EDITH KURZWEIL
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try to country. In America, where it had its earliest success, classical analysis
now seems to be in its furthest stage of decline. But this is a decline only in
relation to early exaggerated hopes, since Freudian ideas are everywhere.
It
is now taken for granted that some of the symptoms of neurotic behavior
may be relieved. The critics of psychoanalysis, however, who accept nothing
less than a total "cure," never are satisfied , even when patients in treatment
get better or reach a plateau. They expect them to attain so-called normality,
a state neither Freud nor anyone else ever has been able to define ade–
quately. But there is a kind of backhanded success in the fact that psycho–
analysis did pave the way for its bastard offspring - that is, for quick-fix
therapies that temporarily at least are being hailed as superior replacements.
I have indicated elsewhere that psychoanalytic history has been con–
stantly updated to further specific themes, recasting Freud as hero or impos–
tor, genius or imitator. I also have shown that the rise and fall in the popu–
larity of psychoanalysis in line with its pertinence and adaptability to events
and preoccupations of a given time could be gauged by the number and types
ofapplications it engendered.
Taken together, the inroads of psychoanalysis into history, anthropol–
ogy, psychology, and sociology have had an impact beyond the academy and
have penetrated every recess of modern culture. In American universities,
acceptance has been accompanied by rejection. Psychoanalysis has been in–
corporated into women's and literary studies, but even when social work and
psychology students are taught only that "Freud was wrong," in one way or
another they learn something about psychoanalysis. Many students during
the past decade have been introduced to Freud via deconstruction. This en–
deavor originally was located in departments of French and comparative lit–
erature, but it soon spread into philosophy - Jacques Derrida's own discipline.
There, among other strategic readings, the Freudian hermeneuticists, the
anti-Freudian Popperians, and the "scientific" Freudians were displaced or, in
deconstructionist language, "decentered."
In a recent collection edited by Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan,
Pragmatism'S Freud: The Moral Disposition of Psychoanalysis
(1986), the
philosopher Richard Rorty argued that Freud fits into the "story of
decentering-as-mechanization." Rorty noted that Hume had treated ideas as
mental atoms whose arrangement
was
the self, but unlike Freud, he had not
changed our self-image. Most philosophers, it appears, have been upset by
Freud's partitioning of the self, have rejected the threatening picture of quasi–
selves lurking beneath consciousness, and have preferred to believe that a
single body contains a single self. But Rorty found that Freud's "revisionary
account of human dignity" allows each of us to "tailor a coherent self-image ..
. and then use it to tinker with our behavior" - behavior that neither furthers
