472
PARTISAN REVIEW
those encyclopedic novels that survive. Nabokov can do so many
things with
Lolita
because that perverse and haunting myth that
forms its obsessive center never moves out of sight. With
Sabbat–
ical,
there is no center, no myth. And although the love story is
credible and often moving, it is not likely to strike very many
readers as having the authority of other novels that are encyclo–
pedic and performative-One
Hundred Years of Solitude, The
Tin Drum.
Barth has given the images of absurdity a special concrete–
ness, from the very start, in his first, stunning novels, at the same
time persuading the reader of the continuing energy of the narra–
tive imagination. This time, he reaches for an affirmative center,
two people in love and married, the male figure seemingly very
like Barth. No one doubts that the relationship is deeply felt. But
there remains a private, gossipy quality to it: it never gathers the
shared, cultura l quality of a myth. And thus the acts of perform–
ance that cluster around that fragile center, when they begin to
seem less than brilliant, seem-less than brilliant.
PHILIP STEVICK
SOULS ON ICE
FREUD AND MAN'S SOUL. By Bruno
Bettelhelm. Alfred A. Knopf.
$11 .95.
In
Freud and Man 's Soul,
Bruno Bettelheim maintains
that most of the misunderstandings and polemics surrounding
psychoanalysis in the English-speaking world are due to faulty
translations ,
to
distortions that cannot be explained rationally.
That he himself, and all the other psychoanalysts of his genera–
tion whose native language was German and who later on prac–
ticed in English, remained silent, he continues, was due to the
fact that either Freud or his daughter Anna, both of whom mas–
tered the English language perfectly, approved every translation;
to the reverence accorded them; and
to
the difficulties of the task.
Bettelheim overcame his reluctance, he tells us , because
someone who shared Freud's cultural background had to , and
