Reading Freud
Taylor, Eugene
the present time is "one of the few since the Second World War [without] military conflict," that Michael grew up "in a trailer park in Los Alamos, New Mexico," and that the diplomats' briefing...
...Some are lighthearted, even tongue-in-cheek, others more somberly reflective and conjectural...
...LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSON is professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Indiana University at Bloomington...
...He is author o f The Writings of the New Testament: An Interpretation, and DecisionMaking in the Church: A Biblical Model (both Fortress...
...the present time is "one of the few since the Second World War [without] military conflict," that Michael grew up "in a trailer park in Los Alamos, New Mexico," and that the diplomats' briefing books refer to "the power of a thousand suns" (an echo of the phrase from the Bhagavad-Gita with which Robert Oppenheimer described the first atomic bomb detonation...
...Sulloway was able to cool Swales's ardor for battle long enough to have the psychoanalyst, Rosemarie Sand, write to Gay with a discreet inquiry...
...The critical missing ingredient in the black community is the input of the middle-class haves, whose energies seem confined to initiating policies primarily designed to wrest from the system more entitlements for themselves...
...The call for this kind of responsibility from blacks and the prospect that such a demand is in the realm of possibility is a shocking notion to most whites, because they are unaware of the billions (yes, billions) of dollars eamed annually (and legally) by American blacks...
...PROGRAM in THEOLOGY with specializations in New Testament & Early Christianity and Christian Ethics PROGRAM The curriculum focuses on the distinctive resources of the Roman Catholic theological tradition and places them in an ecumenical dialogue with the faith and theology of other major Christian traditions...
...And yet, monogamy does not guarantee a woman's integrity...
...As for the study of a life, we observe that no one does so any more...
...LOYOLA UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO announces the opening of a Ph.D...
...Dullness is this novel's most vexing quality...
...Gay, himself, describes these eight essays as falling within the genre of serious fun...
...Gay thought his interlocutors rude--after all, he had told the truth when questioned--while Gay's harshest critics--annoyed that he had never formally admitted to his insider's joke and infuriated that he would not acknowledge their names in print directly--thought him arrogant...
...His most recent contribution to Commonweal was "Up the creek without a compass," May 3, 1991...
...Here, then, in Reading Freud: Explorations and Entertainments, is Gay's long-awaited side of what he called a nonstory, told in full, especially for the benefit of all his detractors...
...Some readers might seek delight instead in Mooney's aggressively odd sense of structure...
...His plan is grandly conceived, but haphazardly executed, i : DR...
...Such laziness extends to simpler matters of verisimilitude...
...380: Commonweal Recent new evidence has come to my attention, however, showing that Professor Gay, in fact, has not perpetrated a fraud on the Freud-fold...
...Sixteen signatories, including Sophie Freud and Adolph Grunebaum, wrote a letter to Times protesting Gay's explanation...
...To the Editors: If, as your editorial ["Beyond Racial Politics," April 5] puts it, poverty, crime, and violence deprive millions of American blacks of"what is necessary for human dignity," such dignity will not be restored through more government good will...
...The last thing the poor need is another patronizing program such as the one suggested by Professor Roy Brooks, where 1 June 1991:381...
...When Sylvia thinks of"Joyce's last novel, A Simple Tail...
...PAUL ELIE has just been graduated from the Graduate Writing Division at Columbia University...
...Both Shelby Steele and others have a clear grasp of the problem...
...Almost no one thinks it worthy to embark for any long period upon an in-depth study of a single person, largely, we suppose, for economic reasons and the press of time...
...FREUD OR DR...
...But this approach frequently yields to mock filmscript scenarios, dream sequences, or selfconscious commentary by the narrator...
...James described him as "a perfectly decent Prussian type who had recently abandoned neurology for a form of homeopathic-spiritualism, which he thought superior in all forms to the insensitivities of reductionistic laboratory types recently invading medicine...
...Integrity can be found in other kinds of marriages honored by generations of culture...
...He is the author of Beyond Detente: Foreign Policy and U.S...
