequence
of operations [described by Freud in connection with an ini tiating
