STEVEN MARCUS
237
the effect of erotic stimulation in order to relieve loneliness," and fill
an emotional blankness or absence.
These changes have come about gradually and in the course of
generations. They have been produced by myriad circumstances
and express themselves in behavioral, social, and cultural forms that
are too numerous and too complex for me to do more than continue
to advert to allusively. They have to do most generally with changing
relations of authority within the family, between men and women in
their different roles, between parents and children, and children and
their decreasing number of siblings. They have to do as well with the
continually destabilized relations between such institutions of
authority as the family, schools, and religion, and with the general
dispersion of authority away from and out of these former centers of
command, interdiction, and guidance, and with the apparent non–
existence as yet of evolutionary replacements for them.
It
was in 1881, one hundred and one years ago, that the meet–
ings between Josef Breuer and Anna
o.
that led to so much began to
take place. It was Freud who made so much of those meetings, and
his dealings with them led him on to make a number of fundamental
discoveries about the mind. Among them was his theory that the
unconscious mind will tend to form itself into a limited variety of
structures or agencies. Today we can see that the particular configu–
ration of those agencies as Freud first perceived and then theoreti–
cally constructed them were appropriate to and expressive of the
deep character structure of late high Victorian bourgeois culture–
even, perhaps, as it was beginning to come apart. In particular, the
excessive and punitive powers of the superego in that theory and
character were prototypical of that culture and of its leading aware–
ness of itself. No one in full possession of his senses could long for a
return of the agency of the superego in the forms and intensities of its
earlier historic manifestations. Yet no one fully alive today can fail to
perceive either that the exchanges and bargains that constitute cul–
tural development do not amount to a rational progress either. As
psychoanalysis as a unique cultural and therapeutic discipline com–
pletes its first century of existence and begins its second, it seems to
me that the tasks confronting it in the culture that it has arisen from,
taken hold in, and critically expresses, are at least as grave and as
severe in magnitude as the tasks that first confronted it one hundred
years ago.
