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sions, denials and arrestments. The symptoms typically had to do
with diminution or loss of functions in sexuality and work. The
psychopathologies' of these patients were in the main a consequence
of certain negative social forces and values as these were transmitted
to and imposed upon them through their experiences with their
parents, siblings and other kin. At the same time these persons
tended largely to resent, dislike and discredit their neuroses. They did
not feel that such deformations and thwartings were worthy of what
a human being should be like. They tended as well
to
feel that such
behaviors and thoughts and fears were not really parts of themselves;
often they felt invaded by their afflictions. They tended, in other
words, to regard their pathologies as ego-alien. The corollary of this
belief was the notion that somewhere inside them was what, for want
of another term, must be called a normal human being who had
gotten lost. Or, if not lost, then deposed and displaced from his
central and controlling position. Their aim in seeking psychological
help was to bring this person back to his center and to have him
reoccupy the place that was rightfully his.
I do not have to say that this very rough model is not as
dominant or prevalent today as it was seventy-five years ago–
although it surely cannot have disappeared altogether. My sense is,
however, that a considerable part of the psychopathology that is
visible today has as much
to
do with the decline and weakening of
those social and cultural forces whose negative power was instru–
mental in the formation of the classical neuroses as it does with the
persistence of such forces. This is not to say that domination and
repression have been simply replaced by anarchy and unmitigated
license among our middle classes. It is to say that the psychopathol–
ogy that seems
to
prevail today has part of its origins in the
decomposition of those structures which made bourgeois culture and
family life the complex and often highly unpleasant things they
were. What they have been replaced with, we may suspect, is
something with its own questionable attributes, and what the
relation of psychoanalysis to these developments might be is a
subject for further discussion.
I have been suggesting that the fate of psychoanal ysis is to a
considerable degree entailed in the fate of bourgeois culture. I have
implied the stricture that psychoanalysis-particularly in its Ameri–
can developments-accepted its place in that culture without ade–
quate critical regard. I believe this to be largely true. Yet one cannot
in all due honesty expect a cultural discipline whose very categories