...Gay said that the piece had been published just for fun in collusion with the editor of Harper's, Lewis Lapham, that there was no deliberate deception intended, and that there was nothing to confess...
...A novelist can play fast and loose with language, form, facts, history--as long as doing so increases our interest...
...And while one might expect that a world without a[omic weapons might differ from the real world in countless smaller ways, Mooney explores this only in a few flights of fancy...
...Chicago, IL 60626 Polygamy is not the gospel ideal...
...James, traveling across Europe at the time in search of a cure for his neurasthenia, had slipped into Vienna on a secret visit to receive psychoanalytic treatment from Freud and managed to pass the review to the editor on leaving...
...In Africa I found most women in polygamous marriages living with dignity, integrity, and fidelity, in great harmony with the other wives and having a profound and compassionate love for their children...
...In any case Goleman eventually published a piece in theTimes titled "A Freudian Spoof is Slipped Past Many Freud Scholars...
...One of these was the parapetetic and keen-witted Freud historian, Peter Swales...
...This eighth volume, a collection of allegedly minor papers, shows the author's sustained interest in an unsolved question, or a document overlooked, which he presents because he hopes that others will be interREVIEWERS JOHN FEFFER has written on foreign policy issues for several newspapers and magazines...
...Because they aren't all that interesting, Mooney's tricks seem not only poorly done, but irresponsible as well...
...or a more liberal translation might be: "There will always be some people who just won't get it...
...Goleman called Gay, and, according to the Swales group, was not given all the true facts or, according to Gay, simply got parts of the account wrong...
...so vivid, erotic, and loving a volume," the reader, rather than feeling a world remade, is reminded of how arbitrary and even lazy Mooney's remaking is...
...Options (Hill & Wang...
...Rare is the savant today who devotes his entire life to the study of another life...
...Applications for these awards are due by February 1. ~ . v ~ LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO For More Information, Please Write To: Director of Graduate Programs Department of Theology Loyola University of Chicago 6525 N. Sheridan Rd...
...Instead, we have the study of lives, where someone rushes in to do a book on Proust, then runs offto write one on James Joyce, then Edith Wharton...
...Nevertheless, they are included because Gay believes they have become "historical documents, with a life of their own...
...this 'big, bad wolf" ?" Finally, Swales consulted with the Freud scholar, Frank Sulloway, on the matter...
...The book's theme demands that its characters traffic in politics and entertainment, the subcultures where private and public lives most obviously intersect...
...One, in particular, is Gay's "discovery" of a turnof-the-century review of Freud's book on dreams, which, since Gay's alleged "translation" was published in 1981, has set the journalistic pot boiling over more than once...
...1 June 1991:379 As for scholarship, all but two are specimens in their own way of critical thinking, expert use of the laws of evidence, and a high command of the English language-three dying arts in the present days of advertising double-speak, media hype, and therapeutic psychobabble...
...Thus has Professor Gay been rescued from being typecast as the Art Buchwald of the psychoanalytic world...
...His most recent contribution to Commonweal was "Dropping in on the Shakers," May 3, 1991...
...While they snivel about a "glass ceiling" in the corporate world that black executives apparently cannot transcend, they do nothing about using their well-documented financial resources for the creation of small industry and other businesses, which would generate jobs and still more enterprises within the black community...
...FRAUD...
...Would he confess tha~ the anonymous review was a hoax...
...READING FREUD Explorations and Entertainments Peter Gay Yale University Press, $24.95, 204 pp...
...What of those feminists and other women of our own times who, even for the sake of convenience, allow their own fetuses to be dismembered...
...In America now, almost half of monogamous marriages end in divorce, with most of the resulting burdens imposed on women and children...
...Several Freud scholars, and not a few orthodox psychoanalysts, subsequently acknowledged Gay's discovery in the professional literature...
...Believing that outright fraud had been perpetrated, Swales called the New York Times, which sent one of its science writers, Daniel Goleman, to investigate...
...After a time, however, Swales, suspecting that the review might be a complete hoax, set off on an unsuccessful international search for the obscure medical journal...
...So what went wrong...
