Correspondence

...And finally, even in the midst of deploring the cruelties of war Freud did not allow himself to slip into slogans and simplistic ideological thinking: " . . . Every war is not open to condemnation to an equal degree...

...Kramer's credo comes to this: Psychoanalysis should be legitimately concerned with the psychic and not the social, with unconscious conflict (a troubled locution, since, like pain, con-(continued on page 30) CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 7) flict has to be conscious to exist, even though aspects of it remain hidden from oneself, i.e., unconscious) and not with real interpersonal conflict...

...O! Canada: "Brian's Song" (by Malcolm Gladwell, TAS, July 1985) seems to me to be very perceptive about Brian Mulroney, but I am afraid that the smug officials in Ottawa are not a reliable source of information on the "efficiency, practicality, and cost-effectiveness of Canada's social programs...

...Kramer was busy sharpening his teeth and talons...

...These programs have made not working a more attractive option than working, and go far to explain the "economic underperformance" mentioned by Mr...

...Lothane and his colleagues appear to want is a right to assert their politics not as individual citizens--one voice, one votembut as specialists, mental health experts with "special knowledge...

...They came to Nicaragua to confirm the credibility of the revolution...

...I agree...

...Lothane himself calls "free debate" which was as much our duty as "informed citizens" as his...

...to learn to read from their book...

...Lothane was disappointed in his failure to recruit us to his cause, but there was neither malice nor distortion in what we depicted (he is welcome any time to listen to himself on our tape of the meeting if he thinks we did not represent him accurately...

...Along with concerned scientists, physicians, and psychologists, the UCCP has come out decrying the real dangers of waging thermonuclear warfare and the arms race and is raising public consciousness about these in the spirit of free debate and the democratic American tradition of checks and balances...

...They themselves are armed today with the most scrupulous care, and not the least important of the methods by which they keep their supporters together is hatred of everyone beyond their frontiers...

...so long as there exist countries and nations that are prepared for the ruthless destruc(continued on page 5/) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1985 31 CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 31) tion of others, those others must be armed for war...

...He is thus in a position to offer informed practical counsel to his patient and help tied "Why War...

...Where and when did Christopher Marlowe call himself a "high church unbeliever...

...Kramer...

...What devious translating...

...In the heat of Dr...

...The two men had met only once before, in 1927, and in a letter describing the occasion Freud wrote with his characteristic irony: "He understands as much about psychology as I do about physics, so we had a very pleasant talk...

...The Sandinista revolution has taken a people considered little more than pack animals for as long as anyone could remember, and made them once again sentient beings...

...We thought we were only participating in what Dr...

...To quote Don Jose, a peasant farmer who wrote to the mother of his literacy teacher: Do you know I'm not ignorant anymore...

...For example, it is possible to "work" for ten weeks on a make-work job paid for by a government grant and then go on unemployment insurance for the rest of the year, something thousands of Nova Scotians do as a matter of course...

...Your son, ma'am, has learned to read from our book...

...The adverse consequences of this for our European, Southeast Asian, and Western Pacific allies, and subsequently for ourselves, does not take much imagination to realize...

...But Freud never dreamt of denying reality and the trauma of reality...

...While the eyes of the West are riveted on the courageous resistance of the Mujahedeen in the northeastern part of the country bordering Pakistan, it is in western Afghanistan that the real action, as far as Moscow is concerned, is taking place...

...in the September issue of The American Spectator, but one point requires either query or correction, or both...

...Such people, Nicaraguans say, are more interested in affirming the establishment of the Utopia or reinforcing their hatred of the American system and American power than really listening to the people...

...I know how to read now...

...Psychologist Freud replies: "You begin with the relation between Right and Might . . . . But may I replace the word 'might' by the bolder and the harsher word 'violence...

...They want their voices to be heard over other voices because they feel they have some highly relevant knowledge which the rest of us don't have...

...Now he knows the life of the mountains...

...but they are, I believe, subsidiary...

...What rumor...

...That, in my opinion, is an illusion...

...His understanding of dream life, of inner motives, will help him understand the real life of the patient better than if he did not have depth psychology at his disposal...

...Was some copy dropped in the last full paragraph of the first column on page 25...

...The meeting was organized by the Union of Concerned Psychoanalysts and Psychotherapists (UCCP) and cosponsored by the Physicians for Social Responsibility...

...These reasons are doubtless true...

...The physicist Einstein asks: "This is the problem: Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war...

...cotton and coffee brigadistas come "to the microphone and express their enthusiasm for the revolutionary process...

