EUGENE GOODHEART
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Such exclusive concentration is necessary to any advance in
knowledge. The argument for the variety and complexity of human
life, when prematurely made against a newly evolving body of
thought, can easily become a conservative, even reactionary obstacle
to intellectual discovery. Freud could have made a similar claim for
the centrality of the Oedipal drama in his evolving thought. But only
a dogmatic Freudian could now claim that Freud's version of the
Oedipus complex is a permanent, rather than an historically condi–
tioned formation.
The recent empirical and theoretical work of the psychoanalyst
Heinz Kohut is relevant in this connection. According to Steven
Marcus's informed and lucid account, Kohut and his associates
discovered that "the classical neurotic patient as first observed by
Freud seemed to be gradually disappearing and was being steadily
replaced by people who suffered from various kinds of what is known
as ego-syntonic character pathology . In particular, as time passed, it
began to be evident that a series of narcissistic disorders were pre–
senting themselves as the emerging prototypical personality forma–
tion of the current era of our culture ." The contemporary neurotic
experiences feelings of emptiness or feelings of fragmentation and
discontinuity. His narcissism is paradoxically based on a lack of "self–
esteem ." Kohut attributes the new neurotic type to the weakening of
the Oedipal structure, that is, to the dissolution of family con–
straints, which manifest themselves in parental "commands, prohibi–
tions , praise , scolding and punishment" and contribute to the
development of the ego . "Children in the past were
'overstimulated'
by the 'threateningly close . . . emotional . .. life of their parents'";
now they are understimulated by parents whom they experience as
"threateningly distant." The absence of constraint and direction in
the familial life is reproduced (or should the sequence be reversed?)
in the wider social life in which permissiveness rather than restric–
tion characterizes the prevailing ethos .
What I would like to suggest is a connection between Foucault's
view of the history of sexuality and Kohut's discovery of a new neu–
rotic type in contemporary society. The sense of emptiness and
fragmentation that Kohut describes and that one finds in contem–
porary fiction - for instance, in the work of so-called minimalist
writers like Donald Barthelme, Ann Beattie, and Raymond Car–
ver- is connected with the discourse of uncensored desire. It can be
understood as the result of what happens when desires are unbound,
free to "imagine" their course irrespective of obstacles and resis–
tances. They exhaust themselves , lose their energy and terminate in
