PARTISAN REVIEW
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ordinary power and suggestiveness ofFreud 's own thinking. Nor is any kind of
intellectual exchange promoted by the patronizing manner of many analysts,
which seems, for some of them, to be a carryover of their feeling of superiority
to their patients in the analytic session. In social situations, for example, many
analysts act as though the world were divided into analysts and patients;
hence they tend to see others as symptoms rather than people . And I suspect
that these nouveau analysts must be as much of an embarrassment to the
more sophisticated ones as they are to those laymen like myself who have
been defending Freud against his detractors.
Perhaps in the melange of opinions that goes by the name of thinking
today, it is impossible to return
to
ideas that people want
to
think are passe.
No doubt, Freud, like any other thinker of the past, needs to be related to
more recent developments-which is, in part, something which the Freud–
ians, themselves, should be doing . But the assault on Freud by the feminists
and by radicals who think they have refuted Freud by repeating cliches about
social and environmental factors may be so destructive
to
the very idea of
analysis that we may no longer be able to salvage even those ideas of Freud's
that are not bound to his culture and his era. The French, always up on the
latest intellectual fashions, have made an effort to bring Freud into the main–
stream of modern thought, but all they have succeeded in doing is to bring
Freud into the mainstream of French rhetoric. Thus a structuralist like Lacan,
whom I confess I can't really understand , has updated Freud, so far as I can
make out, by translating him into structuralist language, and a Communist
like Althusser has translated Freud into a mishmash of Marxist and structur–
alist jargon. On the other hand, seemingly new and broader ideas advanced in
this country have frequently been gimmicky and watered-down adaptations of
old ones. The notion of identity crisis, for example, is just a simplification of a
process described in greater complexity by Freud. And the concept of psycho–
history strikes me as an attempt to create a new field by joining two old ones
with a hyphen .
What we need, I think, is just the opposite. A good deal of the kind of
confusion spread by the theorizing zeal of the French could be avoided by
separating the clinical aspects of psychoanalysis from the theoretical ones, at
least keeping its therapeutic side clear of the jumble of both friendly and
hostile interpretations. And the air would be cleared if a moratorium were
declared on all efforts to marry psychoanalysis to other theories, like Marxism
or existentialism, which have produced only verbal alliances which turn out to
be mismatches. Perhaps, at a time when lofty syntheses are bound to be
suspect, one can only indicate that psychoanalysis is not incompatible with
other beliefs, as Juliet Mitchell has attempted painstakingly, or to bring to its
understanding some of the sophisticated modes of thinking developed mostly
in literary and cultural criticism, as in Lionel Trilling's and Frederick Crews'
earlier writing and in some recent essays by Steven Marcus.
w.p.