...Lothane refers to in his letter, Freud begins his reply to Einstein by saying, "You have taken me by surprise, however, by posing the question of what can be done to protect mankind from the curse of war...

...Sara's obvious bias chafes against his sense of fair play," the paragraph continues, "and the rumor about her devious translating spreads...

...Anything that encourages the growth of emotional ties between men must operate against war...

...It is clear from his letter, however, that Dr...

...They serve him as a springboard for setting us straight about what real, true-blue, pure-faith Freudian psychoanalysis is all about...

...It is pseudoscience-propaganda wrapped in psychological jargon...

...With such self-styled apologists Freud and psychoanalysis need no detractors...

...And do you know, your son isn't ignorant anymore either...

...Furthermore, although the Tories have cut some of the most notorious handouts, there are still plenty to enrich the middle-class sixties people, practiced parasites, who have moved to the countryside...

...Hirshon & Butler: And Also Teach Them to Read (Lawrence Hill & Co., 1983...

...Freud was not enthusiastic about it, and later referred to it as "tedious and sterile...

...It is doubtful that Miss Mayer's experience, carefully sequestered in one of the brigadista programs, is likely to have a more comprehensive view of the Nicaraguan revolution...

...Yale and Rita Kramer of the symposium "The Dynamics of Nuclear Numbness" held on March 3, 1985 ("The Shrinking of America," TAS, June 1985) bristles with malice, innuendos, and distortions...

...I can recall no such comment by Marlowe, and it seems inherently unlikely...

...That, of course, as we tried to say in our article, is nonsense...

...We are told that in certain happy regions of the earth, where nature provides in abundance everything man requires, there are races whose life is passed in tranquillity and who know neither coercion nor aggression...

...Lothane's right to assert his political beliefs as freely as he wished to, but a mischievous abuse of professionalism...

...he is a teacher informed by the ideal of love tempered by justice...

...This is a duty of any informed citizen...

...In western Afghanistan, bordering Iron, the Soviets have built three highly sophisticated air bases and have stocked them with their most advanced fighter bombers, transport and logistical equipment...

...mZvi Lothane, M.D...

...Not perfectly, you understand, but I know how...

...Indeed, her suggestion that the revolution has earned the support of the rural poor, with whom she shared her two weeks, ignores the overwhelming evidence that campesinos, who make up the majority of the contra forces, are most opposed to the policy of the government...

...This is a slogan of the ivory tower psychoanalytic sect to which Dr...

...But these national and international issues are not his concern...

...The excitement of self-transformation is much stronger there than here...

...When I first spotted Dr...

...Furthermore, Freud was quite realistic about the possibility of the international control of aggression: "Wars will only be prevented with certainty if mankind unites in setting up a central authority to which the right of giving judgment upon all conflicts F! Call for any currentbook of interest shall be handed over...

...I am, in fact, part Nicaraguan and I generally stay with relatives when I visit to conduct interviews and research stories...

...Because he has such knowledge of depth dynamics, he is in the position to understand his patient better than a professional who does not have it...

...Frederic Wile New York, New York Unbelievable There is much to admire in Fred Barnes's review of A.N...

...Lothane's quotes Freud comes off as a sappy adolescent idealist, and to spare the old man's memory and set the record straight we will have to fill in some of Dr...

...They call people like Miss Mayer in-ternacionalistas...

...Kramer belongs...

...Here again you yourself have said almost all there is to say on the subject...

...Maybe a five-day junket just isn't the way to find the revolution there...

...On the other hand, the attention of the Western media, and thereby the peoples' and their governments', has been diverted from the main and profoundly important arena, western Afghanistan and Baluchistan...

...The coverage by Dr...

...I chose that program because it is the most common type of Nicaraguan tour, after which knowledgeable participants write op-ed pieces in the New York Times and lobby congressmen...

...Their "troubles" in northeastern Afghanistan are certainly costly and embarrassing, but not as much as Westerners, who value human life and who are used to holding their governments accountable, might think...

...For contrary to what Dr...

...Later (page 26) she waits impatiently during a campesino mass, thinking of her forthcoming restaurant dinner, while U.S...

...They bathe and do laundry in the same streams, because there's no running water, and they eat rice, beans, and tortillas three times a day, sitting on the ground, not in a restaurant...

...Nothing could have been further from the truth...

...I can scarcely believe it, and I should be glad to hear more of these fortunate beings...

...You need to match the Nicaraguans' efforts with some of your own...

...What Dr...

...In Dr...

...In her third paragraph, Joan Frawley admits that her group "chose" a trip with "limited exposure to Third World elements...

...I was scared at first by the thought of my...

