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that they buried their soiled linens for the "cornman good." Certainly,
when the members of the former Reichsinstitut granted Cocks his
interviews in 1973 and 1974, they must have pulled their punches,
unless, in their minds, they already had rewritten their pasts and
had exonerated themselves.
In any event, the young, and leftist, German analysts who
have learned that they must use their own unconscious as tools in
order to help get in touch with their patients' unconscious, now are
questioning their entire discipline. They accuse their elders of fraud
and deceit, and talk of their collective guilt. For, if their elders could
hide the fact that in January 1945 the Reichsinstitut had 290 mem–
bers (102 doctors, 188 laymen, and 215 candidates), what else have
they been hiding? Cocks has gone far in disclosing their activities .
He also discloses, in detail, the institutional basis of the now ex–
tremely successful discipline: it was built on Nazi foundations and
on opportunism. Therefore, it is no wonder that their successors
want to know the truth - a truth Alexander Mitscherlich tried to
elicit in vain, and which would have besmirched many an impec–
cable reputation. This is what explains the forty years of collective
amnesia.
EDITH KURZWEIL
PARABLES OF THE ARTIST
HIM WITH HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH AND OTHER STORIES.
By Saul Bellow.
Harper
&
Row. $15.95.
The title story of Saul Bellow's superb collection ofsto–
ries is a portrait of the artist as an offensive man. Shawmut, the artist–
type (a musicologist by profession) if not exactly an artist, charac–
terizes himself fairly as an utterer of "bad witticisms that well up
from the depths of his nature," as good a definition of much of the in–
spiration of contemporary fiction as one would wish. "A surrealist in
spite of himself," a random shooter from the mouth, Shawmut
blames himself more than others. (" 'Oh, Dr. Shawmut, in that cap
you look like an archeologist.' Before I can stop myself, I answer,
'And you look like something Ijust dug up.'") The story, told in the
form of a letter to the victim of the witticism, is an act of expiation.
