ROBERT MICHELS
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And yet, you have also alluded that in American culture, as psychoanalysis
has changed and become more open, the attitudes towards it have become
more negative. Maybe this is a question that cannot be addressed on a scien–
tific level, but more in terms of cultural studies of American society, of
history and its interactions with psychoanalysis. At some point I would like
to see some discussion, with others participating in it, to try to confront this
great paradox.
Robert Michels:
I totally agree with you that we are not going to discov–
er the reasons for the negative feelings about psychoanalysis by studying
psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis has become a symbol to the public with
increasingly rich and varied meanings and some of those meanings are trig–
gering negative responses. That is a fascinating element in the social history
of ideas and symbols. But the public's negative feelings about psychoanalysis
are not because it doesn't meet Popper's criteria for a falsifiable science. But
if
one wants to attack it, he could scan the
Index Medicus
and find many crit–
icisms of psychoanalysis; there are many volumes by Griinbaum, and in any
of them you have a thoughtful, coherent attack ready to be borrowed. But
why the desire to attack in the first place? I don't think that the answer is
going to be found in psychoanalysis.
William Phillips:
I want to return to the question about the loss of pres–
tige or the negative response to psychoanalysis. I think we shouldn't confuse
the public response with an intellectual response. In fact I don't think we
know what the public response is-it's mostly ignorance. I feel strongly, in
the absence of data, that the public at large was never very much interested
and probably didn't like psychoanalysis at all. What I think is important,
however, is why there has been a shift in the intellectual's attitude to psy–
choanalysis. I recall about twenty or thirty years ago almost everyone I knew,
and I am speaking of people who were writers, philosophers, literary critics,
were fairly open to psychoanalysis. The one example that I can remember is
Mary McCarthy, who went into psychoanalysis, and stopped after a very
short time and came out saying that the whole process was pointless and
worthless because she was smarter than the analyst.
What many people here have touched upon, the so-called negative
intellectual response to psychoanalysis is that most people are not talking
about psychoanalysis concretely. They are not really aware of what goes on
in a psychoanalytic hour. It is a kind of general resistance to psychoanalysis,
which didn't exist thirty years ago. I sometimes wonder if the old and seem–
ingly cliched explanation is that it is a form of resistance to psychoanalysis.
Other than that I think the phenomenon is baflling.