...Freud was also deeply skeptical of the likelihood of achieving international peace in our time, as the following complete quotation suggests...

...Little did I know that Dr...

...And this, my good Dr...

...The Mulroney government cannot withstand leftist criticism and demagoguery (which is all one hears in Canada) because the Tories utterly lack a political vision...

...Thus that attempt to replace actual force by the force of ideas seems at present to be doomed to failure...

...We regret too that Dr...

...Nelson-Pallmeyer's enthusiasm for the Sandinista revolution has been established...

...A case in point and most relevant to our debate is the 1932 exchange of letters between Einstein and Freud entimunity but everyday necessities and common c o n c e r n s . . , b r i n g . . , an increasing probability that a peaceful solution will be found . . . . Some people are inclined to prophesy that it will not be possible to make an end of war until Communist ways of thinking have found universal acceptance . . . . Our mythological theory of instincts makes it easy for us to find a formula for indirect [Freud's emphasis] methods of combating war...

...Of course, political ideas are not so important to Canadians as they are to Americans...

...Gladwell...

...As a consequence, it is very difficult to get people to take ordinary jobs, or to work well at anything...

...Some people are inclined to prophesy that it will not be possible to make an end of war until Communist ways of thinking have found universal acceptance...

...Like other aspects of the tour, her pro-government bias rubbed the group the wrong way...

...There, one of the visiting pastors wonders if Sara Nelson-Pallmeyer is translating correctly the words of a representative from the Permanent Human Rights Commission...

...This was indeed Freud's view...

...The panel of discussants also included former government officials and a physicist from the Livermore Laboratories...

...The Oxford English Dictionary records no use of "high church" before 1704, or of "high churchman" before 1687...

...Beyond Afghanistan In his otherwise exemplary article, "Afghanistan Goes Mongolian" (TAS, September 1985), Arch Puddington states the reasons for the Russian invasion of that sorry nation as a desire to append it to the USSR, as a field for trying out new weaponry and tactics, and to confirm the Brezhnev Doctrine...

...Lothane and his associates when it came to issues of war and peace...

...Lothane's ellipses...

...but here, in less than one paragraph, in the matter of a few words, the author (or copy editor or editor) has leapt from one pastor wondering, to "the rumor" (not "a rumor"), to "devious translating" stated as a fact...

...Contrary to Dr...

...but I'm also suggesting that maybe I, and my fellow brigadistas, such as the ones she heard, got a chance to know Nicaragua and Nicaraguans better than she did...

...Please note that Dr...

...Lothane would like to believe, Freud was no idealist...

...The League of Nations is designed as an agency of this kind, but the second condition has not been fulfilled: The League of Nations has no power of its own and can only acquire it if the members of the new union, the separate states, are ready to resign it...

...To assert one's political beliefs is legitimate and moral, but to use one's professional status to advance one's political values is a form of intellectual bullying, and to do so in the pious tones we heard that day suggests a moral arrogance that makes real discourse impossible...

...As a former cotton brigadista, I'd like to remind Joan Frawley that the volunteer (unpaid) brigade members choose a trip with thorough exposure to Third-World elements, including rain and cold (coffee harvest) and heat and dust (cotton harvest...

...Roland Mushat Frye Schelling Professor of English Emeritus University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, Pennsylvania...

...The correspondence between Einstein and Freud was solicited and organized by a cultural department of the League of Nations in 1932...

...But then I realized that you had raised the question not as a natural scientist and physicist but as a philanthropist: You were following the prompting of the League of Nations . . . . I reflected, moreover, that I was not being asked to make practical proposals but only to set out the problem of avoiding war as it appears to a psychological observer...

...The fascination of ideas and discovery is alive again in Nicaragua...

...Lothane's moral passion he has pieced together from this correspondence a view of Freud that bears little resemblance to reality...

...In the very correspondence that Dr...

...Thus we see that the violent solutions of conflicts of inhim manage his real life better...

...Lothane's editing suggests that Freud espoused or approved of "Communist ways of thinking...

...A psychoanalyst worth his money should be very much concerned with social realities and with the real life of his patient...

...But that aim is in any case a very remote one today, and perhaps could only be reached after the most fearful civil wars...

...A con- terest is not avoided even inside a corncerned analyst does not just "give interpretations of the unconscious...

...But as good Americans they sought at least the appearance of a balanced forum, which the tour organizers promised to provide but didn't...

...We shall be making a false calculation if we disregard the fact that law was originally brute violence and that even today it cannot do without the support of violence...

...There are clearly two separate requirements involved in this: the creation of a supreme agency, and its endowment with the necessary power...

