DAPHNE MERKIN
The Talking Cure Blues
It
is difficult, for those of us who have grown up in the last half-century,
to imagine a world unpermeated with Freudian ideas - with the free and
easy use of such terms as "unconscious," "oral," and, of course, the fa–
mous "oedipal complex." Even at its most diluted, or parodied (as in the
overused "Freudian slip") , the Viennese neurologist's daring reconcep tion
of human struggle as essentially interior - rather than exterior - in nature
has entered the culture and forever transformed the way we look at our–
selves in the world. Accordingly, the "once upon a time" of our lives has
become very much a matter of psychological, rather than behavioral,
imagery. Where once we envisioned personality as an ac tively plotted
construct, repl ete with the heraldic slaying of dragons, we no longer
think of character as unfolding from triumphant or tragic encounters
with purely outward circumstances. Our plots have burrowed inwards:
Will the tender Ego withstand the onslaughts of the punitive Superego?
Will the wily Id evade them both? What we have come to understand,
for better or worse, is that the dragons which assail us are in our minds.
I say "for better or worse," but of course, with the exception of
the British who have held this new mongrel of a science in healthy con–
tempt right from the start, we have all along taken it for granted that
Freud's complex, highly abstract rendering of the forces which impinge
on human existence is , in some simple sense , a good thing. But, one
might ask,
is
it? I mean, is it a verifiable improvement on previous ways
of apprehending reality? Certainly it provides an intellectually more so–
phisticated model than earlier theories of character development, which
looked to physiological or religious contexts for their organizing
principles. Still, as anyone who has ever dipped a toe into psychoanalytic
waters knows , there is nothing immediately to recommend it , either. For
one thing, its premises (not to mention its solutions) as to the formation
of character are frustratingly intangible; as Gertrude Stein once said of
Oakland, there's no
there
there. Simply to be in therapy or to observe
someone else in therapy is
to
have strong cause to wonder:
What does
personality chal1ge look like?
How do you know when it's occurred? And
is it worth several thousand dollars every month? For another, if it is
consolation that one is after (and I would wager that after a long day
