536
PARTISAN REVIEW
Robert Michels:
Your examples are intellectuals who were interested in
entering psychoanalysis as a therapeutic experience.
William Phillips:
Partly that, but partly open to an intellectual experience.
Robert Michels:
My impression is that in the world of the humanities–
of literature, the arts, music, criticism, history-there is an immense interest
in psychoanalysis. It is one of the most sought-out courses in our universi–
ties. When I taught at Cornell in Ithaca, I realized that if we could get more
analysts there, we could fill the classes without any difficulty. At the same
time I think it has lost a measure of status in psychology and certainly in
medicine and psychiatry. One can see it in terms of the two worlds, the two
perspectives we have been talking about. Its natural scientific status has large–
ly diminished in the intellectual community, while that same community is
immensely enthusiastic about it as a system of hermeneutics.
I have spoken about clinical psychoanalysis to groups of intellectuals
who didn't know what I was talking about because it had nothing to do with
"their" psychoanalysis. They would have easily understood a discussion
about contemporary French psychoanalytic views, which I wasn't competent
to offer. They were far more familiar with Lacan than with ego psychology
and they had no interest at all in the clinical process of psychoanalysis.
However, there was no lack of enthusiasm. I'm troubled by the divergence
between the intellectual community that is familiar with the clinical process,
which has always been the richest source of creative analytic ideas, and the
intellectual community that knows little clinical analysis but is interested in
applying psychoanalytic interpretive strategies to the study of texts, works of
art, or historical phenomena.
It
seems to me that there is a potential for rich
interaction between those two groups which doesn't always occur, and that
that interaction might have been better thirty years ago than it is today.
William Phillips: I
agree with you, but I am troubled by the fact that you
seem to be saying that the phenomenon of Frederick Crews is not typical or
widespread.
Robert Michels: I
don't think it is typical or widespread in departments of
English.
William Phillips:
You seem to kowtow to French psychoanalysis and French
deconstruction and other French theories. But that is something different.
That seems to me to be a specific academic phenomenon.
Speaker:
But you can make out an argument, I think, that American psycho–
analysis does have a problem with the intellectual community by shutting it
