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talked about, and has to do with hierarchy and guild, and social
change. The crisis of ideas, around psychoanalysis, is the more
interesting, more complex question, and brings up the viability or
the historical endurance of intellectual revolutions, and the extent or
moment of either revitalization or replacement with something new
that would have been impossible without the parent idea system.
That has not been talked about.
The other kind of thing that has not been referred
to
is an
impulse I see, toward psychoanalytic fundamentalism as a response
to crisis. And why would we not expect this , since it is a response to
crisis throughout culture, in various ways, whether you talk about
the religious cults or other things. And there are some anal ysts who
are withdrawn from institutes because they are getting too liberal,
who really want to go back
to
the original word.
But I think the more characteristic response is the vogue on
narcissism, for instance; I will be perhaps over-simple, but, I think,
truthful insofar as I can be. I think here we see an example of a
mixture of a little bit of intellectual shoring up, an element of
fundamentalism, and the blowing up of a very limited set of ideas
into a major intellectual achievement. Actually, I think that the
preoccupation with narcissism covers up what is really happening in
our culture. People feel they are falling apart. Questions of form.
Well, Steven Marcus did refer
to
this on social and cultural grounds,
and it has to be reflected in social pathology. So we have a vogue in
our culture around death, yes, but very little thought about the
internal falling apart, the psychic death equivalents that seem to me
to
pervade our culture.
Kurt Eissler once said that Freud's great genius was not his
conceptualization but his perception; what Eissler called his "micro–
scope." And that of course was in the analytic method as well as
Freud's mind. Well, it may be that we need new microscopes, we
have to go elsewhere than the analytic couch to both make the
intellectual breakthrough that's needed and
to
perceive some of these
issues of threat and disintegration in our culture. I myself have tried
to journey out toward holocaust, and I think that has something to
do with everyday life as well, but there are other ways, and there
wasn't too much talk about the connection of psychoanalysis with
the great social dilemmas of our time in some more direct way.
I remember when I was a resident in the fifties, at the time of the
psychoanalytic hegemony in our culture, what excited us was not so
much the psychoanalytic profession, which never looked that glam-
