>I read through the Modern Library Giant collection of Freud back in 1949
>or so and was impressed at first.
Lemme see if I've got this right - your very vocal opinions about Freud are based on reading an anthology 55 years ago?
> 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_.
That's just not true. The "you" - or "me" - is formed by one's personal history, especially early history with one's parents. But those experiences are shaped, as Freud said, by "class and nation" and the demands of civilization. The therapeutic process is the work of a dyad, and the relationship evokes all kinds of other relationships in the lives of both patient and analyst.
> 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.
You & Carl Remick are the ones dismissing psychoanalysis with words like "quackery." How is that not poisoning the wells and cutting off debate?
>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?
I can't remember the last time I read a "Calvin was a quack/Calvin is finally really dead" piece. Sure Christianity is controversial, but it's never treated in the same summon-to-dismiss fashion.
> 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.
As I've said before, psychoanalysis is a lot like lit crit. You take every word, every trope, every association very seriously, and ask why that word, trope, or association at that particular moment? How does that choice resonate with other patterns in a life or a text? In this case, I find it very interesting that people constantly bring up Freud and Marx to dismiss them. Why the need to dismiss them repeatedly? It's like Freud's line about negation - an association with a negative sign in front of it. How else would you read Wordsworth's wondering if Lucy should be dead?
Doug