506
PARTISAN REVIEW
its benign policy toward business and its squeezing not Dnly of the poor but
also of the middle class appears to be out to demonstrate the Marxist-Leninist
view of capitalism. And even the effort of the liberal, Democratic politicians
to solve the crisis in New York City by freezing wages and services while
making no effort to control profits or wages must be construed as a Marxist
lesson in politics and economics. Fortunately for American conservatism,
there is no disaffected working class in this country to learn this lesson , nor any
radical party to exploit it.
FREUD
IN THE SEVENTIES. Frederick Crews' recent review of Erikson in
the
New York Review
is a dramatic illustration of a major shift of opinion in
the last few decades . Crews' takedown of Erikson was quite masterly, but
more significant was his use of the occasion to indicate his turn away from
Freud. For Crews has been one of the staunchest as well as one of the most
flexible interpreters of psychoanalytic theory, particularly in relation to liter–
ature . His apostasy must be seen, therefore , as a sign of the almost complete
decline of support for analysis by the intellectual community.
Now, after the heyday ofanalysis in the fifties, when psychoanalysis took
its turn in being popularized and vulgarized by the mass media, even the most
self-satisfied analysts admit that never since the beginnings in Vienna has the
profession been held in lower esteem, and that, indeed , it may be dying , at
least in its most orthodox forms .
The reasons for the decline of psychoanalysis are mixed . For one thing ,
no movement or current ofopinion lasts long these days, when the very idea of
change and novelty, originally spread by the needs of the popular media,
becomes an intellectual ideal. In addition, a captious and sensation-seeking
public has found analysis too long, too dreary, too threatening, too expensive .
All the new faddish and groupie encounters fit better into the current zest for
experience by adding some social and sexual spice to the notion of therapy.
And, of
co~rse,
they are cheaper and faster. If we ask what they are faster in
achieving, then the subject becomes vaguer ; but the question of "cure" is
not really a pertinent one for those adventurers masked as patients , who have
no clear reason for hopping from one kind of treatment to another , nor any
clear expectation of psychological benefits beyond a sense of pleasure and
excitement in the name of therapy .
But the analysts, themselves, have also been accomplices in the declining
respect for analysis, at least for its theoretical side . With the passing of the
older, more sophisticated figures, the public face of the profession has been
presented by the younger analysts, most of whom either have no theoretical
interests, or are quite primitive and amateurish in their thinking . In addition,
their arrogance and dogmatism combined with an ignorance of other areas of
knowledge tend to alienate those who were originally attracted
to
the extra-
