STEVEN MARCUS
I have always looked upon you as a member of my intimate famil y
circl e and will COJ1linue
to
do so, which po iJ1ls (beyond all di sagree–
meJ1lS that are rarely abseJ1l with a family and also have not been
lackin g between u s) toward a fOUJ1l of affection from which one can
always draw aga in.
537
Is this to be read as one of Freud's Epistles to the Gentiles? Is the old
man playing the Jewish Pecksniff of psychoanalysis again ? (Was
"a lways"
really
"always"?) I suppose it has to be regarded as some kind
of achi evement on the part of Roazen tha t he forces us repeatedly to
commit thi s sort of nonsense in asking o urselves these ques tio ns.
One more exampl e, and we are done with Jones. Roazen states that
"Throughout [the bi ography] Jo nes wrote with a se t of unconscious
taboos." There's elegance! And he's ri ght , absolutely right. Name one
book in the hi story of civilization that was not written "with a set [sic]
of unconscious [sic] taboos [sic]." That kind of formul a tion sugges ts
aga in how inwa rd Roazen is with psychoana lysis.
When Roazen moves on to Freud, things become, if possible, even
worse. Sometimes he uses evidence with a nitwit 's sense o f significance.
In a passage th a t di scusses Freud 's a ttitudes towards masturba tion ,
Roazen writes tha t on certain occasions "Freud could seem emanci–
pated from conventional pieties: the problem with mas turba tin g, he is
reported to have said, is tha t one must know how to do it well." This
"report," we learn , is in a letter from Hitschmann to Jones in the Jones
arch ives. Well, I for one couldn 't care more or less if the letter was from
Masters
to
Johnson in the Kin sey archives. What can such a sta tement,
utterl y decontextualized , mean ? Its effect, however, is to make Freud
seem as much a dunce as Roazen . Or there is this gem on Freud 's fa ther
and his signifi cance fo r hi story:
In rea lity Jakob Freud was hardly th e powerful man one might
expect as the father of the discoverer o f the Oedipu s compl ex... .
T h e J es ire for a strong father may have played a role not onl y in
Freud 's fo rmul ati on of the Oedipus complex but also in its accept–
ance by many who have been in a position parallel
to
Freud's, uneasy
about their pasts and yet ashamed of repudiating it.
T he slippery logic of thi s passage slides from an actual
discovery
to a
mo tivated
formulation
to a compromi sed
acceptance
whose effect is to
nullify the di scovery announced at the outset. In additi on , there is
about as much psychological
sachel
in it as there is in a wooden
Indi an . Or as there is in thi s priceless remark about Freud 's mother:
"such a woman could well call forth from Freud the intense kind of
emotion s he would la ter ca ll Oedipal. " To which, one supposes, the
