538
PARTISAN
REVI~W
app ropriate repl y might be, " I guess so. She actuall y seems
to
have
been his mo ther. "
Or there is thi s one: "With hi s famil y background , needin g to
crea te himself and be his own fa ther, Freud wanted to be ca red for and
a t the same time passion a tely des ired to be independenL. " You beL.
Unlike all the res t of us. Roazen 's ability
to
reduce almost an ythin g to
platitude and twaddl e is simpl y infa llible. " Freud fostered the illu–
sion ," h e writes, " tha t the more perfect an ana lys t's technique, the
better the therapeuti c results. An analyst can of course base hi s
judgments onl y on wha t he sees, but the fact is tha t much cl ini cal
material looks different
to
different people." As for the fi rst sen tence,
perhap s he did; and then again, perh aps no t. As for the second, it is
both true and feeble-minded a t the same time.
It
was Dr. Johnson who
once remarked-of a poet whose work he cordi all y detes ted-tha t a
man could write like this forever if he would but abandon hi s m ind to
it. Roazen 's book amounts to a continual act o f such abandonmen t.
