Dear Editor
Dear Editor Straight Gus Tyler has the issues all wrong in his discussion of After Long Sitence(" A Letter to Michael Straight: The Communist Who Wasn't," NL, February 21). Nobody cares whether...
...The USSR's master mole made no bones about his beliefs and spared us an account of the agonies of his conversion to Communism...
...The high fees and the absurd lengths of the analytic enterprise have no justification when all we seek is awareness of the hidden and contradictory forces doing battle for our souls...
...Straight refrained from turning in his erstwhile chums partly because of an adherence to the fatuous exaltation of loyalty to one's friends propounded by E.M...
...As such it does not compare with another work by a member of the same circle, My Secret War by Kim Philby...
...As it happens, he does not offer much...
...His dogmatism and his attention to the details of spycraft enabled him to produce a far more interesting book than Michael Straight's, with its anguished peering into his own mental confusion...
...New York City John Lasalle...
...If this is the case, though, then the psychoanalytic profession has a lot to answer for...
...When confronted with the low cure rate, they scoff at the suggestion that the self-insight gleaned in therapeutic sessions is supposed to work in any practical way...
...Forster and furthered by the Apostles at Cambridge...
...Straight's ideology is entirely beside the point...
...For the price of about two analytic sessions one can buy the relevant works of Freud and study what the Master has to offer...
...But that is to be expected...
...Boston William Fuller Gus Tyler's letter to Michael Straight was tremendous—a substantial corrective to the jingoistic tub-thumping that the author has had to endure since the book's publication...
...His delay in coming clean was treasonous...
...Straight's cultivation of his private Calvary may make diverting reading, but that is too high a price to pay for the damage wrought by the Burgess-Maclean-Philby coterie...
...One might more significantly note a less lofty consideration: Long after his political objections to cooperating with the authorities vanished...
...For practically any disorder you would care to mention, from alcoholism to neurotic sexual dysfunction, psychoanalysis has a cure rate identical to that of talking with a sympathetic friend: A handful get better, the majority does not...
...New York City David Katz After Long Silence is the latest addition to that booming sub-genre, the memoirs of former spies...
...I think she is a fine actress...
...Freud himself danced around this fact in "Analysis Terminable and Interminable," where he admitted that psychotherapy could not do much for the psychotic...
...The crucial matter is the knowledge he possessed and what he did with that knowledge...
...Nobody cares whether this patrician American was a Communist...
...Los Angeles Frederick DeWitt As far as I'm concerned, a man born with all of Michael Straight's advantages who then betrays his country is not a mensch, as Gus Tyler would have us believe...
...Since the writing of that article, we have discovered that psychotics are not alone...
...NewYorkCily M.Michaelson Nelligan Your film critic obviously has a grudge against Kate Nelligan, judging from his misogynistic sneers at her in his review of Without a Trace ("Actors and Scripts," NL, February 21...
...Period...
...The followers of Freud are careful to insulate their doctrines from any noncorroborating evidence, of course...
...The answer I would suggest is that psychotherapy is a very poor mental health care option...
...Of course, Philby's riveting story, as told by him, is also replete with errors, evasions and downright lies...
...So what if joining the CP made Straight a "caring person," or if leaving it because of the evils of Soviet Communism made him "an equally caring person...
...New York City A. Meltzer Psychoanalysis Richard King's incisive discussion of Bruno Bet-telheim's Freud and Man's Soul ("Lost in Translation," NL, February 21) was fine as far as it went, but it did not address the fundamental question of psychoanalysis: Does the talking cure work...
...There is allegedly something deeper that analysis gets at, a level beyond mere cure and illness...
Vol. 66 • March 1983 • No. 6
