>Susan's question is exactly what is so frustrating about the
>Freudian POV. If you accept it, fine. if you reject it, you're in
>'denial."
Or as Katie Roiphe once said to me, explaining why she hated Gloria Steinem,feminists are "humorless and anti-sex." A roughly equivalent level of caricature.
Denial isn't just about "rejecting" something - it's about the nature of that rejection. A disproportionately or weirdly intense rejection of something smells like denial; saying "no" with a reasonable argument in support is not. "He doth protest too much" is a nice literary example of denial (and, as Freud said, "the poets were there before me"). Or, to take another literary example, Quentin Compson saying, "I don't hate the South!" If someone just said, "No thanks, I don't like artichokes," when offered some, that wouldn't be likely to qualify as denial.
The quality of many of the anti-Freudian arguments here, coming from a bunch of intellectuals, has been so weak that I suspect that they're not emerging from the higher cerebral functions.
Doug