BOOKS
459
writer or movement would be defensive in the self-image it pre–
sents strikes Sulloway as somehow odd, and sets him in a realm
altogether apart from psychoanalysis.
Even more puzzling, however, is Sulloway's anxiety that
the demonstration
of
exact influences upon Freud may seem to
belittle him-more, it should be added, in the author's eyes than
in the reader's. Why Sulloway grows guilty about the apparent
success of his manifest intention may have more to do with an
uneasiness that he has no theory of influence subtle enough to
suit his subject than with any concern about the kind of romantic
originality that his genetic presuppositions implicitly require
him to reject. But perhaps what unconsciously frightens Sulloway
after all is the same failing that links his politics with his poetics,
a fear that the very categories and aims of his own study-those
of texts, ideas, of human history and intellectual achievement–
are to be dismissed by the genetic biology in whose service he
writes. To deny the symbolic dimension of psychoanalysis, as
Sulloway does, is to deny the symbolic status of culture itself.
PERRY MEISEL
IMAGES OF THE PAST
THE INCORPORATION OF AMERICA: CULTURE AND SOCIETY IN
THE GILDED AGE.
By
Alan Trachtenberg.
Hill and Wang. $16.95.
If
one takes expressions of aspiration seriously, espe–
cially those of younger historians, the future of the discipline lies
in the field of cultural history . Yet as more and more scholars
identify themselves as cultural historians, the problem of method
becomes more pressing. Those recent worksin the field generally
accounted to be successes exemplify two versions of the same me–
thod. They take either an event or a thread in the culture and
subject it to a mode of
analysi~
that is essentially prismatic, pene–
trating multifaceted surfaces or layers of meaning. One thinks,
for instance, of the work of Neil Harris on early American artists
and on P.
T.
Barnum, of Warren Susman's essay on the 1939
World's Fair, of Mary Ryan's study of the bourgeois family, of
