528
PARTISAN REVIEW
stampede toward nonpsychoanalytic treatment, towards overt sexual
expression. What occurred
to
me was that this is a progression from
the "oi" to the joy of sex.
I did want to make one point, because there is a kind of a
stereopathy about psychoanalysis; the other side of it is the stereotyp–
ing of behaviorism: behaviorism is a technical thing; it is an
engineering task; it is low level.
It
is for the obvious kinds of things,
things you can see. But psychoanalysis is humanistic; it is basic; it is
inner-life; it is a more interesting thing.
It
is the intellectual quality
that one deals with, and so on. And I think that this is merely a
matter of name-calling.
If
psychoanalysis continues in that vein, it will not gain much.
To simply say, oh, but it
is
humanistic, is not enough.
It
seems to me
that there are too many signs that it is not humanistic at all. I think
that it is exclusive. I think that by saying that people are being too
narcissistic, it is misunderstanding the cultural changes that are
taking place. And all the people cannot really be wrong that quickly.
Those are some factors that one has to take into account.
William Phillips:
Thank you. Who wants to go next? This is Sonia
Rudikoff, who has written on many literary questions, and on a
number of psychological questions, for magazines like
Commentary,
Partisan Review,
and others.
Sonia Rudikoff:
Well, I was interested that the speakers mentioned
economic, historical, and social factors relating to the position of
psychoanalysis today. But they did not mention demographic fac–
tors. There are perhaps two hundred and fifteen million people in
the country today. In the forties, a hundred or a hundred and fifty
million was more like it. I wonder whether the members of the panel
don't think that it is not psychoanalysis that has changed so much in
the number of its adherents or even in its capacity for influence. And
certainly it has not changed very much in the number of people
applying for training. It has been perhaps a net decline because it has
not increased quite so much as was thought in the late forties, but
what has really happened is that other therapies have grown up
around it.
If
you consider, for example, the membership of the
American Psychoanalytic Association, with considerable overlap
between central membership, New York Institute, local societies that
don't belong to the national and so forth, the recent data don't put it
very much beyond twenty-six hundred. In a country of two hundred
and fifteen millionl This compares in a very interesting way with the
number of psychiatrists: twenty-three thousand, I think, is the latest
