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games that have become so prevalent in our universities. Swales and
Crews are pros in that realm. And in their aim to either control or de–
stroy the proposed exhibit, to administer the
coup de grace,
they could
count on support from disgruntled psychologists and social workers.
In
general, the Freudians are an easy target: they are politically naive.
Because to them, politics refer to internal, disciplinary battles, they have
been oblivious to the handwriting on the wall. They have equivocated
and placated, and have psychoanalyzed their opponents - unaware that
they were being assaulted by the zeitgeist. Also, because they have per–
fected Freud's technique with patients - of listening to them rather than
talking in order to give their unconscious a chance to surface - they tend
to transfer this habit when it comes to answering their critics. This has
worked against them in the cultural sphere, and in relation to their post–
modernist and deconstructionist foes. For neither silence nor
accommodation will win the day. This is why, at least in part, the Freudi–
ans have been ill-equipped to answer Crews, Swales and their co–
signatories, and why they allowed them to chip away at their project, and
to end up destroying it.
"It's time to reinvent Freud," stated Richard Schweder, a professor of
human development.
In
his short version of the enemies' list, again in
The
New
York
Times,
he (correctly) includes sociobiologists and cognitive sci–
entists; behavioral geneticists and academic psychologists; humanists and
philosophers of science. Moreover, psychiatrists now are experimenting
with newly available drug therapies. For them (and for insurance compa–
nies), it's the victory of Prozac over insight, for most of the others it's the
ascendance of science over the belief in our ability to reach self–
knowledge. But for feminists (and postmodernists) it's something differ–
ent.
Gloria Steinem, one of the signatories, was quoted as stating that
Freud, by suggesting that "biology is destiny, the idea that women were
supposed to have only vaginal orgasms, his wholesale condemnation of
masturbation ... is the psychic equivalent of a cliterodectomy," the sur–
gical removal of female genitals. I had assumed that she was conversant
enough with Freud's rudimentary texts to know that he was not that stu–
pid, and that in his entire oeuvre he had been tentative and searching for
enlightenment - even while mistaken; that he lived in a patriarchal soci–
ety but spent his life trying to overcome rather than support its
assumptions. Sophie Freud, a retired professor of social work, another
signer, who is renowned only as one of Freud's granddaughters, is quoted
as saying that "some of my grandfather's ideas have become obsolete, ...
for instance, the drive theory that sexual and aggressive drives motivate
all
life." Yes. But the besieged American "establishment" has not accepted
