Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Hey, I'm just drawing attention to the repeated attempts to bury the
> good doctor, which remind me very much of the repeated attempts to
> bury Marx. If either were really no damned good, or of so little
> importance, why the repeated attention?
I read through the Modern Library Giant collection of Freud back in 1949 or so and was impressed at first. Trilling even impressed me in his use of Freudian concepts. What started me being suspicious was _exactly_ arguments like this: i.e., psychoanalytic arguments were never about a shared world but about _you_. From that point on I became steadily more skeptical of the whole thing. If the psychoanalysts had anything to say about the world, they wouldn't be so concerned to poison the wells of discourse and cut off debate in advance.
The comparison with Marx is silly because one can substitute so many other names. Why all the excitement about Calvin, or pro and con about Christianity? This is just another way of foreclosing debate by shifting it away from the world to the (hidden) motives of the critic. Its prevalence among defenders of Freud constitutes a heavy criticism of his worth.
Carrol