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PARTISAN REVIEW
Marsha Cavell's recent book,
The Psychoanalytic Mind: From Freud to
Philosophy}
you find a very sophisticated modern integration of
psychoanalytic object relations theory, with Donald Davidson's approach
to philosophy and truth-statements, and an approach to the dilemma of
identity, which is a philosophical problem and at the same time an actual
clinical problem in psychoanalysis. So there are many ways of going from
psychoanalytic theory to philosophy, but the one through Lacan was
really not connected with most of the clinical developments in the field. I
think that's a fair statement.
EK:
Along with the recent general criticisms of psychoanalysis, the ques–
tion of Freud's Jewishness also has been persistently taken up . I keep
wondering why it is of such interest. What do you think makes that such
a burning question?
OK:
I am really not an expert on this matter. It's hard for me to discuss
this in very general terms. Freud represented a very assimilated Central
European Judaism that was estranged from identification with Judaism as a
religion, but at the same time maintained Judaism as a cultural tradition
with which he identified and felt comfortable, although he was not active
in Jewish organizations. I am really not an expert in discussing the ques–
tion of the extent to which Freud's identification with Jewish culture is
influential in his approach to psychology and to what extent it might have
influenced the nature and the origin of psychoanalysis. I know that this
has been a source of great interest.
EK:
What else would you like to discuss that we might not have touched
on yet?
OK:
I always ask this of my patients at the end of an interview: "Is there
anything else I should have asked you, or which you expected me to ask?
Or anything that you would like to tell me and didn't have a chance to
say?" Well, I think of some basic convictions I have about where psycho–
analysis stands nowadays. First of all, I think that it is still the most power–
ful, richest theory of personality that we have, and that it has enormous
implications for the treatment of patients with a broad spectrum of psy–
chological illnesses, with a particular focus of course on personality disor–
ders, maybe because it's my field of interest; that it has the tools for the
analysis of the origin of individual personalities, their distortions and the
possibility of change by psychological means.
To assume that brief, "cheap" psychotherapies can replace psycho–
analysis when fundamental changes in personality functions are necessary
