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PARTISAN REVIEW
anti-Semites and from Freud's concerns but inevitably was embedded in
his theory, in the society from which it sprung, and in the increasing
ambivalences everyone had to deal with, and at which the Jews already
were expert.
Kafka's genius expressed the ubiquitous modern ambivalence in his
haunting novels, and Freud located it in the roots of the human psyche.
We know that they were born in the same part of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, that Kafka was younger and died at an earlier age, and that they
did not know each other. But I was not aware before I got to Brussels
that Sandor Ferenczi, Freud's Hungarian disciple, practiced a form of
automatic writing in an attempt to reach the unconscious that vaguely
resembled Kafka's endeavors and that - though later and differently - a
number of the Surrealists advocated. Nor did I realize that Ferenczi, un–
beknownst to Freud, already had undergone a self-analysis in 1899 and
was preoccupied with spiritism, unconscious thought, and conflicts and
transfer of thought before he ever met Freud.
I am noting these disparate factors to remind us that Prague,
Budapest, and Vienna were the hubs of enlightenment in the Kaiserreich,
and that with the removal of the so-called Iron Curtain not only eco–
nomic but also intellectual exchange once again has opened up. Sooner
or later, it is expected not only to permeate but also to guide the soon–
to- be realized European Economic Community. The foundation of this
community, and particularly the integration of twelve currencies into a
single European one, was on everyone's mind during my brief trip.
The French psychoanalysts arranged to change the conference pro–
gram in order to get back to Paris in time to cast their votes on
September 20th: they all expected to have their say on the referendum.
Roundtable discussions, commentators on television, and the front pages
'of newspapers at first celebrated the fifty-one percent victory for integra–
tion and then focused on the negative consequences of the forty-nine
percent of dissenters. Even though the
International Herald Tribune
em–
phasized the political stalemate in Paris and EC leaders vowed unity, I
kept thinking of the fact that French voter turnout was over seventy
percent and that every European citizen takes his government more seri–
ously than we in America do, thus managing to elect more serious polit–
ical leaders than we do - leaders who in turn cannot afford to spend
too much time electioneering rather than governing.
I had been invited to Vienna because, among other things, some
people wanted to hear about how we handle multiculturalism in
America: Austria accepts and integrates many immigrants and thus has to
deal with the problems of teaching them German and finding work for
them. I was told by the superintendent of Vienna's school system that