...Debby Mayer New York, New York...

...nevertheless, Canada is guided by ideas, and unfortunately, they are leftist, Welfare State shibboleths...

...They learn a lot about what this revolution has done for farm workers, and it's even more than free medical care, and education for all, and equal pay for equal work...

...The Russian Communists, too, hope to be able to cause human aggressiveness to disappear by guaranteeing the satisfaction of all material needs and by establishing equality in other respects among all the members of the community...

...Miss Mayer suggests a five-day visit is not enough time to see the real fruits of the revolution...

...Was Freud a Freezenik...

...Was this sloppy writing, or very careful editing...

...And at the moment there seems very little prospect of this...

...Meanwhile, the Soviets patiently await the chaos certain to erupt in Iran upon Khomeini's death, and the undermining of Pakistan has already begun with threats and intrusions into the country's air space...

...Marlowe was stabbed to death in a tavern brawl at Deptford on May 30, 1593...

...Jigs Gardner Orangedale, Nova Scotia ['HE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1985 51...

...I suppose Joan Frawley would say I'm just trooping to the letters column to express my enthusiasm for the revolutionary process, and I guess I am...

...He never lost sight of the dialectical balance between the real and the imagined (i.e., dreamt), between the public, societal stage of relations and interpersonal actions and the inner, private, secret stage of dreams and hidden motives...

...Nor does any idea exist today which could be expected to exert a unifying authority of the sort...

...However, his arguments are totally devoid of substance: They are purely ad hominem...

...Gladwell evidently thinks this is fine, but I fear that he has been misled...

...Kramer, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and a former classmate at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, I was gladdened at the prospect of yet another intelligent supporter of the cause...

...in volume 22 of the Standard Edition...

...The scene at the human rights commission suggested that a propaganda tour composed of only slightly willing accomplices was on a collision course with itself...

...If willingness to engage in war is an effect of the destructive instinct, the most obvious plan will be to bring Eros, its antagonist, into play against it...

...you, I am convinced, will be able to suggest educative methods, lying more or less outside the scope of politics, which will eliminate these obstacles...

...Although he deplored war, and hoped for the best, he understood that the impulses to aggression were deeply rooted in human nature, as the following from the same correspondence indicates: "For our immediate purpose, then, this much follows from what has been said: There is no use trying to get rid of men's aggressive inclinations...

...Kramer scoffs at such activists as a medley of assorted yogurt-eating liberals, leftists, and pacifists, and derides their ability to question Realpolitik, nuclear warfare, SDI, and military spending...

...They are training, in the Soviet Union, young Baluchi radicals to return to Baluchistan, which sits on the north side of the Straits of Hormuz and runs in a north/northeasterly direction up through southeastern Iran and southwestern Pakistan into Afghanistan, to prepare and light the tinder box at the appropriate time...

...Lothane's feathers were ruffled by our remarks...

...But he is no better judge of these matters than the poor schnooks he set up to laugh at...

...Kramer's exhortations, "pacifist" Einstein enjoins Freud as follows: "There are certain psychological obstacles whose existence a layman in the mental sciences may dimly surmise, but whose interrelations and vagaries he is incompetent to fathom...

...on the contrary, he teaches the perplexed how to love and work (Lieben und Arbeiten, remember, Dr...

...Indeed, it is all too clear that the national ideals by which nations are at present swayed operate in a contrary direction...

...Joan Frawley replies: Miss Mayer seems to have missed the too subtle irony in my description of the group's reaction to the translator's obvious support for the Nicaraguan government...

...Kramer, was also the intention of the wise women in Lysistrata...

...One without the other would be useless...

...Wilson's How Can We Know...

...Brigadistas spend two to four weeks living on farms, alongside the Nicaraguan families who live there permanently...

...And they get to know people Day after day, not in five days of one speech here, one question-and-answer session there...

...However, the trip described in my story was not the first but the fourth visit I made to Nicaragua...

...The overriding reason for the initial subversion of Afghanistan some thirty years ago was to establish it as a stepping stone to a warm water port on the South Asian littoral and for the Russians to establish themselves as a primary and even controlling force in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean...

...Yes, he revolutionized our understanding of dream life (often referred to by the shorthand "unconscious") and how it colors our perception of the real world...

...Freud, even in his 76th year, was a little humbler than Dr...

...incapacity for dealing with what seemed to be a practical problem, a concern for statesmen...

...The issue, as we tried to suggest, was not Dr...

...Lothane has missed our point...

...Mount Sinai School of Medicine New York, New York 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1985 Yale Kramer replies" We regret that Dr...