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Authorized Freud
Some notes regarding the
Katha Pollitt-Andrew Sullivan dialogue in "The Book Club" about my new anthology Unauthorized Freud:
Doubters Confront a Legend :
1. One of the few points on
which these commentators fully agree is that I am a village atheist. They are,
however, sadly mistaken. I was born and raised in Philadelphia.
2. It is true, alas, as
Sullivan observes, that I am not "in command of my senses" and that, in fact, I
am an outright "maniac." I must also concede that my articles on Freud and the
recovered memory movement in the New York Review of Books --articles that
Sullivan hasn't read--were, as he judges, "tirades." But from now on, by virtue
of studying Sullivan's own understated prose, I hope to cultivate a more
rational and deliberate manner.
3. "Does Crews need to see a
shrink?" Sullivan is not the first reader to have posed this profound
diagnostic question. Indeed, it has been the standard retort--pioneered by no
less an authority than Freud himself--that Freudians throw back at those who
challenge the empirical credentials of psychoanalysis. See the concluding
chapter of my book The Memory Wars (1995).
4. It is less than cogent to
view the historical Freud through the lens of one's own contemporary
psychotherapeutic involvement. Nor it is helpful to lump psychoanalysis and
psychotherapy together, as Sullivan does. I have never attacked psychotherapy,
by which I mean the general enterprise of helping people talk through their
anxieties and face the difficulties in their immediate circumstances. The
target of my skepticism has been psychodynamic therapy, whereby the
patient's manifestly perceived problems, beliefs, and feelings are treated as
mere "compromise formations" tossed to the surface by deep turmoil that can
only be resolved by dredging for repressed memories, Oedipal cravings, and the
like. If I am to be deemed a maniac, let's at least try to state correctly what
it is I've been raving about.
5. Nearly everyone who is
ignorant of the critical literature assumes that Freud made some genuine
discoveries, but the list varies according to taste. Sullivan, for example, is
quite sure that Freud was right about repression, resistance, transference, the
Oedipus complex, dream interpretation, and (God help us!) "the probable origins
of homosexuality." Thus, when Sullivan found me asserting what nearly any
research professor of psychology could have told him--that not one
distinctively Freudian concept or hypothesis has survived independent
scrutiny--he gave a horrified glance at my chapter titles, abandoned
Unauthorized Freud , and pronounced me insane. If he had kept on reading,
as Pollitt did, he would have encountered reasoned arguments by philosophers
and historians challenging each and every Freudian notion that he considers
self-evident.
6. Pollitt and Sullivan
alike deem me insensitive to the depth and complexity of the psyche, and
Sullivan warmly endorses psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear's admonition that we dare
not reject Freud lest those qualities drop out of sight. But neither Pollitt
nor Sullivan nor Lear understands that psychoanalysis has been a means of
simplifying the mind by presuming sexual and aggressive motives to be
invariably primary and by invoking deterministic "mechanisms" that always lead
to a few banal and arbitrary causative factors. As my introduction points out,
psychoanalysis would be helpless to address the intricacy of Freud's own
devious and supersubtle mind. Only when we have grasped the full extent of the
Freudian intellectual fiasco--it is adumbrated in my book but exhaustively
explored in Malcolm Macmillan's Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc
(1997)--will we be able to talk about motives with an adequate respect for
their actual variety and volatility.
7.
Finally, Pollitt and Sullivan are disappointed that Unauthorized
Freud doesn't pay homage to Freud's cultural importance in our century.
True--but I fully grant that importance. Quite simply, my book asks whether it
was attained with or without the benefit of accurate clinical
observation, defensible drawing of inferences, and encouraging therapeutic
results. The answer is: without them. Once that fact has sunk in, a cultural
historian can assess the true magnitude of the problem that Unauthorized
Freud only glancingly treats: how 20 th century secular
intellectuals, not excepting journalists in therapy, could have been so
thoroughly bamboozled.
-- Frederick
Crews Berkeley, Calif.