...Soon newspapers as far away as England and Yugoslavia were abuzz with the story...
...Successful businessmen like Joshua Smith and Paul Pryde have spent years exhorting middle-class blacks to put their money where their talk is...
...The second is to put a few finishing touches on the study of a life the way lives have been classically studied...
...By his own direct statement, and by reading between the lines, the author of this little text gives us three reasons for yet an additional dose of the Psychoanalytic Wizard of Vienna...
...But these subcultures are carelessly presented, undermining the plausibility of the novel as a whole...
...The third, inferred more by what is not stated, is the subtle art of rebuttal...
...As for the subtle rebuttal, the reader must rely merely on the present reviewer's conjecture, for the two pieces that are not straightforward scholarship are presented as "wholly frivolous," hardly deserving of even the name "papers," Gay says...
...EUGENE TAYLOR is the author of William James on Exceptional Mental States ( Scribner's ). "And just how big is ested also...
...In the main, the novel moves at a deliberate and unvarying pace, with every conversation fully recorded, every freeway and restaurant copiously described...
...In a thinly veiled slight to all objectors, the letter ends with a quote from Friedrich Schiller, "Mit der Dummheit kiimpfen G6tter selbst vergebens" ("Against stupidity even the gods fight in vain...
...And while he has promised us that, henceforth, he intends to leave the person of Freud behind, Gay, convinced that psychoanalytic insights are indispensable to the practicing historian, assures us that Freud's ideas will indeed surface in his future works...
...In Traffic and Laughter, having chosen a premise with great moral and formal implications, he has failed to rise to the larger challenge...
...GEORGE CROCENZI, C.S...
...Tucked away in the uncatalogued section of the William James Papers at Harvard is a letter from James to his personal physician and neurologistturned-psychoanalyst, James Jackson Putnam, which shows that William James was the author of the anonymous review that appeared in the Grazer Medizinische Vierteljahresschrift, and that the editor, a Dr...
...Such men, he believed, following Freud's theory, were only in love with their measurements and their instruments...
...Informed readers must certainly be familiar with this recent Freud flap...
...In the art of biography in times past, Johnson had his Boswell, Henry James his Leon Edel, Freud his Ernest Jones and now his Peter Gay...
...Oberhuber, was a friend of Putnam's from their days at Leipzig under Meynert and Benedict, who had also been Freud's teachers...
...CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 354) Israel, as though "glib clerical celibates" are appealing to this kind of precedent to justify temporary toleration of plural marriages...
...The first is for the love of fine scholarship as an end in itself...
...Eugene Taylor hy more Freud...
...In 1981 Gay published his "newly discovered" review of Freud's Interpretation o f Dreams, done by an anonymous Austrian physician at the turn of the century and published in an obscure medical journal, the Grazer Medizinische Vierteljahresschrift...
...Easy Travel to Other Planets derived its charm from the fact that Mooney employed his learning and verbal gifts in the service of sheer whimsy...
...ADMISSION Admission is limited to full-time students in the Fall semester only...
...Justified by an artist's rather than a pedant's sense of order, they include Freud's view on the real identity of Shakespeare, an interpretation of names Freud gave his children, Freud on free will and determinism, Freud's list of "ten good books," Freud's jokes, a fictitious review of The Interpretation of Dreams, a spoof on what if the inventor of psychoanalysis had been a German instead of a Jew, and a peek at letters between Freud and Minna Bemays, Freud's sister-in-law and alleged paramour...
...Gay, however, has courted his subject for decades, and then given it his concentrated attention for the past fifteen years...
...The letter concludes with a thank-you to Putnam for the introduction to Oberhuber...
...SP Black s e l f - h e l p New York, N.Y...
...Application deadline is April 1. FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE Research assistantships, tuition scholarships, and a limited number of fellowships are available to new and continuing students...
...After all, Professor Gay has already brought us five different works either about or including the Inventor of Psychoanalysis, and then topped that with his award winning biography Freud: A Life for Our Time(1988), which he followed with an anthology of readings...
Vol. 118 • June 1991 • No. 11
