584
PARTISAN REVIEW
DB:
About Fromm. You said earlier that your mother introduced you to
him.
DR:
My mother did. What she said was, " I want to be able to talk to you
about psychoanalysis. So I'd like you to be in the same analytic frame as I
am. And my analyst, Karen Horney, recommended Erich Fromm."
That's how I went to him. I was in Buffalo at that time. I'd go into New
York City on a weekend and have two hours on a Saturday and two
hours on a Sunday. Here you might find some of the seeds of individual–
ism. My law school colleagues at Buffalo, such as Mark DeWolfe Howe
(a distinguished scholar of legal history and author of a major work on
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.), were very scornful of psychoanalysis.
Fromm pointed out how childish it was of me to take so seriously the
views of someone as provincial as Mark DeWolf Howe.
DB:
In the end, the analytic experience served you well. Did you even–
tually talk with your mother about it?
DR:
Oh I'm tremendously thankful for the experience. But I didn't talk
to my mother about it as much as she would have liked. I wasn't inclined
to share confidences with my mother or to identify with her as much as
she would have expected me to . The picture that emerges here is not a
happy one. It should be added, though, that in the last years of her life,
for many many years, she suffered from Parkinson's disease, and she bore
up bravely and stoicly, going in a wheelchair to concerts and continuing
her intellectual life. Her analysis with Karen Horney continued. So this
should help create a picture of sadness. The harsh comments that I've
made about her should be qualified by my recognition of the bravery
with which she endured a totally incurable disease.
DB:
Did you grow closer to her in her latter years?
DR:
I regret that I did not. I was away. I was not as good a caretaker as I
wish I had been.
DB:
Does your German-Jewish heritage have anything to do with your
interest in cultural conformity, which is a question that is at the heart of
J ewish culture?
DR:
That is the contemporary struggle for identity. Of course, I'm com–
pletely a blank because
r
wasn't brought up a Jew. My mother's closest
friend was Mary Frazier, after whom my sister was named. My parents
were in the Social Register. The principal way in which being Jewish was
