EDITH KURZWEIL
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academy, the market place, or any other public sphere. And Freud has
been dead for over fifty-five years. Yet his ideas, with their many twists
and turns, and the reformulations and changes he himself proposed, and
which then and later were being introduced into and elaborated in many
new disciplines, have been extraordinarily resilient. And endless free asso–
ciations to them have fueled the debates about what by now is thought to
be the science of psychoanalysis by some, and its art by others.
Some of the aspects the critics are exploiting are rooted in the pecu–
liarly American history of the psychoanalytic movement, which goes back
to the late 1920s. Then, American Freudians over Freud's strong objec–
tions and in contrast to the Europeans, insisted on restricting membership
to medically trained individuals. (Ironically, in part they did so for fear of
the charlatans who, in America, could not be legally kept from hanging
out their shingles.) The resulting stratification excluded clinically trained
psychologists from the most desirable jobs and from most funded research,
as well as from working with psychiatrists. Ten years ago, they started a
lawsuit, which they (mostly) won. Although they now are officially wel–
comed by the "establishment," many among them keep nursing their
" scars." In England, Germany, Austria, and France, both physicians and
clinical psychologists were being trained in the same institutes all along.
In the cultural domain, the informed public expected Freud's insights
into the psyche, into literature, into society, and even into politics, to ex–
plore and explain the depths of the human mind. But because the
psychoanalysts couldn't live up to these exalted expectations, the public,
on the whole, was disappointed. Some patients felt forsaken by their own
psychoanalysts. During that time, also, psychoanalysts were splitting up
into theoretical factions, formed myriads of new associations and training
institutes - hoping to discover a path that might, after all, unravel the
deepest vagaries of our psyches. The unavoidable splits among them,
which they did not hesitate to air, made them ever more vulnerable to
criticism by outsiders. This Babel of psychoanalytic practices was com–
pounded further by the more recent addition of Lacanian inspired literary
studies, which hold that linguistically driven free association to written,
verbal and cultural texts are the road to Freud's unconscious - the foun–
dation of psychoanalysis. This approach ignored many advances in clinical
techniques, and led to a shift of the center from psychoanalytic therapy to
psychoanalytic language. And the professors of literature don't take into
account that words alone don't cure neuroses.
A quick perusal of the petition's signatories indicates that most of
them are Ph.D.s rather than M.D.s, and researchers or academics rather
than practicing therapists. This not only makes most of them downplay
the therapeutic elements but has attuned them to playing the political
