Vol. 57 No. 1 1990 - page 44

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PARTISAN REVIEW
that there is social assistance for the poor who get sick and that the rich and
powerful can buy what they want, including the peace of mind that allows
them to escape debilitating neuroses. This means that the middle class alone
will seek to address the nature of an illness via psychoanalysis. Cremerius
then described some of his own middle-class patients, compared them to Leo
Srole's American respondents, and distinguished among neurotics who don't
need treatment, those who make their neuroses functional, and those who
avoid role conflict through identification. He concluded that individuals whose
ego and ego-ideal are linked to group ideals lack appropriate guilt feelings.
Thus, psychoanalysts, he held, ought to feel guilty when treating mostly
middle-class patients, even though these are the ones who seek them out.
In view of the fact that German psyc hoanal ys is was nonexistent in
1945, its strides during the last forty years have been miraculous. "Too
much, too soon," quipped one of my informants. On the so-called right, he
was among those who
felt
that too many badly analyzed Freudians had
passed down their Nazi-induced neuroses
to
their candidates. And because so
much of what was called psychoanalysis had really been short-term therapy,
and many of the analysts themselves had been poorly analyzed, a number of
Freudians stated that it was imperative to do "repair work."
But the seven analysts and five social scientists who got together in
1983 in Frankfurt
to
discuss
Psychoanalysis and fls Discontents
thought re–
search was equally important. They deplored the Frankfurt Institute's in–
creasing pursuit of therapy alone after Mitscherlich's death and attacked the
trend toward medicalization. They were afraid that this would transi()rm
psychoanalysis into an adjunct of the state's mental health system, at the
same time depriving it of its critical edge. When informed that this transfor–
mation was being advocated because the state of Hessen wanted to see
(therapeutic) results in return (or funding the institute, they rose to the de–
fense of psychoanalysis as a social critique. Attacking unconscious lies of
(unnamed but recognizable) psychoanalysts, their unhappy relationship to
power, and their frequent neglect of the countertransference, these authors
were unaware that the issues had become important enough to be picked up
by psychoanalysts throughout the country. So, when they followed up with a
second critical volume,
Psychoanalysis on the Couch
(1984), they were joined
by another dozen contributors and enlarged their critiques to every political
topic. They were amazed by the enormous response to their concerns and
by the large audiences who came to hear them talk.
Still, not too many persons psychoanalyze in the morning and become
social critics in the afternoon, a practice that appears to be limited to German–
speaking left-oriented Freudians. (Close collaboration with nonanalysts and
students follows from it.) And, carefully and quietly, some of the German
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