BOOKS
475
raises, of course, the larger issue of the furure of psychoanalytic criticism
itself, whose course never has and probably never will run smooth.
It
is in
the very narure of psychoanalysis, whether applied to literature or to living
persons, that its discoveries should arouse resistance of some kind-indigna–
tion, derision, at the very least uneasiness. And few psychoanalytic critics
have succeeded in finding a vocabulary and method that can uncover the
primitive elements in works of literature while at the same time accounting
for the transformations of form and meaning wrought by the ego . Yet it was .
Freud himself, in
The Interpretation
0/
Dreams,
who taught us to see the
multiple significance and virrually endless complexity of mental produc–
tions. In discussing symptoms and especIally dreams, Freud continually
speaks of them as texts to be interpreted. In doing so he made us aware of
new possibilities of meaning in every kind of text.
It
will be a peculiar irony
if
the difficulties presented by psychoanalytic method and by our own
resistances to it should lead us
to
renounce those possibilities in the study
of our richest and most valuable texts, the great works ofliterature.
ELIZABETH DALTON
SYSTEMS ANALYSIS
POLITICS AND CRIME.
By
Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Seabury Press.
$6.95.
THE CONSCIOUSNESS INDUSTRY.
By
Hans Magnus Enzensberger.
Seabury Press. $6.95.
Born in 1929, poet and ideologue, admirer of Brecht and Walter
Benjamin, Enzensberger is a child of the German catastrophe. Conscripted
into the last-ditch
Volkssturm
at the age of sixteen-Grass, with whom
Enzensberger is in chronic disagreement, shared this experience, I recall-he
served as a translator for the RAF before embarking on his bourgeois destiny:
nine years of higher education. It was then apparently, that he enrolled in a
different
Volkssturm,
the shock-troops of the ungrateful, and emerged as
the Federal Republic's most intransigently radical literary voice.