"High and
Mighty": A Low Blow
About Seth Stevenson's July
23 article "High
and Mighty": The Partnership for a Drug-Free America has never claimed that
"all drug use leads to disaster." Our advertising is based on a breadth of
research from which we develop specific campaigns depending on the drug and the
demographic we're targeting. There's a huge difference, for example, between
smoking marijuana and smoking heroin and between communicating to an 8-year-old
or a 14-year-old. Take a look: Our advertising does not--and never has--treated
all drugs equally.
Stevenson's article shows a
fundamental lack of understanding about what our campaign entails. Had he
contacted us, we would have been happy to discuss our advertising as well as
our research. We would still be open to such a discussion.
We welcome
scrutiny into our advertising campaign and our organization, but here's one
suggestion: How about waiting for some results before deciding this can't
possibly work, and how about reading the existing research that shows it can
("The Impact of Anti-Drug Advertising," Johns Hopkins University; "Does
Anti-Drug Advertising Work," New York University's Stern School of Business)?
Advertising will not solve the drug problem, but done right it can vastly
improve the chances for children and teens to stay off drugs.
-- Leigh
Leventhal Assistant director, public affairsPartnership for a Drug-Free
AmericaNew York City
Culture
Wars
Jacob Weisberg's Aug. 20
"The Browser"
on uncritical movie critics is wrong, I think, to suggest that mainstream
critics should ignore blockbusters or dismiss them in a paragraph. Most readers
of mass circulation newspapers and magazines are intensely interested in such
titles, and I find my reviews of movies such as Godzilla ,
Armageddon , The Lost World , Starship Troopers , Lost in
Space , Halloween H20 , BASEketball , Air Force One ,
etc., to be invaluable opportunities to help open their eyes to the clichés and
stupidities being retailed by the filmmakers. He is wrong, too, to say of my
favorable review of The Negotiator that I overpraised it in a
"cringe-making way." I did indeed say it "really hums along," in the second
sentence of an opening paragraph which, if he had quoted it all, would have
destroyed his point. I invite any
Slate
reader to examine my
entire review and
decide if it supports Weisberg's generalizations.
The technique of
generalizing from an exception to the rule is an effective but not honorable
journalistic practice. If Weisberg will take a closer look he will find I have
given negative reviews to most of the big-budget blockbusters of recent years,
and that I review more foreign, art, documentary, and indeed films (like
Pi and Taste of Cherry ) in a month than
Slate
does
in a year.
Weisberg's technique is to selectively choose those titles from each critic
that illustrate his point, while remaining deliberately oblivious to reviews by
the same critic that would weaken it. The article works only if
Slate
readers take him at his word, for example, that Gene Siskel
gave Armageddon a "rave" (he did not). And it is not fair to criticize
Janet Maslin for praising Lethal Weapon 4 while suppressing the
information that I, for example, disliked it, because that would not help his
case--just as the information that Maslin disliked many of the other films he
mentions would also not serve his thesis. If you are going to criticize
critics, you have to be a better critic than he is in this essentially
unresearched piece, which is excellent only as an example of the off the top of
the head thumb-sucker genre.
-- Roger EbertChicago
Sun-Times Chicago
Jacob
Weisberg replies:
Readers can decide for themselves whether Ebert overpraises The
Negotiator by clicking here to read his three and a half star review. Siskel gave
Armageddon a "thumbs up" and named it his "flick of the week" on Sneak
Previews .
Gender
Impolitics
About
Robert Wright's Aug. 19 "Earthling": Watching feminist leaders wriggle, squirm, and
say nothing about Clinton's violation of everything they are supposed to stand
for undermines any theory that female politicians--elected or otherwise--are
any more principled than men. Politicians are another, lesser, species--and
their differences from everyone else transcend gender.
-- Glenn H.
Reynolds Knoxville, Tenn.
Easy on
Breakfast
Lucianne
Goldberg at "The Breakfast Table" last week was too much. Did you forget to send
me the e-mail about your buyout by Vanity Fair ? Is name recognition now
the primary requirement for publication?
-- Andrew
Berman Seattle
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