PSYCHOANALYSIS TODAY
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are a number of strata in revolutionary theory that tend towards
authoritarianism and towards the destruction of a free society. It is
very definitely the case that in a socialist society that may come
psychoanalysis will still be needed, and it is in that sense that I hope
it would remain the nucleus of a humanism that may yet happen,
although it would be a Marxist humanism. Thank you.
William Phillips:
All right, Steven ...
Steven Marcus:
Let me say that I think you misunderstood me alto–
gether. I was not talking about society, I was talking about what the
Depression looked like culturally and how it seemed that it was
going to go on forever, and that only the war was what brought it to
an end, so that there was a kind of pseudo-stability about that. I'm
using the term with a certain amount of irony.
I won't really respond to these various remarks but comment on
my sense of the whole.
If
there is a crisis, it seems from the discussion
this evening very moderate, rather comfortable, and ambling along
at a steady, very pleasant pace. Son of like what goes on in psychoan–
al ysts' offices sometimes. There are real developments and discover–
ies, nobody can deny that. I don't think that any of us expect
psychoanalysis to go away, to disappear, to fail altogether. One does
expect that this institution, which is a peculiar institution, to coin a
phrase, will continue in one form or another, sustain itself at the
fairly moderate level that it has been sustaining itself at now. And
will continue to be part of the scientific, social-scientific, cultural
picture of America and of the Western world.
That doesn't rule out discussion of what has happened to it and
is happening to it; how it changed, and how it changed in the most
complex way because it's situated in a culture which is itself
phenomenally excessive in its, as it were, unconscious commitment
to ceaseless change.
It
would seem to me that no institution,
especially one such as psychoanalysis, locating itself in a culture of
this historically peculiar kind, evolving in the unpredictable and
unheard of ways that this culture and society are doing, cannot be
profoundly affected structurally in terms of its theory, of itself as an
institution by its mere existence and interest in society and its being
part of such a society.
And it seems to me that this is the kind of discussion that one
would like to see carried to further detail and to further ramifica–
tions.
William Phillips:
Thank you. OK, I think the meeting is over.
