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PARTISAN REVIEW
limited contribution it might seem, to respond and act by still another
analy is of still another dream? And where would be the profound
social change that was to follow the discovery of the unconscious?
Dr. Kovel does not discuss this specifically and he makes no
reference to all the energetic opinion expressed by various observers on
theoretical and cultural aspects of psychoanalysis. His own social
critique fails to take account of the way the psychoanalytically
weighted ideology of American cultural life was surprised and quite
unprepared for the events of these decades. The suspension of social
judgment, for long one of the basic terms of psychoanalytic treatment,
and Freud's insistence that psychoanalysis was not, and did not have, a
Weltanschauung,
had produced a curious neutrality which could be
supported or defended only with increasingly awkward argument.
Although as an aspect of treatment, it was intended to direct attention
away from outward immediate circumstances to the inner psychic
forces which create neurosis, as a corporate expression of the psychoan–
alytic establishment it had the undeniable effect of counseling confor–
mity
to
things as they are. Did the psychoanalytic writers imagine that
the social changes they might theoretically support would ever actually
occur? Did they really foresee an end to the racism or other social
pathologies whose cost they so deftly discerned? And how was such an
end to come about? The social message of Freudian theory seemed to
imply only stoic acceptance of war, cruelty, poverty, injustice, and
inequality, an unwilling but enlightened acquiescence in a kind of
eternal damnation by the irrational forces of unconscious life, which
would forever dominate and destroy efforts toward social progress.
What made this position untenable, how did the entire habit of
mind lose its authority? Was it the civil rights movement or Vietnam or
the peace movement? Or the new feminism or the demographic
changes which generated the youth culture? Or, as many writers have
observed, had important social and psychic changes occurred long
before and were merely being dramatized in the politics of the sixties?
Certainly some unknown and unexpected quarters revealed impressive
resources: after generations of silence, who would have expected the
black communities in the rural South to show such vitality? Who
would have thought the Catholics would respond with Vatican II and
Pope John XXIII amid widespread disaffection and erosion of faith?
Who would have expected the ostensibly trapped housewives and
neurotic mothers to emerge in the labor force as they did, to divorce, to
change their lives, to resume their careers? Who in the forties and fifties
would have anticipated the renewal of feminism? Freud had pro-
