SONYA RUDIKOFF
33
demonic or infantile,
LOO
rationalistic, and therefore incomplete. And
any therapy which fails to analyse the transference fails in Dr. Kovel's
view to assist the patient in the process of individuation, relying
instead on manipulation and on infringement of the patient's auton–
omy. A more serious challenge, and one to which Dr. Kovel responds,
can be seen in the social critique of psychoanalysis, and of therapy
altogether. He does not cite the vast literature on the subject but,
divided as he is in his own allegiances to both classical psychoanalytic
theory and radical politics, he is troubled by the way psychoanalysis
has become "locked into upper-bourgeois class interests, a fate which
has exerted an inexorably stultifying influence over its theory and
practice," and by the lack of a social critique which gives the individ–
ual "no choice other than to go along with the cultural delusion which
is civilization 's classic response to its discontents."
The once revolutionary theory, which arrogated to itself nothing
less than the mission of transforming human life in society, has been
incorporated into late capitalism, as Dr. Kovel notes, thus reifying the
conformism and power-orientation of the very society it once dared to
heal. The lengthy treatment, and its extreme costliness, have limited
the putative benefits severely to only that handful who are able to pay
the fees and spend the time. The therapeutic structure necessarily
reinforces authoritarian and compliant impulses, even if the transfer–
ence is intended to be self-liquidating. The concentration on subjective
and unconscious factors deflect attention from objective social and
political circumstances, and, indeed, the fundamental action of the
therapy itself may be to promote conformity through enlightened
understanding, the creature of bourgeois society adorning and serving
its creator. Therapy comes from
theraps,
servant or attendant, and it
raises a hard question: if society is the patient, as some have observed, is
therapy then fated to serve society rather than transform it?
The question, of great theoretical interest, must also express the
personal and existential dilemma of the individual therapist. Silting in
his lone office, awaiting still another patient entangled in the shards of
infantile passion and memory, any psychoanalyst might well wonder
what he and his patient have to do with all that world out there.
If
the
number of patients entering psychoanalysis has declined, as seems to be
the case, and if the annual cost of a single patient's psychoanalysis is a
sum sufficient
LO
support an entire family above the poverty level, it is
not surprising that a psychoanalyst would question his own profes–
sional existence. Faced with urgent social and political changes of the
sort that have demanded attention in recent decades, what a meagre and
