PARTISAN REV lEW
115
which recommend a wide range of devices, mechanical or otherwise, to
train children: these include bathing children's eyes in cold water,
strapping portions of the child 's body to the bed when he sleeps, and so
on. "Schreber," Schatzman tells us, "suffers from reminiscences. His
body embodies his past. He retains memories of what his father did to
him as a child; although part of his mind knows they are memories, 'he'
does not. He is considered insane not only because 'of the quality of his
experiences, but because he misconstrues their
mode:
he
remembers,
in
some cases perfectly accurately, how his father treated him, but thinks
he
perceives
events occurring in the present for which he imagines God,
rays, little men, etc., are the agents." In fact, "Schreber knows what he
most needs to know, but does not know he knows it. When he calls his
experiences miracles he denies what he knows, denies he is denying
anything," and so on.
To which I say, most rewarding and persuasive. And yet, I am
troubled, as earlier suggested. What are we to take from Schatzman's ob–
servation? According to him, a great deal indeed, for the authoritarian
patriarchal nineteenth-<:entury family is in some respects still with us, so
that many of us are still unable to see and to criticize the inevitable
tyrannies to which it gives rise. Schatzman echoes Laing when he writes
that "anyone brought up in this type of family who learned to live suc–
cessfully with its rules and roles, its premises and practices, would not be
likely to see it as the source of someone else's feelings of persecution."
The fact is, though, that at this time in the progress of western culture
we are all too ready to lend a sympathetic ear to those who see them–
selves as victimized and persecuted. It may be true that ideological blind
spots of a nineteenth-<:entury variety remain for some of us, even for
trained analysts, but it is hardly reasonable to contend that most people
live so successfully with institutional rules and roles that they do not feel
it necessary to ask questions.
If
the family is under attack, for instance, it
is because many in our culture assume that rules and roles of whatever
sort inhibit human development and suppress sympathies. In the last
fifty years the shift in our perspective on such matters as fidelity, trust,
and responsibility has been nothing less than revolutionary, so that most
of us now anticipate the failure of all institutions on a scale that justifies
virtually any behavioral excess or experimentation. I do not think we
need anyone to suggest that children who suffer do so at the hands of
generally castrating fathers and under the auspices of authoritarian insti–
tutions demanding unconditional obedience to their doctrines. Dissi–
dence, albeit of a petty and deeply neurotic kind, has by now become
the rule of the day, not order and obedience.
It
may be satisfying to
