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PARTISAN REVIEW
dates had to undergo tended strongly to overprepare lhem in some
skills that they would never draw upon as psychoanalytic therapisls
and radically to underprepare them in other intellectual skills thal
they would later sadly acknowledge as somehow mallers of personal
deficiency. The fact that many American psychoanalysts are so
notoriously ill-read, a fact noted even twenty-five years ago, was
never an encouraging circumstance-no matter how slrongly it
might be urged that knowing something about books and history
and society had nothing necessarily to do with the strength of an
analyst's therapeutic impulse or the power of his or her therapeutic
acumen.
The second area to which people outside the profession tended
to attach themselves had
to
do with psychoanalysis as a momentous
radical intellectual discipline, an instrument of modernity by means
of which the world could be reinterpreted, a new and critical
perspective on man, society and history. It was a theory (with many
subtheories), a means of research, and its applications
to
matters in
fields beyond the immediate clinical purview promised
to
be reward–
ing. In this connection, the writings of Freud were of paramount
interest and importance. It quickly became clear to those who were
able to read that these writings were in the direct mainstream of the
central intellectual and cultural tradition of the West. A distinct line
was to be drawn from the adjuration of the oracle of Delphi to
"Know thyself" to such writers of the Renaissance as Montaigne to
the Romantic poets and nineteenth-century novelists to Freud. In his
work a particular tradition of introspection came to culmination.
The introspection as practiced in this tradition was largely secular,
and its goals were those of rational understanding-in particular, a
rationally governed understanding of that within us and without
which was not rational. In this sense psychoanalysis was a cultural
science or discipline of considerable dimensions. To be sure it could
readily be vulgarized and misused, but that is the partial fate that any
powerful new heuristic instrument has to undergo. Yet here too,
even twenty-five years ago, disquieting signs and tendencies were lO
be made out. There were, for example, the unmistakable differences
between the earlier generations of mostly European analysts and
their American pupils and successors; nevertheless, these cultural
differences could be in some degree discounted as part of the more
general difference, as far as intellectual interests and range were
concerned, between Europeans and Americans, especially Europeans
born in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and Americans
