BOOKS
GOODBYE TO ALL THAT
OUT OF MY SYSTEM: PSYCHOANALYSIS, IDEOLOGY, AND CRITICAL
METHOD.
By Frederick Crews. Oxford University Press. $10.00.
Frederick Crews's book was originally conceived as a series of
inquiries into the methodology of psychoanalytic criticism. However, in the
eight years during which these essays were written, the author's attitude
towards psychoanalysis and its application
to
literature has become increas–
ingly conflicted and uncertain. Crews was also distracted from his original
intention by the events and enthusiasms of the late sixties. The book con–
tains several pieces dealing with the radical students and the universities
and essays on Norman O. Brown and Wilhelm Reich. The attitudes in these
chapters are also extremely conflicted; the essays, as the author points out
in
his
preface, "quarrel, not just with adversary views, but with one another."
Crews attempts
to
make a virtue of these contradictions: he describes
the book as "an evolving document, an oblique
case
history of sorts."
Taken together, however, the essays create
less
the effect of a reasoned
self-scrutiny than of an impacted and paralyzing ambivalence. Chapters not
only quarrel but cancel one another out. Several individual pieces seemed
brilliant when they first appeared in periodicals; here they are overwhelmed
and negated by a general
sense
of intellectual confusion and inhibition.
In the first essay on radical politics in the university, published in 1969,
Crews rejects Lewis Feuer's view of the students as merely oedipal rebels,
although he is troubled by their provocative tactics. Another piece from the
same year asserts that recent literary criticism, in its exclusively aesthetic
orientation, implicitly supports the values of monopoly capitalism. A third
essay, published three years later, does a total about-face . Here Crews
sees
the Movement primarily as an adolescent rebellion and writes with withering
irony of those who politicize literary study. These essays came out of a
chaotic period, and one recognizes in them
some
of one's own confused
