MARK SHECHNER
527
in when its members become bored ; it is actually yawned to death by a
caucus of younger comrades (who call themselves The Ennui Club) who
can't stay awake during the national chairman's speeches. There is no nos–
talgia here for the meeting hall , but neither is there any sign of " political"
disaffection, for Rosenfeld 's criticism of the party was issued on such psycho–
logical grounds as rendered issues, as commonly understood , obsolete.
Rosenfeld has to be counted among those who , in the 1940s, imported
psychology into the territory vacated by a retreating American radicalism.
His essays and reviews were persuasive demonstrations of how psychoanalysis,
mainly in its Reichian incarnation, might be used as a general criticism with
application to culture, politics, and literature . Historically, the de-emphasis
of social change in favor of self-adjustment may have been a requirement
of Rosenfeld 's era, much as it has been a feature of our own , but his adop–
tion of psychoanalysis was no modish recycling of world views during a
moment of historical shock, nor a retreat from analytic intelligence and
moral expectation.
In
a review of Jo Sinclair's novel
Wasteland
(which he
called a "drab but profitable little poem in celebration of the beatitudes
of psychiatric social work' ') he complained of the easy complacency of post–
war psychiatric rationality, declaring that "the transformation of 'change
the world' into 'adjust yourself has had the effect of abolishing concern
with the kind of society that is worthy of our adjustment, and of removing
the discussion of social problems from a historical context." Rosenfeld was
resistant to the strains of social utopianism and adjustment psychiatry in the
culture of psychoanalysis; he was sceptical of designs for general uplift and
promises of personal contentment, this despite his deep yearning for detente
with his own feelings . Rather it was the critical edge of psychoanalysis, its
genius for unmasking motives and debunking pieties, that he found con–
genial, and accordingly it was the most radical , antinomian version of
psychoanalysis that he cultivated .
That was in keeping with his deepest commitment of all, the commit–
ment to his alienation, his constitutional inability to feel at home in the
world. The Jewish writer, he declared with himself in mind, is a " specialist
in alienation" which he called "the one international banking system the
Jews actually controL" He looked upon this alienation as both a handicap
and an endowment, for it conferred upon the Jewish intellectual the gift of
understanding:
"It
puts him in touch with his own past traditions, the
history of the Diaspora; with the present predicament of almost all intellec–
tuals and , for all one knows, with the future conditions of civilized society."
Writing about
The Rise ofDavid Levinsky,
Rosenfeld identified alienation
as the secret of Jewish assimilation in America: a loneliness at the core of
Jewish identity that spoke to the loneliness in the American heart and pro-
